Not what it used to be

So it turns out they do make them like that any more. Thank you Santa

Nostalgia is an unavoidable consequence of the human condition, I suppose. We edit our memories to forget the boring bits, the failures, the humiliations (most of them), the down-sides and dark sides, the duds and dead ends. As a consequence, our curated past appears far superior to our mundane and uncertain present; we constantly feel that our lives, our town, our country, civilisation is in decline

This is exploited by marketing departments to sell us stuff, on the basis that if we buy their product we can re-experience the way we remember things used to be. Reactionary politics pulls the same trick: if only we vote for them, they will make the world as if was before the Internet or equalities legislation or the EU or multi-cultural Britain or decimalisation or the end of empire - the world as we comfortingly misremember it

This being Christmas, we watched one of the classic old films: Where Eagles Dare - Richard Burton and Clint Eastwood putting it up the Nazis. The plot is preposterous, the clichés are relentless, the acting is old school British - Clint looks like a fish out of water. It's enduring popularity rests on a nostalgia for Britain's stand-alone moment in 1940 and the national satisfaction that flowed from being on the winning side in a war where good and evil could, it seemed, be confidently assigned. Far-right Nazism had been defeated and even two decades later it was possible to sell a movie that relies on an audience that can indulge its nostalgia, certain that the victory was inevitable and permanent

Sixty years later, aware of the drift of politics in Sweden, Denmark, Hungary, Poland, France, Italy, Spain and Germany, and particularly of our home-grown iconoclasts, it is hard to watch with such an easy mind

My first camera was not unlike this one - probably I got it around the time Where Eagles Dare was made. Somewhere I've got some of the pictures I took. I wonder if they are as good as I remember