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Memory used for nostalgia

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Cadwell NOT Caldwell

Nostalgia but not as you know it

[5 minute read ] 

Nostalgia, the preserve of old persons, and I suppose preservation is what nostalgia is. The preservation of a number of judiciously selected memories carefully and seamlessly stitched together, just the same way we join up episodes in an overnight dream.

'...and then I was falling off a cliff but a lion reached its paw out and grabbed me before I hit the ground...but it was okay because he was also running away from the rabbit swinging a tree branch at us, demanding more ice-cream.'

Well, that isn't nostalgia but in a dream it all makes sense to the person who dreamt it and some highly-paid charlatans who pretend to know what it all means. Nostalgia is, however, certainly made up of a collection of pieces of information, either real memories or snippets of information from a past that a person has a longing for We might include 'saudade', the Portuguese word for longing for something we feel we have lost but had never attained here. At least, that is how I read it to be. Confused? Nostalgic for the past? Nostalgic for the Victorian days or the 1950s or some time that the individual never existed in? We might be not understanding this unless the highly paid charlatan pipes up with, 'The rabbit is you from a previous life chasing the greed of today from a position of poverty, which is why the rabbit is shoe-less and carries only a branch and not a key!'

This, so far is meant to be somewhat non-sensical because it carries with it the idea that the memory of our past is both subjectively personal to only each of us and unreliable. Just like witnesses to the same crime or event but from different geographical and biased perspectives we will describe the scene differently. All my family members (parents and siblings) on any of our holidays decades ago will remember our holiday differently. My parents, my brother and I never noticed the good-looking boy my sister spied. My sister never experienced my joy of winning a few pennies in the amusement arcade, and we children never realised our parents left us alone to go out and have a few drinks once we were asleep. None of us could describe the same scene and have more than a few aspects of those days match in our narrations. Of course, there is a common thread throughout but markedly different values are placed on different events. Oh, by the way, it never, ever rained when I was a child but it always snowed in Winter and my socks always dipped own inside my wellies when my sister and I went carol-singing.

The truth is that, like everyone else, I use selective memory to colour my past. Almost none of my fond memories actually happened on a day that started out as fantastic, had no negative issues and finished as me being the winner. Let's face it, as a child, I had quarreling parents, a bullying brother and a sister that always said, 'Are we there yet?' after about twenty minutes of going anywhere. She also got car-sick; at least I remember that she thought she was. My dad told her that cars have a chain underneath that hits the road and stops people feeling ill and she never complained about feeling ill again. My father knew about static electricity.

But, how about this? How about other people can change our recollection of what happened simply because they have enough information to convince us that they were there? Sound like a story? It is! I have already written it and it has been read and recorded as my own work. Yet, I cannot copyright such a story because it is factual in everyone's life. Take for example, a parent who, listening to us recount one of our favourite childhood experiences, adds information to the tale such as background or a sub-plot; a sub-plot that we must inherently be unaware of since we were engaged in a different aspect of the event. I remember my mum bringing one of our goat-kids into my primary-school class. As far as I remember the kid only came into my school classroom. Apparently, it visited the whole school and wee-ed on the headmaster's office floor. I am, however, not nostalgic for that day or those innocent days. The other children in my class may remember me as being aloof and uninterested. The boys may have taken my lead and not coo-ed over the cute, white fluffy creature. Indeed, my actions may very well have been such that those boys I influenced on that day means they did not form a memory that they wanted to keep. They didn't know that I was already familiar with our animals at home. Obviously, my memory of my mum with a white goat-kid entering my classroom is enhanced by her telling of what the kid did in the headmaster's office and the knowledge that the whole school saw the kid. I have, just now, also attached an image of my mum leading the goat-kid through the village from our home to our school. If this was a nostalgic memory it is no longer the original one and must indeed be a living one; still open for further tweaking and re-interpretation, quite simply because with a jaded eye I added the journey the kid made from my home to the school and back. I suspect it would remember that day sadly because it probably just wanted to gambol in our garden and eat the long grass near its own mum. But, its life was not going to be one out of a 'Babe' film or movie.

We might, as I mentioned, be nostalgic for a past time; a time when we were not even born. We must be in possession of information that pertains to that time, yet we also carry with us in those nostalgic journeys information of our modern existence. How wonderful it would have been to live in the Victorian times, except they had no welfare state and worked six and seven days a week. Television films and dramas show us a tiny tranche of how life was and the ugly bits are hidden. How wonderful the 1960s and 1970s were in France, the UK and America-land, but not in Nigeria, Israel or Vietnam in 1967. 'Fortunate Son' by Creedence Clearwater Revival, now heard as a background sound to the Vietnam war gives us a opportunity to think that it was a good lark, a romp, or a jolly good show that was had with some dope-smoking mates. I can't say it wasn't because I have to rely on accounts from people who were actually there with their personal experiences; who obviously had a different time from the strategists of their day and the historians of today. The 'picture' will always be incomplete; always a story and never a true account, not least because the people on the ground only bring forward selected memories.

