venta

I am invariably annoyed when people write articles about things remembered from childhood which "you don't get nowadays". For a start, they always seem to include things like "milk arriving on the doorstep" which you do get nowadays (or I do, anyway). Or "children playing in the road"; if you believe doesn't happen these days, drive down Swinburne Rd at teatime. Ask

zandev for details.

These lists often seem to be pointless nostalgia-fests - wasn't the world great when you could buy ten rhubarb-and-custard chews for ten pence and play out til teatime? Well, yes, it was; but surely that's the cry of each succeeding generation since Cane first wailed to Abel that chocolate fruit-of-the-tree-of-knowledge wasn't a patch on the stuff you could get when they were kiddies.

Now, maybe it's just one of those things that one person's harmless nostalgia is another's sentimental wallowing. I do find myself fascinated, though, by the everyday things which just silently drop out of life - and which you don't notice at the time, until suddenly you hear a phrase which catapults you back twenty years.

The phrase "dial 01 if you're outside London". Going out for a country walk and finding rabbits dying of myxomatosis. Hearing news reports attributed to "the Soviet news agency, TASS". The little square plastic tags which held bags of sliced bread closed.

Unlike long-forgotten things like adverts and one-hit-wonders, they're things which seemed incredibly permanent at the time. By definition, they're hard things to think of, because they're exactly the things you don't think of from day to day, and which are rarely marked in museums in the way that other obsolete things might be. They're not missed, or necessarily remembered with any great fondness. I suppose their seeming permanence might just have been an artefact of me being little - TASS probably didn't seem so inevitable to someone who remembered the forming of the Sovet Union.

Some things, like the mentions of TASS, disappeared as the result of momentous events. Others, like the bread tags, were just replaced by a technological development which rocked nobody's life (and you just try putting those little bits of tape round the spokes of your bike wheels). I'll happily consider submissions for other examples.

Some things which I thought had quietly shuffled out of existence seem just to have retreated further north with time. A year or so ago I was at home in Darlington and was delighted to hear a strangely, unearthly shout from the far end of the road:

"Nyaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaag-bn Nyag-bn"

These days it's a pick-up truck, of course, with a second guy walking along side it. When I was little it was a man in a horse and cart. But my parents' road still occasionally gets visits from the rag-and-bone man. Given the number of old fridges, microwaves, sofas etc which haunt the side roads of Cowley, we could do with one down here. Whether they would still make the same unintelligble noise is an interesting question.