Confessions of a Nostalgia Junky

What makes you feel nostalgic?

They say that nostalgia is good but it’s not what it used to be.

I’m a total nostalgia junky, I need no excuse to feel nostalgic, I simply can’t help myself.

On paper, the world is immeasurably better than it was. Most things are more reliable and readily available. But that just makes it bland. There is so little hardship now, that the little treats have no real purpose.

I was thinking just the other day about the frequent power cuts in the Seventies. I was very little at the time but remember the lights going out and the candles being lit. We would peer out the window and see the street lights were off, and our neighbors movements about their homes traced by the flickering shadows.

We would have toast made on the hot coals of the living room fire, drenched in real salty butter. And then be sent to bed with a candle to light the way. Toast was never so good in the toaster. Times were harsh but they gave us memories all the more cherishable for it.

The home of my childhood was torn down in the 2000s and replaced with affordable housing. The fields I played, are now affordable housing. My secondary school closed many years ago, even my college buildings have gone, Victorian blocks now towers of glass and steel. The market stalls are gone. Even the draughty old bus station, with its diesel fumes and greasy spoons, is gone.

Most of my childhood is now memory or museum pieces.

My very first train set, was this High Speed Train. My first trip to London was on one of these. I felt like I’d been born in the future.

We were the first on the street to get a video recorder. We could set the timer and record Coronation Street and Emmerdale Farm while we were on day trips to London. It really was the future.

The ZX Spectrum. A golden age video games.

The best toys were the Transformers. My first one was a Gobot, I still think about the hours spent playing with these, on my own, and with friends.

All of these pictures were taken in museums, Barnsley, and York. It’s quite sobering seeing our ‘now’ being preserved for posterity. We can no more stop the march of time than we can tell the tide to halt, but it’s fun to look back in simpler times.

31/12/2023 0

Prompt: Too Curmudgeon For Games – Not Really

What’s your favorite game (card, board, video, etc.)? Why?

I don’t play games anymore. Except for Family Games Night, then I play games. I can’t say that I have a favourite though, just whichever is the flavour of the day and that gets played to death, until we get bored and never touch it again.

At the moment, that game would be Cluedo, or Clue, for my American friends. We’ve got two versions. The modern one, and the classic.

We also play Soggy Doggy, but that involves water and batteries. For a long time though Monopoly was my all time favourite, but it goes on for so long, and ruins friendships, so that went into storage long ago.

I was always more of a video game player. My first computer was the zx spectrum and for the first week it was set up on the TV in the living room, and the whole family got involved. We played such games as Harrier Attack, Oh Mummy, and Treasure Island into the small hours.

There were thousands of games, but the one that captures my imagination most was Dizzy, and all of its clones and spin-offs. It kept me entertained for years.

Dizzy was a boxing glove wearing egg that bounced around the screen solving puzzles. The setting didn’t matter, the main interest was exploring the world, collecting objects and finding their purpose to unlock new parts of the game. It was almost as good as going outside.

They don’t make games like this anymore, and the more the graphics have improved the visuals, the less the imagination is fired. In a modern game, what you see is what there is, but in a low resolution game the world implied by visual prompts is way richer.

It didn’t matter that the graphics were simple or that the colours clashed. There’s long grass here and you can smell it, hear the insects beating their wings. The tree is old, the wind rustles its leaves and its branches sway and creak, this tree could tell a tale or two. But that gravestone, it’s been there for a while and it’s started to sink, soon it will topple and disappear in to the ground, taking it’s secrets with it. Could there be something buried here? Treasure? A secret entrance?

I picked up this game on a trip to the seaside in the eighties. I read the packaging, consumed its treasure island themed art work with the sun on my face and the sea air in my lungs interwoven with the anticipation of playing the game when I got home, 3 long hours later. Memories like that can carry you from childhood to deathbed in a way that instant downloads never will.

I’ve played many games since. Blood, Grand Theft Auto, Bendy and the Ink Machine. There are good games but they don’t have the simplistic beauty or the imagination of the classics.

I can’t name an all-time favourite, there are just too many, but many have left an indelible soft spot.

22/07/2023 0

The Great Unifier

Do you practice religion?

If there is one thing that we can all agree on, it’s religion. Not.

Do I practice religion? It’s difficult to say really. I wasn’t brought up to be religious. My interest lay in logic, and reason, and science. I was a big fan of star trek. Arthur C Clarke was my all time favourite author. There was no Sunday school for me, no baptism or confessions. The school dutifully served up parables and had us singing hymns with all the enthusiasm of a stale loaf of bread. I was led down the path of atheism.

I had to be an atheist. It was the only thing that made sense as a reductionist consciousness living in a material universe. Anything else was an absurdity, wishful thinking, or a means to control the gullible population.

And yet, my relationship with God was always a strong one. How could it not be? We are one with the divine.

My very earliest memories, from my very earliest years, they are obviously very vague. How can we process and store the vast amounts of experiences and sensations without any context? We can’t, but there are still memories. I remember being a toddler, barely able to walk or talk. I remember being shoed away from the things that weren’t for me, dangerous or fragile. But at that time, I remember the presence of God, always there, speaking, indistinguishable from the rest of the world.

