Pinhole Nostalgia

They say it’s a sign of getting old, but really the reason you get more frequent flashbacks to your youth as you get older is because there’s more to flashback to. When you reach ten you can only look back at what it was like being 7 or 8 and 3 months, but when you’re twenty-seven, ‘youth’ is defined as anything before last Tuesday.

I’d like to point out that I do other things in life apart from buy books, but I was in Waterstones yesterday and suddenly found myself in a Detective Sam Tyler flashback to another decade. Trying to find contemporary non-narrative literature, my brain tuned in to music wafting around me like curryhouse carpetting. Normally music in shops is by design a grey and lifeless affair, but suddenly my toe was tapping to ‘King of the Kerb’ by Echobelly. It raised a smile within me, a kind of knowing recognition shared with some of my fellow bookbuyers.

Then ‘Vegas’ by Sleeper came on and I was gone. Sure, my hands were still fondling all the lovely paperback books wanting to teach me new ways of looking cynically at the world, but my mind was elsewhere. As Lousie Nerding sang “He got away. Waited all this time with, all this scratching around, in one place made it just in time, all this talk about luck” there I was sitting in the sunshine in Cambridge surrounded by friends. I was arguing with Amy about some facet of Jarvis’ personality or trying to come up with reasons why Rachel, now a fully qualified fitter of lady’s undergarments for Robert Sayles, wasn’t going to drag me around underwear shops to spy on the competition’s merchandise. Again.

Then Nerding continued, “He got away, took him 40 years to plan his route of escape from this place. Made it just in time, with all this talk about luck“. There I was, sat on a bench in the quadrangle of my Sixth Form college. Our lives ahead of us, about to go off to university with suitcases full of good A-levels, determined to avoid dullness in our lives and sidestep the corporate ratrun. At least I know where I get my cynical and subversive nature from. No lives of the common people of Cocker’s world for us. We were destined for great things. We were the ‘it’ generation of Britpop. But for now we were content to eat cream eggs in the sun and laze around on pine garden furniture, resting in complete confidence that things were going to be different for us.

Just as I thought reality would bite, then the line “Do you think it’s be alright, if I could just crash here tonight, as you see I’m in no shape for drivin’ and anyway I got no place to go”. The Gin Blossoms were taking me into level of consciousness normally delivered by post-operative sedation in a hospital environment. Now it was GCSE year, and mid-summer sitting around listening to music and playing the Street Fighter game. This was one of Sarah’s favourites, much to the dismay of Bob. It was too ‘pop’ to be cool in a world where everyone was being different by listening to Nirvana in a Prodigy world.

It’s not just songs either, this evening the word ‘Bostik’ had my mind rambling for ages. It’s a glue which only people with an interest in woodwork, airfix models or Warhammer games will be aware of. It had this amazing ability to dry instantly on everything it came into contact with except its intended target, for which it would have a setting time of approximately 2 weeks. I could smell it and sense it on my fingers, as I stuck tyranids together in the secondary school library with friends long after the rest of the school had gone home. Where teachers would wander through to the staffroom and be amazed at our energy and enthusiasm at 4:30 when hours earlier we had been comatose in the corners of their classrooms. It had images of d-sixes and d-noughts, dice with no real function and a completely inappropriate shape for use on flat surfaces.

It’s strange how these flashbacks hit you. It’s not an all-encompassing wave that washes over you and changes the colour with which you see the world. It’s not some jet that whisks you off to another place, nor is a trigger for a seachange of what you’re currently thinking. It’s like a piece of pinhole photography. On the outside you know there’s a billion memories all in technicolour and linked in millions of ways which you could get completely lost in following. It’s a world full of smell and sensations, movement and sounds. The thing is, only a small amount gets through the pinhole at the front of the camera and you get a snapshot to place in a larger album. A square picture which, despite its vivid colour and historical significance, has clearly defined borders which are difficult to overcome.

I think the Gin Blossoms song actually has the key to it all. The hook to the chorus embodies what I ‘m trying to say, “Tomorrow we can drive around this town, let the cops chase us around. The past is gone but something might be found to take its place…“, and that’s exactly what it’s like. The flashbacks become more frequent as we get older because there’s more to flashback to, but they also become more warm and welcoming. What was traumatic at 14 becomes fuzzy and glowey at 27. We can meander around our memories today and take sanctuary in them in the hope something will happen tomorrow to take their place. Maybe by 37 I’ll be in a bookshop listening to a song to transport me back to March 2007.