Nostalgia isn’t what it was in my day.

Well now – here we are almost exactly a month on from my last post. It seems like more than a month actually – we weren’t yet quite gone into lock-down here in Singapore at the time, although it was on the cards – but since then we have had said lock-down imposed, and subsequently extended. None of us are going anywhere until at least June, by which time the year will be half over before it has really begun.

In my last post I wrote, on the subject of lock-downs, that “Here in Singapore – we haven’t gotten that far yet, but if people insist on ignoring the advice and continue crowding into places like supermarkets and hawker centres all the time, they will force the government to go to a complete lock-down – and then they’ll complain about it.”  As it turns out, that is pretty much what has happened, although to be fair, people are complying for the most part now, with the exception of a minority of gobshites but you’ll get that anywhere. The one thing I was wrong about of course, is that it is most definitely NOT a “lock-down”. Wait – what?? Read on….

For some reason, our illustrious leaders prefers to call it a series of “Circuit Breaker” measures. Much like the time a few years back when there was an extremely heavy rainfall, even by our standards, and I recall that several basement level shops, including a newly opened (two days prior) Wendy’s burger joint on Orchard Road, were all but submerged. Back then one of our ministers, always great with a turn of phrase, acknowledged that some areas had experienced “ponding”. Not flooding – ponding. So yeah – a lock-down by any other name still means you get fined if you’re caught out of your house without one of a handful of specific reasons, or if you go out without wearing a mask.

Like my last post, I do not wish to talk about the virus, the pandemic, the horrendous toll it is taking, the ubiquitous conspiracy theories and endless Facebook arguments, not to mention Donald bloody Trump. No – I want to talk about nostalgia.

You see, the lock-down is having a lot of different effects on different people. For those of us  thus far thankfully not among the quarter million and counting who had plans for today and tomorrow, the luckier ones merely have to worry about how to fill the time without going a bit stir crazy being cooped up in the house. The not so lucky ones don’t have a house to be cooped up in, or can’t afford to buy food into said house if they do. So I am mindful of how much luckier I myself am than many many others. And we should all be mindful of that.

But I have noticed, in myself, a growing sense of nostalgia for times past. It’s nothing all that new really, I’ve always been a bit of a sentimental old git, but the last few weeks I have noticed that I get these flashbacks to long ago times – childhood stuff – and a certain feeling of wistfulness comes with it. I wouldn’t go so far as to call it melancholy – it’s more of a very slight “fond sadness”, if that makes any sense. Perhaps it comes out of the fact that, let’s face it – life as we knew it up to the beginning of 2020 is never going to be exactly the same as it was (and there are encouraging signs that it will be better) and so there’s a certain “letting go of the past” process to go through.

Don’t get me wrong, I am not wallowing in the 1970’s  or 1980’s and wishing I could go back to it. On the contrary, I am looking ahead, and doing things I wish I had done then but “never got around to”. Self learning piano, for example. It’s fun, but damn frustrating and gives me a sense of what my beginning guitar students go through.  I’d encourage you to do the same if you can – whatever it is for you that you’ve always wanted to do, have a go –  a year from now you might be glad you started today. I’m also eagerly awaiting July when I go back to school to get my CELTA certification.

But today, (April 29th 2020), has triggered a slightly stronger bout of nostalgia, for it was on April 29th 1930 that my  paternal grandparents got married. That’s 90 years ago, so you might well wonder why I am getting nostalgic for an event that I did not attend. Well – I am not really. My nostalgia on this occasion has been triggered by the celebration that took place exactly 50 years later, when three generations of the by now much enlarged and extended family all got together to celebrate Joe & Alice’s Golden Wedding Anniversary. The first member of a fourth generation was there too, but was still in utero until about a week later 🙂  I myself was 12 years old by then, my Dad (Joe & Alice’s first) was a couple of years younger than I am now, and he and his siblings set about organising a monumental day of celebrations. By monumental, I mean we got the day off school – it was a Tuesday 🙂

I’ll leave you with a picture of the happy couple with their first  born son Philip – my Dad- born in March 1931, so the photo dates from early 1932 I reckon.

All three are of course no longer with us, Joe having passed away in 1981 Alice in 1983 and Phil in 2001.