I propose that if we can be nostalgic for the past (one we never experienced ourselves), theoretically, we should be able to be nostalgic for the future, any future. I propose that just like the past which is a patchwork of selected memories and supposedly hard facts, any number of futures can be imagined and all are equally true. Wait! What? Am I saying that understanding the past relies on imagination? Yes, I am. Someone studying at Cambridge University told me that they had been told by a tutor that because so little is known about the Anglo-Saxons and the Vikings, whenever an artifact that related to that time is unearthed they have to make up stuff in order to be able to include its relevance in an ongoing story of that time. I suppose they hypothesise in the positive form and wait for someone to test in the negative form to prove them right.

Anyway - back to nostalgic for 'the future'. I suppose that any movie franchise such as Star Wars or even Star Trek not only creates a hankering for a similar experience but also provides scope for a nostalgia of the same. Yet, that is not really the future, because everything we experience instantly becomes the past so we are really only wanting to refresh our past with another Star Wars movie. No, I mean we need technology to actually boost us into the future, notwithstanding that we would need to move across space to where the galaxy, solar system and Earth would be in the future. Fantasists who want to live like hobbits or kill dragons with swords and magic plainly need to be acquainted with witches, wizards, and spirits in the here and now to actually experience their nostalgic vibe. Yet, I go back to the idea that if we can be nostalgic for a past we must theoretically be able to pine for its reciprocal, the future and variations of an alternative life. Just Saying.

There is one aspect of nostalgia that we shouldn't overlook. Memories made in our childhood are the strongest ones that we retain. New experiences provide the greatest impact on our lives. Of course, if we are to survive we must sear into our minds, events, experiences and solutions that provide escape from danger, at a very early age, so it is natural for us to feel nostalgic about our childhood or other people. Apparently, this tendency to firmly stamp episodes into our memory fades after the age of thirty.

I had the distinct pleasure of writing a piece on nostalgia as part of my studies. It is not difficult to start an account and 'storify' it with lyrical description. It is not difficult to set moods and show the character's emotions. It is entirely natural to write the account in a chronological order. The difficulty lies in making sure the reader is not confused when the piece does not follow conventions, and let's face it, the 'White Swan' of iteration. If we only ever see white swans we come to believe that all swans are white through iteration. Time and time again, when we read a nostalgic account we are told what to understand. In its basic form: 'I remember when...Those were the days!' Or, more interestingly at the beginning of a story: 'Life on the beach in 1965 with Laura changed when Kiki arrived.' When the formula for recounting events, that are given as nostalgia, is cast aside to make room for an understanding of how memory actually works the reader can be confused. Putting a time machine into a story on nostalgia just trashes people's sensitivities. Questions might be asked why the typical chronological order of lyrical descriptions is interrupted by shifting perspectives. If, for example, I have a remit to write two thousand words prose on nostalgia, I am not going to write about the last holiday I spent with my grandparents, even if they did get washed away by the tide that summer. I am not going to dwell in a fractured and patched up past that is in my memory, that has been augmented with background stories, and pretend it actually occurred any more than I am likely to write about how my memory is corrupted by my biases, including the ones I don't know about. Grandma and Grandpa may well have arrived in France on a rubber dinghy and never made it home to England and all I gave them was a mournful wave, but there is no fun in the writing of it. Prose just means include lyrical description and avoid using meter to me. The sky was the limit. Unfortunately, my readers are on the ground. Even climbing a tree for a different viewpoint might be awkward for them. Of course, it is for the writer to provide a ladder for the reader to climb; or for the really stubborn, slovenly, or the reader trapped in a world of 'white swans', an armchair on a raised platform on a forklift.

All my posts: https://learn1.open.ac.uk/mod/oublog/view.php?u=zw219551

or search for 'martin cadwell -caldwell' Take note of the position of the minus sign to eliminate caldwell returns or search for 'martin cadwell blog' in your browser.

I am not on YouTube or social media

[ 6 minute read ]

My heating and I fight

Around this time of year, my heating and I usually wrestle in the mornings. It used to be good-natured; ‘You are too hot!’, ‘No, you are!’ This might go on for a while, bickering, until one of us, most often me, gets a bit physical. You have heard of ‘a wall of heat’ haven’t you? I have ultimate control; of course, I control how much food the heating gets with a little switch, but I am loathe to use it because I know the heating wants me to use it just to make me look stupid when I point a finger at it and moan. Eventually, I remember, or discover a day or so later, that ‘someone’ has switched the heating off.

