I wrote this a month or so ago, before we all entered the current COVID-19 nightmare. I can't help but worry about the lingering effect this will have on today's kids, long after the immediate emergency is over. Anyway, I wrote this in response to a Twitter CfP from @horrifyingbook who are looking to compile … Continue reading Children’s TV – The Stuff of Nightmares
One of the boys in this photo is now dead. Today would have been his 45th birthday. Why do I remember something like that? I didn't know him particularly well. As it happens, his family moved away when we were in 2nd (or 3rd, or 4th?) year of High School, so I never saw him … Continue reading “All those moments…”
"Yes, he was looking back, because nowadays he had forgotten who he had been when he was young." Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting This post follows loosely from one I wrote two years ago, about nostalgia. I found the quote above while re-reading Kundera for the first time since I was about … Continue reading Shedding skins / counting rings
They're building houses on the field. Not in the field: the field has gone. On it, on the site that it once occupied. For a hundred years, it was a field. Before that, common land perhaps, before the village spread up the hill to encompass it. I don't know. The developers haven't grubbed up hedges … Continue reading A blank space filled
Visitors flocking to the sleek new V&A in Dundee who opt to explore the city further may, depending on the childhood they had, be bemused by the statues in the city centre. A stout cowboy, striding along the Nethergate and hauling a recalcitrant bulldog, is about to be ambushed by a catapult-wielding adolescent girl. A … Continue reading Here Comes A’body
If I could visit any place and time in history, among my choices would be Paris around 1960. It was a time of great societal tension, with events in colonial Algeria at the forefront of events. But it was the time of the nouvelle vague, the nouveau roman and jazz music, and it was a … Continue reading Other people’s nostalgia
Or, me talking about maps again. Names change as both language and places change. The village I grew up in has a name - Newburgh - which it has borne since the 12th or 13th century and clearly no longer merits. Some town names' spelling - and meaning - alter over the centuries, but this … Continue reading A nail to hang a place on
This is a follow-up to my previous piece on nostalgia. Not because the world needs any more writing on The Beatles: it really doesn't. The book is a collection of the serialised strips which appeared in Look-In from 1981-1982. There was also a similar strip covering Elvis' rise to fame. I remember them (vaguely) from … Continue reading Meta-nostalgia: “The Beatles Story” by Arthur Ranson & Angus Allan (1981/2018)
This piece was an unsuccessful competition entry. The brief was "memories of cinema-going". Not for us the spurious joys of cider by the fountain, or Tennent’s behind the hut in the top park. The summer my friends and I turned sixteen we marked this coming-of-age by getting into the cinema to watch 18-rated films. With … Continue reading 1990: summer of cinema
In my previous post I wrote about nostalgia and the loss of contiguity that can trigger it. There are books, though, that I have always had: every house move has seen them boxed, shifted and unpacked; and, in time, re-read. For these books, each re-reading reveals new aspects: a form of anti- or a-nostalgia. One … Continue reading All change: Jan Mark’s “Thunder and Lightnings” (1976)
Into the Gyre 