Nostalgia Ain't What It Used To Be

Harty warns against the imagined joy of the good ol’ days of the travelling windsurfer.

It was a sorry sight – that of 8 people, friends presum-ably, sat around a table on a glorious evening and every one of them was staring at their phone. “What could possibly be more important,” my friend commented, “than the living people right in front of them? Phones …” he ranted, “I bloody hate them!”

In many ways I agree – but I asked him to consider whether he’d really like to return to a pre-digital age. Remember having to call the office / home because you were running late? You pull in at a phone box, find it’s been vandalised. You find another, which is working but the last occupant had decided to use it as a urinal. There’s a dial tone – it’s a miracle! You get through but run out of 2p’s before you have a chance to announce your name. The whole process was designed to give you a stress-induced coronary.

When you got home (your terminally unreliable car broke down twice on the way) you tried to unwind by treating yourself to a meal in the local pub. The starter was fruit juice from a carton and the main a carbonised lump of gristle.

“There was a lot to dislike about the good ol’ days,” I continued.. But by this stage my friend had stopped listening to check Windguru.