14 June 2026, appropriately enough, is a Sunday. Because today marks the 10th anniversary of this blog. In that time, I’ve posted more than 250 different essays, all sharing a common theme of nostalgia and memory, and amassed 1.47Gb of material in the folder I’ve set aside for this project. My first post was subtitled ‘childhood encounters with popular culture, 1961-79’, but over the years, I’ve occasionally drifted away from that original intention. I began writing this blog for myself, preserving memories while they’re still accessible. In doing so, I discovered that the most potent form of nostalgia comes from contextualisation. Mention of an old comic, piece of music or television series in isolation is all well and good, but when it’s placed within the wider cultural landscape in which it emerged, one gets a much keener appreciation of how it felt to be around during those times.
Beginning with my own diaries, I’ve drawn on sources including TV listings, pop charts and even weather records in an effort to recapture specific moments in time. In doing so, I’ve unearthed memories that I’d actually forgotten, and this is where context becomes critical. Hearing an old record may give you a hit of nostalgia, but when you hear an entire chart from say fifty years ago you begin to sense other things – like where you were and what you were doing, even what the weather was like (which is why I so often refer back to Met Office records). Place that pop chart alongside the TV listings for the same week, and still more memories begin to emerge by association. It’s the nostalgia equivalent of placing two pieces of plutonium next to one another – a chain reaction of memory. Probably the bext example of this can be found in my entry from March 2017, “Daydream – a Time Detective Story” wherein I described how I’d taken a random memory and found a precise date for it. In the course of writing the item, I went from a vague memory of a random moment in time to a much clearer picture of an entire Saturday back in April 1970. If you didn’t read it at the time, you can find it here:
https://sundayinoldmoney.blogspot.com/2017/03/daydream-time-detective-story.html
There may come a time when my own memory begins to fade, so having all this written down is something I’m doing for my own benefit (I’m compiling a document of similar recollections which currently stands at nearly 50,000 words over 110 pages). By the same token, perhaps as memory begins to break down, these distant moments will come into sharper focus and clarity. Maybe that’s already happening. There’s no way of knowing. Sunday in Old Money is, in this respect, a kind of fall-out shelter of memory, a place where moments like this can be preserved. It will almost certainly outlast me, and if it serves any purpose at all outside of being a repository of my own personal recollections, then it might, in future, be the equivalent of a researcher stumbling across a vintage diary. Never mind those TV nostalgia programmes – this is how it really felt to be around in the 1960s and 70s.
I’ve never set out to be an ‘influencer’ (however one even achieves such a thing), but I did wonder a few months back whether this blog might have played a small part in the BBC’s resurrection of their Laurel and Hardy Omnibus documentary of 1974, which I’d mentioned in a posting at Christmas last year, drawing attention to the fact that it had remained unshown since 1976. Just a couple of months later, it turned up, to mark the 60 anniversary of Stan Laurel’s passing. Coincidence or not? It doesn’t matter, as long as items like this aren’t left to gather dust in the archives forever.
When I first set up the blog, I must have checked a box requiring moderation, ie. approval of any comments, purely as a means to weed out the bots and spammers that I’ve seen populating other blogs. Originally, blogger would send emails notifying me if anyone had posted a comment, but in recent years this has stopped happening, for reasons unknown. Recently, in response to a reader who’d been trying to post a comment without it appearing, I had a look at the dashboard and realised that there was a folder in the sidebar containing a collection of comments pending approval. Astonishingly, these went back as far as 2017. There weren’t many – perhaps less than twenty in all – but they were all useful, well-meant, appreciative and relevant: not a spammer amongst them. In several cases, I would like to have been able to reply at the time the comments appeared, and I apologise to anyone who has posted here in hope of a reply and felt they’d been ignored. This was certainly never the intention, and comments are always welcome.
Over the years, I’ve been aware of maybe a handful of regular readers, some of whom I know personally, but the blog’s dashboard tells a slightly different story. Most entries are read maybe twenty or thirty times, but that figure spikes noticeably wherever I’ve written about archive television of a certain stripe – namely, the action/adventure series of ITC and any kind of Gerry Anderson content. The post that attracted the most comments was ‘The Afterlife of ITC’, originally posted on Friday 2 July 2021, following the announcement of the death of The Champions star Stuart Damon. These, along with all the other comments in the ‘pending’ file, are now available to read. Looking at the global map that Blogger provides, I see a surprising amount of engagement from the far east, all of which I presume to be bots and other content scrapers. The next highest readership is from the USA, which is also suspect, as the content I write about is, for the most part, very British. Taking account of all this spurious engagement, I’d estimate the number of genuine readers to be around a hundred. A recent post (which was shared on a number of online forums) clocked up 73 views in its first few days online, while the blog itself supposedly was viewed 1000 times during the same period, with bots most likely accounting for the bulk of those. Even so, it’s reaching a few more people than I originally envisaged.
I started Sunday in Old Money essentially as an attempt to set down how it felt to have encountered some of the icons of popular culture before they’d acquired their iconic status, and the very first post looked back at ‘Bat-Year 1966’, a veritable annual mirabilis of pop culture that brought us the Batman TV series, a second crop of Thunderbirds, Action Man, and a lot more besides. My recollection of that year is as clear now as it was when I wrote the blog, but it’s staggering to realise that those memories have now receded another decade into history. I also hoped that the blog would reach readers of a similar age and demographic who would recognise or relate to some of the subject matter. I know that one or two readers have helped to promote Sunday in Old Money online – my thanks if you’re one of them, and either way, please feel at liberty to post links to any of my posts wherever you think they may find kindred spirits.
When I started this blog, I was writing it in my spare time between holding down a full-time job (albeit one in which I worked from home 100% of the time). You can see from the right hand column those years when I had more to do and less time to devote to blogging – 2019 and 2022 were, for whatever reason, particularly busy times. On the other hand, since my job came to an end, writing these entries has often been the only thing I’ve had to do on a given day, and their number has shot up (2024’s tally of 60 having been ‘artificially’ increased by a ‘twelve days of Christmas’ series). As long as I can find subjects to write about, I will continue to do so. If it provides interest or entertainment to anyone else, that’s a bonus.
Thanks for reading!
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