It’s a strange quirk of human nature that some of us are looking back on those lockdown weeks with a certain nostalgia. Of course for many it was a terrible time, but for others it’s now perceived as a period of enforced calm and blissful peace in which nothing was expected from them except to stay at home and possibly go out for a daily walk in the spring sunshine. It was a time of underlying anxiety, but also one of great simplicity. A bit like childhood. If we did what we were told, then everything would be all right.
Which brings me to the nostalgia we feel for our childhood years. For those of us born many decades ago, childhood was a fairly rough-and-ready experience. No one paid much attention to what we had to say (“children should be seen and not heard” might be an expression associated with the Victorian era, but it is equally applicable to my mid-20th century childhood), physical punishment was the norm and school was a particularly dull and humiliating experience. Children were expected to fit in around adults’ lives, not the other way round. And the food! Soggy cabbage and semolina pudding are just two examples from the long list of horrors. So why are we so nostalgic for it? Why do we fondly remember gobstoppers, Gonks, the Beatles and Fray Bentos steak and kidney pies, forgetting all the rest?
Then there’s nostalgia for our own children’s childhoods. At the time, let’s be honest, it was a long, hard slog. Children are so relentless and we were so tired. However, I now look fondly at photos of them proudly showing off gappy teeth, riding their bikes, blowing out the candles on their birthday cakes, making sand castles and looking adorable while asleep (I can see the appeal of that one), and think what an extraordinary time it was. I even smile fondly when I think of the Teletubbies, Harry Potter and Cool Britannia.
But now we’re all just feeling nostalgic for normal life. We want to plan a holiday in the confidence that we won’t be required to spend two weeks under house arrest when we get there. We want to go for a walk without having to step into the road to avoid other people. We want to try on clothes in a shop. We long to return to a time when we had never heard of Zoom. Yes, we can be nostalgic for just about anything.