Colm O'Regan: 'I have a hunger to see a photo of a SuperSer or an old Escort'

They should have had a warning. RTE Gold was playing the music from the late 90s last week. THE LATE 90s? GOLD? I was a fully grown man during those years! Albeit with a terrible earring and clothes that didn’t fit. But still, Whigfield was not ‘a golden era’. That was only the other day.

I’m alarmed with the casual disregard that Time seems to be having for my feelings. I’m constantly blindsided by ‘surprising facts’ memes that say things like: “It is a longer time from now back to the release of The Waterboys’ The Whole of the Moon than it was from Fall of the Berlin Wall back to the building of the Pyramids.”

But nostalgia is not what it used to be. It’s better. A 17th-century medical student coined ‘nostalgia’ to describe the anxieties shown by Swiss mercenaries who were missing home. It was seen as a medical condition. A type of melancholy. 

The nostalgia I felt in my 30s? That was fake. A way of prematurely gaining Cranky Oul Lad Credibility, to distance myself from the callow youths with their …whatever it is they had. Clothes that fitted or something.

But nostalgia now? Kindly send for my 17th century physician and have him bring a langerload of leeches. This is the real deal. I’ve got the black bile.

I have found myself drifting into the Facebook Groups. Not the ones that say The Vaccine makes forks stick to you. The nice nostalgia ones. I’m now a member of at least ten OLD PHOTOS OF PEOPLE ENJOYING THEMSELVES AND NOT STUCK IN THEIR PHONES LIKE THE YOUNG PEOPLE THESE DAYS online communities.

I have a HUNGER to see a photo of a SuperSer or an old Escort. The car I mean, it’s not some kink. 

My soul yearns for memories of old lino and candid shots of people in pubs smoking two fags at a time while training the baby to hold her pint. Snaps of drinkers who look like the cast of the Last of the Summer Wine even though they were in their mid-20s.

And, a quick word of thanks to the administrators of those burgeoning nostalgia groups. Lockdown has seen membership surge. 

Now some fella who only set up the group to upload photos of a Macra Dinner Dance has to wade through off-topic incursions from pro-assault rifle campaigners, Trumpists, Bitcoin Scammers, and Elizabeth M. talking about “how I lost my husband to a sorceress but through the power of my Pastor I have found peace”. 

And all of this in the comments underneath a photo of the girls from the Sunbeam factory drinking Satzenbrau at a table quiz.

I joined the 2000AD group. That released stored up time from the missing years where I only remembered awful teenage discos. But it wasn’t all misery. 

I was reading 2000AD, a comic that was the home of Judge Dredd, Slaine, Rogue Trooper, Strontium Dog -some of the finest culture of the end of the 20th century.

My Technical Drawing A3 folder for school was covered in a picture of a Celtic hero sitting on a mound of dead warriors, as if defending my Solids in Contact solutions from evil marauders. WHAT WAS I THINKING? 

Well, I was thinking that women who saw me with this on the bus would make their own contact and invite me to all sorts of filth. I want to swallow my own face with the cringe of it. But also be kind to myself. 

Maybe that’s part of the nostalgia. To stretch out a bony wizened hand across the fabric of space-time to that earnest comic-reader and tell him that, by the time he gets to his forties, he’ll be fine. If a little melancholy.