Rose-tinted glasses obscure our view of the future

THERE was an air of vultures circling a still-breathing carcass yesterday in my local HMV.

Obviously I went there as soon as I heard about the administrators, in the vague hope that the 3-for-€20 deal had changed to 20-for-€3. No such luck. The place was heaving, full of people rifling through CDs and DVDs although the queue at the till was tiny. Maybe people were coming in for that most pleasurable but economically useless of activities — the protracted aimless browse, before going home to order online.

We all love a good browse, yet this solitary pursuit is about to become endangered. For this I feel a bit sad — you can’t browse on Amazon the way you can mooch to your heart’s content in an actual shop crammed with tangible stuff. However, there seems little point in getting all weepy and nostalgic about the closure of chains like HMV (apart from sympathising, of course, with those losing their jobs), while the reality is that it was us, the credit card-carrying public, who shut them down. Mooching and browsing is all very nice, but who in their right mind is actually going to do their music and film shopping somewhere that charges way over the online odds, and makes you physically schlep into town for the privilege?

Already much nostalgia-led guff has been written about the death of the high street. It’s not death, it’s change. Evolution. Change is our only constant — resistance is futile, and nostalgia is a total waste of energy. Only trainee shoplifters could possibly miss Woolworths — its combination of being outdated, overpriced and hopelessly naff proved fatal in our shiny Cloud-centred digital world. (Like everyone else over 40, I have no idea what a Cloud is, other than those things that rain on us, but I’m trying to sound modern here.)

We can get so caught up in all that mawkish nostalgia when things change at a speed that makes us uncomfortable. I like red-lipsticked retro glamour as much as the next man, especially if it involves Dita Von Teese in a martini glass, but that whole cult of looking back instead of forward just turns us into a bunch of infantilised ostriches terrified of the present, never mind the future. And so we take refuge in recreating the past, except repackaging it to make it more palatable — minus its legislated racism, sexism, homophobia. Cupcakes? Vintage kitchens? Fetishisation of bygone eras via Mad Men and Downton Abbey? Do me a favour.

The past was not some golden era. It was grim. Like childbirth, we forget the bad bits and remember only the good, filtering our memories through a haze of nostalgic fondness for pick ’n’ mix and vinyl, for analogue and face-to-face retailing. But really, it’s over. Keep looking sadly over your shoulder at the past and you start to resemble a Hovis advert.