Distracting balm

Nostalgia. Is it a wimpish retreat into a bygone age, a celebration of what has gone before or just a plain old symptom of being a sentient human being who can look back as well as look forward? Maybe it is all three? I'm always mindful of Spike Milligan's take on the subject, an obsessive nostalgianarian (I may have just made up that word). He wrote something along the lines of - 'do we always look back in time because the present is troubling, the future is uncertain but the past is a known quantity' - some thing like that. I'm also drawn to the final line in F Scott Fitzgerald's novel 'The Great Gatsby' which is 'so we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past'. I wish I'd written that. Almost as good as 'I've seen things you people wouldn't believe' - I'll stop there before I go full flow into a response such as...

"a quarter of a million hirundines fleeing the Kent coast and heading out blind above the grey lapping water; hundreds of Hawfinches, all wing bars and tail tips flashing in the dawn light; a meadow of a million flowers embroidering a panorama on a perfectly still June day..."

oops, too late!

Anyway, enough of that. Nostalgia. I'm currently in its grip, not because 'back then' was so brilliant but because 'now' is so disturbing. I have got absolutely nothing to complain about. Touch wood, no major worries (and believe me I've had plenty of those in recent years). I can get up in the morning and please myself. Go birding? Yes, why not. Have a lunchtime pint in a local pub? Help yourself Steve. Go off with the family down to Cornwall for a holiday? Just log on and book in. So why feel as if the 1970s (my current nostalgia period of choice) is somehow more acceptable than now. 

A few facts. When 1970 came into being I was 11 years old and as 1979 faded into history I had just turned 21. Still a student. Still living at home. No independence. Little money. But what I did have was no - or very little - responsibility. No dependents. A blank slate of a life stretching ahead. Anything was possible. And before anyone suggests that this is some sort of lament on how my life panned out you can forget it - I wouldn't change a thing. But what youth confers on you is a naive acceptance that what is about to happen in your life will be brilliant. Will be memorable. Will be life changing and life affirming in nothing but a positive way, all on an upward trajectory. It's a weighty handle to grasp. That feeling, that assumption can last for years. It did for me.

The 1970s. A strange decade with which to get all cosy and fluffy about. Britain was a run-down and dirty place, under funded, three day weeks, power cuts, union strikes, IMF bailouts, The Troubles, racist, homophobic, violent... you get my drift. But it was my decade, my formative years. I started birdwatching, started to go to football matches, discovered alcohol and girls, embraced music. And I also went to a certain place called Dungeness for the first time. I have diaries and notebooks that bring this period of time alive. There was a national togetherness (if you ignore the ragged social edges already mentioned) that meant that when Morecambe and Wise put on a Christmas special then 25 million of us all sat down at the same time and watched the television, then spent the following day discussing it. We were not 60 million individuals all in a personal orbit centred upon our phones and profiles. Wanted to buy a pair of trousers back then? Go to a shop, talk to a sales assistant, try them on. Want to watch a top tier football match in 1974? Turn up at the ground and buy a ticket - with cash, with your pocket money - and walk in. Want to speak to a friend? Phone them up on a landline or go round to their house and knock on their front door. Want to meet new people? As a youth it was the local playground, youth club or, when a bit older, the pub. No swiping left or right, no online persona, no sterility. 

Social Media was not even a thing, not on anybody's radar apart from a couple of Sci-Fi writers. We changed our fashion, music and habits at a virtual glacial pace. It allowed us to create our own scene at our own speed, to hear about what was going on by word of mouth, at a local level, not driven by what the bubble says you must do. Take a class of 30 youths back then and there would be 10 tribes within it - differing fashion, music, interests.  The speed of local birding was no different. I would turn up at Beddington Sewage Farm and only then find out what had been seen during the previous few days. If a rare bird turned up nationally it might be several days before news broke and then the information would only be forthcoming if you were in the know, knew the contacts and put in the effort to cultivate them. It might have not had the immediacy of 2026 but it was all that we knew and was quick enough for us (in our flared jeans, long hair and tank tops - at least pre-1976).

So. My current vogue for the 1970s. Am I running away from 2026?

Yes. Even if it just for an hour or two. A reminder of simpler times. When life wasn't so dystopian. It doesn't mean that all of today is crap and  that there is no hope. I do wonder if, back in 1973 (during the strikes, three weeks and power cuts) and there had been today's social media coverage, would we have been totally spooked by the levels of scrutiny and information that we would have received? It would not have been unusual for a newspaper columnist to call for a PM to resign in the early 70s but now such demands are made by hundreds of thousands of commentators on varying social media platforms - with many of them bots from unfriendly nations - which skews the narrative and skews the opinion. 

And of course we have our climate crisis. Yes, that again. I have friends and family members who still don't get it, think that I'm a lefty, and they genuinely believe that some Silicon Valley start up will invent a machine that puts our climate back to pre-Industrial Revolution levels. I don't worry for myself but I do for my children and my grandchild. So yes, a few hours listening to the wonderful music from the early-70s, of Hunky Dory, Transformer and Selling England by the Pound; reminiscing about George Best, Denis Law and Pele; and thinking about those gloriously uncomplicated days when I'd wander onto Beddington Sewage Farm, as pleased as punch with my cheap Boots binoculars, to find my very first Tree Sparrows and Green Sandpipers. Better? No, not necessarily so, just a distracting balm for this disturbed mind.