Nostalgia...

Nostalgia ain’t what it used to be. Now, in keeping to the spirit of the thing, I can’t tell you, at this moment in time, who first wrote that. You’ll see what I mean as time drifts on, or back… Can I ask first, where do you plan on being when you remember when you first heard John Hurt was dead. I don’t mean where you actually were, but where you think you might remember you were, by the time someone asks you, with enough distance to forget. Memory is such an impish jumble. A lie almost. Sometimes a really good one. I remember being in an International Food Store (T.M.) when 9-11 was kicking off. Looking into the face of a middle aged Muslim guy who was sharing a moment of utter despair with me. ‘Well, here we go then, what happens next…’ Of course, the information we got about the planes was from the completely impartial and highly reliable BBC News, just there, look up, on the tv monitor behind the counter. Reliable, impartial. That was certainly what most people saw Auntie Beeb as, back then. When you write anything set in a specific time-frame, let me tell you, it becomes a contextual nightmare, or an opportunity to point out what an unreliable subset of swine your recollections can be, or even how temporal distance can explode meaning, belief. I’m writing this now on February 3rd 2017, just to clarify, in case I’m now typing something which will later become unacceptably gauche or insensitive. Perhaps even ironic, god forbid. Unless of course irony then becomes fashionable again. The book I have coming out in two months time is set in 2003. A time when calling your little brother a fag was precisely this offensive to a lot of people, but not quite yet that offensive- which is handy to know as my book contains some brothers and at least some of them are jerks. I spent a lot of time getting the period exactly right. Wow, period research for 2003, that must have been taxing. Well, now you come to mention it, remembering 2003 can sometimes be a little more tricky than capturing a convincing take on the 1900’s. One of them you have to remember if a certain tv show had started or not, the other… no tv, no worries. So, I was meticulous, except… the easter egg, that unpacks time. Do you remember the first time you heard the term easter egg used to mean a hidden secret? It’s hard to imagine now, but John Hurt was still alive and New York had twin towers. Well I guess that was true for you. If you call a book ‘A Good Lie Ain’t Easy’ then you’d expect readers not to trust everything, but I thought as it’s April Fools Day I may as well let you in on one secret. So, no-one in my novel uses smart phones- they don’t surf the internet on a hand-held device as it’s 2003. Except at one point. Where the character is looking at a website full of comically bad tattoos which probably didn’t exist as a site until at least 2010 on a phone that couldn’t possibly do that. Why the discrepancy? Well, my central protagonist is remembering that character deciding on a tattoo. A tattoo the character will continue to prevaricate about until 2013, at least. So telescoping his recollections together, he misremembers, mixes up dates, moments, as we all do. Sometimes a lie, is something we tell ourselves, sometimes we don’t remember even telling it. We say so and so happened on this day, when it was on that, or not at all. Right now I want to tell you who wrote ‘nostalgia ain’t what it used to be’, but it’s 2003, February 2nd, April Fools Day, and I just can’t google it.