“The past is a foreign country. They do things differently there”. E.M. Forster

When will it end? When will life go back to normal again? All our hopes seem to be pinned on the prospect of emerging from a locked-down world and that world looking a lot like it did before.  Remember, like it was before everything went mad!?  It won’t, but that doesn’t mean that the feelings are any less potent.  So, we naturally cling to hope.  But this time our hopes for the future aren’t progress, or difference, or improvement, or even new shiny things. Perhaps for the first time in history, the whole world now longs for the future to be a return to the past.  

Speak to a close friend. Well, any male friend - and say words like “football”, “pub” or “gig” and even via the low latency of a laptop webcam, you can instantaneously see his face twitch, as a powerful neurological and physiological reaction takes hold. Such is the depth and complexity of the human mind that he processes the aurally received concept of a “Pub”, he pictures, considers, reflects, processes and responds (in less time than it takes a Wuhan wet-market bat to flap its wings) and he says something at once relatable and universal. “Fuck yeah, can you even imagine!?”

And we can. We can picture every moment. Heading west on a cramped sweaty tube, shouting above the noise, paying a fiver for each pint, the aggro at closing time, the fights, the stupid messages, the artery swelling junk-food, the cab driver sharing his ‘wisdom’, the hangover, the inevitable alarm clock, the mouthwash, the paracetamol, the weary commute on the familiar journey to a workplace surrounded by other people.  Some of our deepest future hopes are for a rerun of evenings we might at best only half-remember.   

“Nostalgia.  It’s delicate, but potent.”  Don Draper, Mad Men.  

Today is, I think, the 40th day of lockdown. I have been listening to Aladdin Sane.  Bowie’s sixth studio album was released 47 years ago. Forty-seven years!  An age away. And it’s still timeless and idiosyncratic and uncomfortable - a smorgasbord of piano (and what a piano!) and scribbled words, schizophrenically switching styles between haunted moodiness and singalong choruses and then some head-down guitar riff driven boogie.  I hear it again and feel instant nostalgia. 

I can remember listening over and over to the album a few years after it was released. In the late 1970’s I lived in Warley Drive, Bradford and Bowie’s was one of a handful of records I actually owned.  Where I lived was a bit shit. I’ve only been back to that street once in four decades. I have zero nostalgia for that time or place. T’was grim. A lot of what made that past memorable was probably best forgotten.  Perhaps it’s part of the reason that Aladdin Sane still sounds so wonderful today? But I don’t long to return to that past, even for an album that sometimes skipped on side two.    

“The future, isn’t what it used to be.” Foals, Black Gold.

We’re rightly bamboozled by the uncertainty of the future (which may indeed again be “a bit shit”) and hold ever tighter to the deeply felt memories of the past.  In Mad Men, Don Draper said the feeling of nostalgia was like the “pain from an old wound.” What then does pre-Corona nostalgia look and feel like? Is it a longing for Family? Friends? Work? Music? Theatre? Italy? Sport? Because the good news is that in the future that feeling of nostalgia and wonder will still be there - in the locker of the past. On the Zoom backdrop bookshelves of yesterday.  And whatever the triumphs and tragedy ahead, it will be found again in a post-Corona world. That nostalgia will still be there.