       ‘You wasted your time scolding me, you know? I couldn’t hear you.’

       ‘How do you know I was scolding you?’

       ‘You did. You probably raised you voice a bit as well. “What is wrong with you?” Isn’t that what you say?’’

I don’t like denying food to all the heating but sometimes it all gets a bit much for me. You see, I am outnumbered. I have A LOT of radiators; more than five! Some of them are really quite benevolent and just quietly welcome me when I come in. The one by the front door is like a cat weaving between my legs. It is the leader, the big one, in the living room, that tries to dominate me. 

It is monstrously expensive to try to heat rooms and store heat simultaneously, with storage heating; imagine trying to heat water in your immersion heater while you have all the hot taps on and you will get the picture. The big radiator, in the living room is a seven kiloWatt device; the same as an immersion heater. 

First thing in the morning, in my living-room, the temperature is 25^oC / 77 ^oF and only 19^oC / 66^oF in the bedroom and hall. I open the living room door from the hall and, Wall of Heat! Don’t ask, it is just more efficient to not let the airs mingle too much. (I keep a spreadsheet of power consumption). So, when I started writing this I had to be wearing only trousers. In five minutes, I shall need to start getting fully dressed again. The reason for this is that each of the radiators has a fan on a timer. It is just so annoying. I am not very organised and even have to go outside for a minute or two in the mornings ( 1^oC / 33 ^oF today). I put clothes on, and then take them off, and then put some back on, and then more, and then strip back to only trousers.

I used to own a logistics business, concentrating on transport. I started out as a home and business relocation service provider; but because I don’t eat bacon sandwiches I was not a man with a van. I went into road haulage and heavy haulage, and expanded the business across Europe. Once we were established; on occasion, I would personally need to assess the requirements of some clients from within their home; a personal business meeting, if you will. It was that sort of business wherein we needed to understand the client’s ‘needs and wants’ across multi-layered platforms of operation in multiple countries, concurrently. Of course, we were always professional; so why did I sit down uninvited in a client’s home? Worse, I seemed to want to take my shoes off and just chat. Smell. Old wood smoke. It was autumn and they had an open fireplace. The ashes in the fireplace confirmed they had recently had a fire. This isn’t ‘fifty shades’ so there was no rug in front of the fireplace and no pair of wineglasses left on the coffee table, just five well-groomed adults standing before me in a sparse but expensively decorated room, giving each other puzzled glances. Fortunately, my shoes were still on my feet when I shook off my intoxication and threw off being a hostage to sensuality.

I grew up in a bungalow with an outside toilet. There were two fireplaces, one in the living room (lit) and one in my bedroom (never lit); and a wood-burning range, maybe an Aga, in the kitchen. Mostly, we burned coal in those days, but often, in the earliest days, wood. The wood-burning kitchen range / stove only ever burned wood and was only lit to heat the kitchen before we went to school; we had electric. At home, there were draughts in every room and in the coldest months, we would burn one side of ourselves by the living room fire while our other side was cold, so we would swap places to ‘burn’ the other side for a while. Outside, I learned to ‘go’ really quickly. One day I timed it, from the back door and back in thirty seconds. Run, trousers down, ‘go’, wipe, trousers up, flush, run. I even had to pass the Belgian Hare and the guinea-pig cages, there and back. It is not hardship if you know no different. Visitors to my home sometimes ask, ‘No shower?’

       ‘Did you see the bucket in the bath, and the jug?’

       ‘Yes’

       ‘I boil a kettle and use that.’

They have nothing to say to that.

No-one ever mentions that my bathroom is not heated. There was no fireplace in the bathroom of the bungalow I grew up in. It is also no wonder, to me, that I have never got into the habit of reading newspapers or magazines.

In Winter, the warmth from the kitchen range used to be the first thing I was conscious of while my mum was gently forcing my arms into my school clothes. Somehow, I went to sleep in my bedroom before she had finished reading Enid Blyton aloud, and ‘woke up’ in the kitchen, being manipulated into shapes to fit into the arm and leg holes of my clothes. I was never conscious of a burning wood smell but it was there. I love Winter.

       'Mr Kawazuki, my apologies! Mr Ango! Small nods and bows to the others. In return, I got relieved smiles.

While there is a wall of defiant heat when I go from one room to another in my modern home first thing in the morning; and a damp dish-cloth of cold outside these days. The smell of wood-smoke combined with the scent of cold on my clothes is a trigger for me to become limp for a while in a snug and stupefying nest of peace. I want to burn myself on one side while the other side is cold; and smell wood-smoke. My heating has automatically gone off and I am now fully dressed. The temperature is 21^oC / 69.8 ^oF.