Sunday in Even Older Money

Nine Years of Nostalgia...

On 14 June, I will have been writing this blog for nine years. Memories that I was writing about in 2016 are now almost a decade older than when I set them down. And yet, strangely, none of them seem any further back in time. Perhaps this is a quirk of memory: once something is remembered, is it somehow set in aspic, never to retreat any further into the past?

Sunday In Old Money began with my diaries. Starting at the age of nine, in January 1971 – and with many gaps over the first few years – I kept notes of anything I'd seen on television, books I was reading or had bought for me, and anything else I thought worth recording. They're hardly a rival to Samuel Pepys, but in an admittedly rather shallow way, they do shine a light onto the pop culture of the era, in a time when viewing and reading habits were rather different than they are today – there was no internet, no CDs, DVDs or any of the modern formats in which we consume music, film and television.

In those nine years, I’ve posted 207 different essays, all sharing a common theme of nostalgia and memory. I doubt if they’ve been read by more than a dozen individuals – and whilst it would have been nice to get some conversations going on some of these topics, that was never really the point. 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 – 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. I did it by combining radio and TV listings and weather records, along with the release date of a specific piece of music. 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

Here's another example: for some reason, I’d always remembered a random remark my dad made one evening in the early 1960s. He said something about watching a television series called ‘The Aeroplane Story’ which was on that same evening. There was never a television series with such a title, but it sounded exciting to me, which is probably why I remembered it. But what TV series might he have been talking about? ITV's boardroom drama The Plane Makers was very popular in the 1960s, so I looked up the transmission dates. I noticed that the third series began on Tuesday 20 October 1964. What else was happening at that time? The Tokyo Olympics. Knowing that fact sparked off another memory – at the time our dad was speaking, the television was on in the background, tuned to the early evening news – which was reporting on the Olympics. All of which strongly suggested that this random fragment of memory belonged to Tuesday 20 October 1964. It's hardly an exact science, but in the absence of a time machine, it's near enough.

None of this will mean anything to anyone else, but I’m using it here as an example of how memory can be pinned down in this manner. No other individual will have precisely the same network of memories and associations – but I hope that readers will occasionally find moments here that they can relate to their own lives, or that these essays might serve to give a better idea of how it felt to live in the 1960s and 70s than can be had from the many nostalgia-focused items one finds on television these days. 

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, regardless of how few people are reading. If it provides interest or entertainment to anyone else, that’s a bonus. And if you find it interesting yourself and know someone else who might enjoy it, pass it on...