Nostalgia ain't what it used to be

Three cheers for the W.I. ! After the stunning nudie calendar which inspired a successful film starring the ageless Helen Mirren, they have now gone on the warpath against excessive packaging. I wholeheartedly approve. Apart from the fact that a plastic carrier bag is the height of scruffiness (unless it’s a green and gold one, and even then), all that plastic is really clogging up the planet’s arteries. I am old enough to remember when milk came in a returnable glass bottle, and fruit and veg were weighed out on scales with metal weights and poured into one’s wicker basket by a florid gentleman who would oftimes throw in one for luck. I am starting to sound like Prince Charles, or John Major, with his warm beer and cricket on the village green. I am listening more and more to the test match on Radio 4, even though I don’t know my LBW from my silly mid on. I find it soothing.

I am a relic from a gentler, more organic age. I empathize with the Edward G. Robinson character in a much underrated 1973 film called “Soylent Green” in which real food and the simple pleasures of nature have been usurped by a faceless military-industrial complex which feeds people unknowingly on the ground-up remains of human corpses dyed in various colours and pressed into tablet form. So far, so unappetizing. Euthanasia is encouraged as soon as people are no longer productive, and special centres are set up for the elderly to go and turn themselves in, their sacrifice rewarded by a gentle chemical-induced death surrounded by a 360° screen showing a sort of “Look at Life” (remember those?) film of the Earth as it once was, accompanied by Beethoven’s 6th symphony (aka the St Ivel butter advert).

I wondered what I would choose for my “dernière séance”, were I given a choice ? Woodstock maybe, or the Stones Steel Wheels concert of 1998 in Imax. What would you choose for your final reel, readers? You should write it down somewhere, you never know, truth is sometimes stranger than fiction.

Now, where did I put those frozen spinach chips again ….