Bryony Gordon
We're all in the grip of nostalgia
Did you know that nostalgia was once thought of as an illness, a terrible malady that caused fever, stomach pain and even death? Sufferers were largely Swiss mercenaries who experienced symptoms after they were posted to the plains of France and Italy in the 18th and 19th centuries. They missed the mountains and the air and the St Bernards, and who wouldn’t have a funny turn at the thought of no more fondue and raclette? Physicians put the peculiar condition down to demons, before deciding that, actually, it was caused by all the clanging of all the cowbells in the Swiss Alps, which had essentially sent them bonkers.
I only mention this because I think that I might be suffering from a serious case of nostalgia. I first noticed the symptoms last week as I watched the comeback of Nineties staple TFI Friday on Channel 4. I sat on the sofa making a distressed sound to signify my wish to return to a time of Game Boys, gunge and Going Live!.
“Are you OK?” asked my husband.
“No. Can’t you see? I’m thinking about how much I miss Zig and Zag.”
So there I was, feeling sorry for myself, when the segment where Chris Evans met Jeremy Clarkson came on. This was bad, because it made me feel nostalgic for Top Gear – which is odd, given I’ve never really watched it and it hasn’t actually gone away. “Do you remember a time when Jeremy Clarkson could be an objectionable pillock and nobody batted an eyelid?” I sighed. “Those were the days.”
By Saturday, the nostalgia had worsened. “I was thinking we could watch the next episode of Game of Thrones,” said my husband as we sat down for dinner. “Oh God,” I wailed. “Do you remember when we first started watching Game of Thrones all those years ago? Don’t you feel sad that we’re no longer those people? Aren’t you jealous of our pre- Game of Thrones selves, who had no idea of all the beheadings and incest and torture that was to come?
“And anyway, we can’t watch the next episode, because in a moment there’s one of those talking head programmes that looks back at the Nineties. Do you remember, in The Time Before Box Sets, when retrospective list shows were the only ones a channel ever broadcast? Those most certainly weren’t the days.”
The symptoms have become more pronounced ever since: feeling faint upon learning that The Crystal Maze is coming back, because the young man I sit next to doesn’t remember it, which makes me feel old; hysteria at the return of The Clangers, even though it finished about half a decade before I was born; booking a babysitter so my husband and I can go to watch Jurassic World at the Imax, followed by arguments over which bit of the original film was best: was it the velociraptors opening the kitchen door, or the water in the glass shaking as the T. rex made its approach?
Perhaps I should take heart from the fact that I am not alone in suffering from nostalgia. Even the banks are at it, with Lloyds naming their spin-off company TSB and HSBC considering rebranding in Britain as Midland (how safe and cosy and convenient these names are in harking back to a time before billion-pound bail-outs and Libor-rigging).
And as a country, we are gripped by a collective anxiety that the world was a much better place in the past, even if in the past it was touch and go as to whether or not you’d have electricity for a whole day, and in the past women could look forward to a life spent cooking and cleaning and hoping that the rubbish would actually be taken away. A YouGov poll earlier this year found that 71 per cent of Britons think the world is on the slide. You’ll know the usual complaints, because you’ve probably used them yourself at least once in the past month: our young people are no longer safe because of the rise of social media; the internet and smartphones have made us impolite and insular; it is only a matter of time before we are finished off by robots or climate change or designer babies or immigrants.
But we don’t make a fuss of the fact social media has actually prompted young people to drink less, because they fear looking like fools on Facebook (according to the Office for National Statistics last week). We don’t mention that we are more likely to thank people now we have texts and emails and don’t have to rely on the Royal Mail. And it is easier to be scared of scientific advancements than grateful to them for helping us all live longer and healthier lives.
So the Swiss had it right. Nostalgia is an illness – one that stops us from enjoying the present. And you just know that in the future, the things we’ll miss most are probably all around us right now.