Category: Nostalgia
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In last week’s post, I recalled one of the rituals of Sunday morning being a trip to the newsagent to pick up a copy of The Sunday Post newspaper. For the uninitiated, this is a Scottish newspaper, founded in 1914 and which, in the late 1960s, was estimated to have a readership of close to…
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Sitting down to write this post, I am sharply reminded that as a British ex-pat living in the United States, I will forever have a foot in each country, so to speak, as far as my memories go. I remember when I moved here around a quarter-century ago being impressed by the convenience afforded to…
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Video games are such a ubiquitous part of people’s lives now, being played on phones, tablets, consoles and computers. Their variety and complexity are such that it’s easy to forget that for members of Generation X, playing a video game usually meant a trip to the arcade to play simple games like Space Invaders and…
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One of the things I am extremely grateful to my mother for is instilling in me a love of reading. From a very early age she would read to me as I sat on her lap, watching her finger pointing out the words on the page. I was able to read well before I started…
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After writing last week’s post about nostalgia, I started thinking about the fact that the things people get nostalgic for are often cultural: Television shows (the 1960s adaptation of Robinson Crusoe, Bagpuss, and The White Horses often come up in discussions by British people around my age), board games (Mouse Trap, Operation and Bloik!!), sweets…
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When I started my new blog back in July of last year I didn’t intend it to be a nostalgia blog as such. However, as it turns out, a lot of my posts have been about my memories of growing up, of books, television and so on that I enjoyed in my youth. So be…
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One of the cultural phenomena I remember clearly from my youth is that of “must-see television”. There were some shows that felt like compulsory viewing, and would be discussed and quoted endlessly at school the next day. To miss an episode truly was to miss out, as video cassette recorders were uncommon and expensive in…
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On 25th August, 1975, I watched Tom Baker, in character as The Doctor, sitting in a cinema presenting clips from Disney films in the August Bank Holiday edition of Disney Time. At the end of the show, a hand was seen passing him a note. He read the note and announced “It’s from the Brigadier.…
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When I was a youngster in the 1970s, I remember people of my mother’s generation and older being very keen on a local band called the Dragoni Brothers. They played widely around the North East at the time, mostly at clubs and smaller venues, though they did perform at both Newcastle City Hall and the…
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Have you ever had a memory of something that absolutely no one else seems to remember? Where you ask people about it and they look at you blankly, so much so that you wonder if you dreamed it? One such memory for me is of a brand of soft drink my friends and I used…
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As a pupil in a Catholic junior school in the 1970s, one of the things I used to look forward to was the monthly arrival of Crusader magazine. This would be sold to us by our teacher for 8p a copy, and avidly read during morning break on the day it arrived. Crusader was a…
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As anyone who knows me can attest, I have a deep and abiding affection for Doctor Who, having watched it ever since I was a wee scrap of a lad sitting in front of the TV in the living room. (My first Doctor was Jon Pertwee, accompanied by his companion Jo Grant, played by Katy…
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Here is the fourth and final part of my list of influential singles from a 2023 Facebook challenge. The idea of the challenge was to post each day for 20 days a single that had been influential in my life. I expanded this to include singles which, when I listen to them, vividly conjure up…
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Here is the third part of my list of influential singles from a 2023 Facebook challenge. The idea of the challenge was to post each day for 20 days a single that had been influential in my life. I expanded this to include singles which, when I listen to them, vividly conjure up a particular…
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Here is the second part of my list of influential singles from a 2023 Facebook challenge. The idea of the challenge was to post each day for 20 days a single that had been influential in my life. I expanded this to include singles which, when I listen to them, vividly conjure up a particular…
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Early in 2023 I took part in a Facebook challenge to post each day for 20 days a single that had been influential in my life. I expanded this to include singles which, when I listen to them, vividly conjure up a particular time in my life. In addition, I wanted to concentrate on singles…