Nostalgia – 10 a Penny

One thing I noticed on my recent trip to London was that the past seems to be selling extremely well.

After my previously documented trip to the retro sweetie shop – dozens of which are cropping up all over the country for eager and misty eyed forty year old schoolboys to spend their (considerably larger than yesteryear) pocket money – I wandered over the road – a lovely road, with a nice old-fashioned parade of shops, just like when I were a girl – to a trendy gift shop (not like when I were a girl) which had all sorts of enticing and designerish items for a magpie like me and her fledglings.

Among the things which caught my eye particularly was a set of mugs adorned with the old Penguin book cover design. Ooh! I remember these! Yes! I loved them! I’m sure my parents had them all! I want them! Why don’t they have these anymore?

The past is better because I was there then.

I didn’t buy them, mainly because I was concerned about suitcase breakages and also Husband’s face when he saw yet another set of whimsical mugs (already have 12 Alice in Wonderland mugs with the Tenniel illustrations that he claims make him feel like a child every time he has a cup of tea – exactly, DUH!).

Next my gaze alighted upon what I thought, with a rush of excitement, were a set of the old Ladybird books, just like the ones I used to read in school. Actually, to be honest I was always a bit sniffy about them because I could already read when I got to school and was slightly disdainful about Peter and Jane et. al. but I liked the pictures. I was a tad disappointed when I picked one up and saw that it was not a proper Ladybird book at all, but rather a notebook with the Ladybird illustration as a cover and this rather clever piece of marketing on the back:

 

If your formative years meant:??

– school dinners were liver and onions rather than Turkey Twizzlers?

– a Blackberry was something you picked in a country lane and not something you spent your weekend ignoring?

– MySpace was a den in your back garden, built with bed sheets and runner bean canes?

– Noah, Isaac and Joshua were characters from the bible rather than the kids in your class?

– Wheelies were what you did on your bike in the park and not what you wore on your feet for the weekly shop?

– And if you wanted to be an astronaut, train driver, footballer or anything other than a CELEBRITY when you grew up…??

CONGRATULATIONS! You are a product of the Ladybird generation.

 

Oh! I deserve CONGRATULATIONS!!! I am a proper person, not some young riffraff, I got up before I went to bed, lived in hole in the road, knew the proper order of things and now, I have the fabulous opportunity to BUY IT ALL BACK AGAIN! YES PLEASE!

I am not being entirely facetious. I would have bought it if it was a real Ladybird book and given it to Five. I just don’t have need of a notebook that small. My handwriting is too appalling (so much for the fabulous education of that generation).

 

Curiously, there were quite a lot of WWII era nostalgia items on sale which spoke to me, I don’t know why. You know the type of thing – Potato Pete, and Soup is Good Food etc. I suppose that memories of the war were still relatively fresh in people’s minds back in the 1970’s.  Grandparents had fought, rationing was part of some of our parents’ own childhoods, little boys still built model spitfires.
I was once again drawn to a mug, brightly coloured, and this time it simply said: 

Waste not, want not

I was very taken by this. My step-granny, the former WWII evacuee always quotes this phrase at us, anxiously snatching up and carefully folding pieces of discarded wrapping paper at Christmas, painstakingly saving leftover food in numerous bowls in the fridge (inevitably they rot uneaten, ungrateful, modern beasts, we are), and she tries very, very hard to keep everything that the unthinkingly wasteful throw away in case we might one day need it.
She is more in tune with the times than she knows.

I was about to throw caution to the wind and buy this mug in her honour when I stopped and thought a bit more about it.
Waste not, want not.
I already have a mug. In fact I have twelve. And this mug was made in China (of course), shipped over here using God knows how much fuel, packaging materials etc. (cue Husband and his in-depth life-cycle assessment, OMFG) and it had the GALL to say Waste not, want not. 
Ok, I would do just that. I would want it not and therefore waste not by foregoing the purchase.  Good on me.  But it did kick me right in the retro.

There were many other examples I could bore you with, in a long list, of items I saw for sale that targeted people just like me, like you, Gen X, maybe a few Gen Y (oh you youngsters!) now with children of our own, hoping to buy back a bit of the old days, the old order, our own youth and pass on some of that meaning, sense of the world to our children as it slips, ever faster into the distant past – the world moves at an increasingly alarming speed, does it not? But I am going to depart from my shopping list into another little nostalgia study that has interested me (and possibly me alone) in the last few days.

You are free to leave this post if you wish to commit suicide at the mention of

In the Night Garden.

Ok. I know I’m late to the party on this one. We don’t get it over here in California and my two had only seen a couple of episodes in South Africa when we were there last year at my mother’s house. I ignored it because it was basically an opportunity for me to run around containing the chaos they had caused at their Grandma’s house so I didn’t really take in anything other than kept on asking me if they could see it again.

Once or twice I let them look at the website and found it curiously appealing. I loved the music and found myself singing Iggle Piggle’s song almost daily (the possibilities for harmony are almost endless!) but I hadn’t actually watched the programme until I bought them a DVD this trip and sat down with them the other night for a few episodes.

I am aware of the awards, the fuss, the love/hate relationship that parents have with this show. I’m not going to come down for or against it – these things are so subjective, aren’t they? My children LOVE it. Husband thinks it’s the most boring programme he’s ever seen – so repetitive, he says, and why do they talk nonsense? (I ask myself this question about many of the citizens of this fine country on a daily basis, too, but neither of us has received a satisfactory answer. I digress, however)

I happen to love it and find it very comforting, despite it being very repetitive and nonsensical. There is something much more primal going on and I find myself being lulled into a similar stupor to my children as it’s showing, while Husband remains curiously immune. I have developed a (no doubt highly flawed, due to it being a sample of one) scientific theory about why this programme is so successful with parents as well as children, and it all comes down to the same subject as this post:
Nostalgia.

My quick and dirty analysis. Feel free to add your own observations.

The programme starts with the stars in the night sky pinging, one by one in time to the music. (Music is heavily Bagpuss influenced) This reminded me immediately of the opening scene of The Clangers. Not quite the same, no. But night skies. Close enough

Then we have a little child (or a baby) being sung a song, a familiar chord progression and they are turning their finger around their palm – it’s

“Round and round the garden like a teddy bear” Ahh, I like that. Comforting. Reminds me of.. my own childhood.

Derek Jacobi narrating is so very familiar to all of us, young and old, and again, this gives us all such a comforting old-school BBC children’s telly feel. I could almost weep.

Then Iggle Piggle goes off to sea in his boat in that time release photo style – Bagpuss again, anyone? Just like when Bagpuss wakes up, and the music is rather reminiscent too, come to think of it..

Those flowers – the trees – so Magic Roundabout! I’m having FLASHBACKS!

Iggle Piggle sounds like SWEEP! The Pontypines sound like the mice from the Marvelous Mechanical Mouse Organ!  Aggh!

And that bandstand thing (what is it called?) It even SOUNDS like Camberwick Green, or the other one, what was it called (Trumpton?)

I should probably study, Google it all more thoroughly and write a dissertation on all of this and use big words to make it sound more cleverer. They’d probably give me an MA!

But frankly, I’d rather just sit and watch the telly sucking my thumb with my blankie along with the real children.

Ahh. Nostalgia..