Nostalgia’s past it... Long live the future
TIME TO ditch the aspirin: according to neuroscientists in China, nostalgia can act as a painkiller. Brooding about the past can reduce brain activity and in turn, perceived levels of pain, so much so that going over a few childhood photo albums could cure a headache. Interesting. But is this a way of fooling ourselves once more?
It is very easy to think that everything was better in the past, especially at times like the present: a pandemic followed by a terrifying war is no one’s idea of fun.
Then there’s the fact that for obvious reasons, nostalgia focuses on a time when we were younger, with the future still ahead.
But to harp on about what happened decades ago does rather suggest that the best is well behind us, a depressing idea, and there’s nothing more tedious than people you knew in a past life droning on incessantly about long-forgotten events and individuals you lost contact with for the very good reason that you haven’t had anything in common since Edward Heath was prime minister.
Speaking as a child of the 1970s, here are quite a few things I won’t miss:
Strikes: We may have ’em now, but back then they were practically a way of life and they almost brought the country to its knees until You Know Who rescued us.
The three-day week. Unions running out of control. Kipper ties. A cuisine that was either brown (boiled meat) or green (boiled vegetables), in which no one had heard of an avocado.
The 1970s produced shag pile carpeting, an oil crisis and an energy crisis (yes, I know, the irony), disco music (ok, that was quite fun), heavy metal (that wasn’t) and progressive rock, one of the most tedious art forms ever invented.
And glam rock (sorry, but it was preposterously overrated, despite Freddie Mercury.)
The Bay City Rollers (I was a Donny Osmond girl and he’s still around).
The Black and White Minstrel Show.
Admittedly the 1970s produced some superb television (Dad’s Army, The Good Life) which still bears viewing to this day, but it also produced Benny Hill.
“Did Brits really watch that?” asked an American acquaintance. I can feel the burning shame to this day.
Television was still largely black and white and there were three channels. No: it wasn’t fun to watch the Test Card. And everything ended early. No thanks.
Mind you, the 1970s had one thing going for it: it ushered in the glorious 1980s. So, grim as it might feel right now, there may be a stunning new era around the corner.
Meanwhile, you know the old joke. Nostalgia isn’t what it used to be. Look ahead.
WE HAVE a new heroine in our midst: Andrea Wilkinson, a 51-year old grandmother who built a DIY road block out of rocks from a drystone wall in the Lancashire village of Edgworth.
She’s just been cleared by a court of causing damage to a passing car and quite right too.
We are all sick to death of boy racers (the complainant was actually a woman, but same thing) making our streets a nightmare, while in cities, electric scooters have become an absolute menace.
Could she be tempted down south to sort those irritants out too?
A STUDY has revealed that if you indulge in a spot of heavy gardening for half an hour a week, it slashes your risk of dying early by a fifth.
Excellent news: my support bubble has a huge garden and is teaching me how to till the soil.
Incidentally, in these troubled times a bit of weeding and watering can be remarkably therapeutic. Nature is the great healer: get out there and dig.
ACCORDING to a poll, we Brits have a habit of pretending to have read the classics, when we’ve done nothing of the sort.
War and Peace comes top of the list for those most unread.
It reminds me of a long-ago Woody Allen joke in which he claimed to have speed-read Tolstoy’s masterpiece. “It’s about Russia.”