I’ve had more than a couple of paranormal or spiritual encounters. Warnings on high that have saved my life in one way or another. Ghosts, premonitions, inexplicable things in the sky, and even a broadcast message from the future, I shit you not.

If you find yourself paying any sort of attention to the nature of what it is to be alive in the universe, we come across all manner of intractable problems. Questions such as why is there something and not nothing? What happened before the big bang? What even is consciousness?

It turns out that we’ve been asking these questions for thousands of years, and the more we learn, the less we can be certain of anything at all. Quantum mechanics tells us that the universe doesn’t even exist when we’re not looking at it. It’s almost as if all of this is in our head.

Nothing came from nothing, Cordelia, but the universe did. The unfathomably massive entirety of everything is thought to have a net energy of zero. In aggregate, the universe doesn’t exist. Everything leads to metaphysics.

Religion is villainised by atheists as the domain of ignorance and they shower it, and its followers, with ridicule. They attack its values and lore with nitpicks, but in doing so, they miss the point.

I certainly didn’t arrive at religion from a place of ignorance. I had the full atheist mindset for a long time, and it was only with thorough questioning of everything that I realised that atheism was the lie, not religion. The bible is not a means to control, though it undeniably can be hijacked by the ideologues for nefarious ends, but that’s to miss the point. The bible isn’t a blueprint for a kind society, it’s a guide on how to live a good life, and it’s purely serendipitous that a great society will emerge from a population that lived a noble and courageous truthful life.

Do I practice religion? Well, I don’t go to church, but I do practice gratitude, when I remember. Gratitude for the life we have gives us solace and serenity. I also try to live by truth because lying splits our spirit across multiple versions of reality, of which only one is true and the rest cannot last. Jesus taught us that we must go through hell to know heaven. If we think not of the afterlife, but as analogues for daily life, we know that nothing worthwhile is ever easy, nothing in abundance has value.

It’s possible to assimilate these lessons without incurring religion, but even a narrow thread of intellectual integrity must admit that there is a ‘why’ to be accounted for, and that is a question only for religion. And when recognising this, the benefits of practicing religion become obvious.

31/05/2023 0

Inaction Intervened – a prompted piece

Write about a time when you didn’t take action but wish you had. What would you do differently?

What would I do that I didn’t do? What indeed? This is one of those dining on ashes things, and I’ve enough to feed us all.

There are many times I didn’t act, took the craven path, but one in particular sticks with me.

Long ago I took a journey on a train, a train that is now long since scrapped, from a place I no longer go back to, to a town where I no longer live. It was a late train, a late hour and delayed too. But it was buzzing, filled with weary travellers and revellers alike. It was the smoking carriage too, as I recall, back then it was where I liked to sit.

For the journey I kept myself to myself, enjoyed what little view there was of the argon lit streets in the sparse towns that punctuated the blackened fields of the English countryside, and occasionally sparking up a hand rolled cigarette that I had made for something to do.

About halfway through the journey I became aware that the shouting had lost its jovial hue and had turned quite sour. A barely intelligible Scots woman was hurling the most obscene insults at another passenger.

I was stunned. I couldn’t see what was happening but none of the other fifty odd passengers saw fit to intervene and that only reinforced my cowardice.

And what would I even do? I was a spotty bespectacled student with less meat than a half eaten buffalo wing, and even less gumption and street smarts.

So I listened, I winced and I cringed, and slowly I had pieced together what had transpired. By my estimation the plus sized mother had made the mistake of asking the inebriated Caledonian harpy to perhaps lay off the profanities and all hell ensued. This diminutive windbag hurled all manner of verbal abuse at the poor woman, who could do nothing but pray for a swift end to the torment of herself and her terrified son.

What could I even have done except make myself a target? You read all the time about heroes being stabbed for their trouble. But how likely was that? So if I stood up and took the flack, could I not withstand the noise of a screeching harridan for a couple of stops? Was this the man I had grown up to be? Had I forgotten the jubilation of the time I stood up to the neighborhood jerk and flung him out of his own garden? Sure, that jerk was no more than ten years old, but that was still older than I was at the time, and he never bothered us again.

What might have happened is that others might have stood up with me, and shown that terrified mother and her boy that there was still a shred of decency and hope in the world, and I might have retained that sense of forthright dignity that has evaded me ever since.

In the end it was the police that ended the ordeal. The train made an unscheduled stop at some nowhere town and the gob, along with her silent companion that I hadn’t even noticed, were removed from the train. The crowd found its voice again and cheered for removal, but I didn’t. I was glad that the ordeal was over, but I had no right to celebrate.

Years ago. Not so many as that train ride, but a good while nonetheless, my career meandered me on to various medical practices and surgeries, and on one occasion I was privileged to shadow an oncology consultant delivering the all clear to an immensely relieved and grateful patient.

The patient spoke to me directly, looked me square in the eye and told me, warned me, to take care of my body, and to watch out for the changes.

It’s not that I ignored the guy, I took the advice with good grace and promised to abide, but did I really? Did I? Did I go see my doctor all the times I should have, perhaps, perhaps not. What I do know is that had I taken more action along the way, perhaps the presence of the hairy hand of fate would now be just that little less apparent.

Such is life.

26/04/2023 0

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