A Defence of Nostalgia

It’s 6.30 on a frosty December morning and I’m on my phone smiling at a grainy black and white photo of a top-hatted Edwardian gentleman measuring the width of an impossibly narrow alleyway. I put down my coffee, save the image to Twitter and begin composing a suitable caption. Occasionally I lean into the sentimental, but mostly I aim for a sardonic, hopefully witty note that captures the absurdity so often lurking in old photos. I settle on: “Nobody expects the Ginnel Inspector” and press ‘Post’, knowing that today, I’ve got a good ‘un. Just before I leave for work, I check the post’s progress: the likes, laughter emojis and gifs are accumulating and there’s already witty banter about whether ginnel, snicket or twitchell should be the appropriate nomenclature for a narrow alley.

This has been my daily ritual for five years now, since I started the Twitter account Ron Manager Remembers Nottingham during the dark days of Covid lockdown. Inspired by Paul Whitehouse’s genius creation of Ron Manager, my early tweets aimed to capture his beguiling, lyrical beauty – the sense that all was well with the world, and simple happiness could be found by “small boys in the park” using “jumpers for goalposts, hmm?” By adapting a similar tone to Ron, I hoped to reel in from the past those fragmentary memories of people, places and events from the Nottingham of my formative years, and in the process connect with others who might recognise these often universal experiences. One lockdown and several thousand followers later, it appeared as though I’d managed to tap into something very, very relatable and – if I were to be grand – rather important.

But first, something about Nottingham. Wordsworth said that: “Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, / But to be young was very heaven!” and that’s how I felt about my home town during the late 70s and early 80s. Unusually blessed for what is, in effect, a small provincial city, we could boast sporting excellence in Brian Clough’s Nottingham Forest, which was a goal kick away from the Trent Bridge Test match venue, reputedly more pubs per square mile than any other city, a lively university, a boisterous music and clubbing scene, plenty of beautiful architecture, all watched over by the proud purring of the two stone lions of the grand municipal Council House building. Add a literary heritage of Byron, D.H. Lawrence and Alan Sillitoe, then you had a time and place that almost seemed designed for misty-eyed nostalgia.

And oh, how I milked that nostalgia relentlessly: tweets about repressed memories of seedy nightclubs, the Escoffier-worthy glory of mushy peas (Nottingham’s true staple), fond recollections of the labyrinthine Debenhams, celebrations of the vanishing local accent, lionisations of sporting heroes. I couldn’t type fast enough. And it seemed that Ron’s followers couldn’t get enough of it, my tweets triggering threads of conversations and shared recollections of ‘doing stuff’ during a time when we were being ordered to hunker down and withdraw from a life well lived.

As the pandemic stretched out, and Ron’s followers increased – by now numbering people from far beyond the boundaries of Nottingham – I noticed more Twitter accounts devoting themselves to the remembrance of things past. The platform was, and still is, awash with soft-focus images: Bagpuss, nurses in starched aprons, upright bobbies on the beat, car-free roads on tidy, terraced streets, grand department stores and the like. Also on the rise was the reaction of commentators lining up to declare that this boom in nostalgia was a sure sign of national malaise. Nick Cohen asserted that “confident countries are not nostalgic”; Ben Sixsmith weighed in with “this sort of damp-eyed sentimentality often grounds itself in the 70s, yet power cuts and three-day weeks are overlooked in favour of eccentric dinner party dishes and children’s television”, whilst Otto English went to war on what he saw as a tsunami of ‘Shitstalgia’ on social media. Of course, there’s some truth in these positions; clearly the “remembrance of things past is not necessarily the remembrance of things as they were”, as Proust famously put it. For every sunlit playground of laughing children on the witch’s hat, there’s a kid nursing a broken arm from having tumbled onto pre-health and safety concrete; for every Alpine pop van, there’s legions of Brits with shrapnel-toothed smiles; for each glorious Oliver Postgate programme there’s the relentless hours of boredom when there was nothing on the box; for every child that stayed outdoors ‘all day until teatime’ there’s the concealed stories of deprivation and abuse.

But this is to miss the point of why the pandemic period produced such an upsurge in the gazing back to a perceived golden age. If the pandemic and lockdowns gave us anything of value, it was the opportunity to step away from the 21st century grindstone, to slow down and take a good look around. A stocktake of what makes life worth living, and what provides meaning, was now being conducted. And what many people saw when they emerged blinking from their government-enforced purdah was a society that felt increasingly hollowed-out and unsatisfying. Is it any wonder then, that a black and white picture of thousands of grinning fans packed like sardines on a Meadow Lane football terrace said more about being a human being than the fidgety social distancing at the supermarket? Can we be surprised if our eyes welled up at the image of an extended family at a 1960s Skegness when we had been ordered to stay away from our older relatives for the past year?

The enforced period of reflection also revealed a broader societal decline that the pandemic had merely accelerated: towns and cities had become mere palimpsests of their original function. When Ron announced on April Fools’ Day that planning permission had been received to convert the deserted Debenham’s – a fine Grade II listed building at the heart of Nottingham – into “Europe’s largest vape shop”, many were taken in; it was just too close to reality to be an obvious prank. A walk through Nottingham now is a depressing experience, as it is in many post-industrial towns and cities across the country: whole thoroughfares exhibit boarded up shops, their doorways sheltering rough sleepers in flimsy tents; the ubiquitous Turkish Barbers punctuate streets that once boasted several lively pubs, and the only bustle is now provided by steely-eyed Deliveroo motorcyclists who clog up the pavements outside the food outlets. Strikingly, very few old people are to be found in the city; Ron’s posts of city scenes of the 70s and 80s often show well-dressed pensioners, having alighted from the subsidised buses, taking their place among the urban throng. This is a universe away from skunk-infused, edgier streets of today. Even the Council House which, in its imposing grandeur, is a striking metaphor of the civic pride and ambition of a previous age, looks tired and unkempt. A financially strained council, weighed down by financial mismanagement and a lack of government funding, can’t even afford to remove the mould from its iconic lions who silently overlook the decline. You don’t have to be a rosy-hued nostalgia junkie to recognise the dizzying changes that have taken place in Britain over recent decades; for many, the 1970s – power cuts and all – just felt better, and Ron looks to remind us of this.

It’s another frosty morning, and another black and white photo posted, this time of New Year’s celebrations in the Old Market Square. My dad-joke caption: “Youth is when you’re allowed to stay up for New Year’s. Middle age is when you’re forced to” reels in the likes and banter. Maybe some would call it ‘shitstalgia’, but as I lose myself in the unmistakable joy and optimism of the celebrants in the picture, I remind myself that by looking back, we clarify what’s gone awry and what we fight for now. Those lions can be cleaned up for a start.

Andy Simpson is officially ‘getting on a bit’ but finds solace in posting silly things on his nostalgia account Ron Manager Remembers Nottingham on X.