Sunday 2nd April 2023

I hated Sunday afternoons as a child. It was always the low point of the week, the afternoon when nothing really happened. It was those long hours between Sunday lunch and Sunday tea. My parents would go and garden, leaving me alone with the television. There were only three channels and none of them saved their best programs for Sunday afternoons. I watched a lot of old and often not very good films, black and white war films that were all about the glory of fighting, or equally black and white family dramas were everyone was so buttoned up and corseted that barely any emotion could escape. As a child I wasn’t a discerning viewer, I would watch anything to chase away the boredom, and those long Sunday afternoons I would watch anything the television had to offer.

This afternoon Martin and I spent a lazy Sunday afternoon at home, watching television. We have the advantage of streaming TV; we can choose whatever program whenever we want to. There’s no searching through three channels and settling for the least annoying thing on offer. As we watched television, I wrote on my laptop.

I find nostalgia fascinating but also a little worrying. The romancing of the past until it almost seems like a paradise. My father and his brothers used to do it. They would look back on the nineteen-forties and nineteen-fifties, especially the Second World War, as an almost perfect time. Even as a child, in the nineteen-seventies and nineteen-eighties, this seemed strange to me, society had moved forward so much, why was the past so wonderful?

I don’t want to return to the world of my childhood, technology has made my life so much better, and I don’t see my childhood as some sort of paradise, yet some people are now romancing that time too.