The warm blanket of yore

If time machines were available, we’d queue up for a quick tour of our own back stories, a rewind of our childhood and youth.

Who among us does not crave to go back in time? A few birthdays ago, a previous time, the glorious past… Our own personal histories interest us no end. If we could, we would burrow into our own flashbacks and live there forever. Choose a point of time when we fell in love or were cradling a firstborn or were toddlers ourselves, gurgling happily in a parental lap.

Of course, Covid has exacerbated the feeling. While cribbing about our job or love-life, we never thought earth itself was going to spin in reverse on its axis. So we can be forgiven for, first and foremost, aching for things to go back to what they used to be in terms of travel, parties, career, extended family and friends. Yearning for what used to be once upon a time freely available to us as ‘normal’. Being out and about with nothing particular in mind.

And then the minutiae creep in. We miss all those who have departed from our lives. Even the gardener of our old family home. All those who filled in the colours in the painting of us. Nostalgia for the past is a real thing, which makes us worship retro music, retro clothes, vintage furniture, antiques and heritage buildings. Recreating bygone moods to evoke previous emotions is a human compulsion. So we have comfort words – frankly, actually, personally, literally, if you ask me, let me tell you, sorry to say, etc., along with a generous garnish of ‘you know’. We have comfort clothes – T-shirts we wash and wear continuously, the same jeans we grab each time… Threadbare but bringing us the worn smoothness of another time, a kind of remembered happiness. Comfort food, of course, is the magic genie that resurrects us from the doldrums, brings us back from the land of blue. The power of curd rice to slay your inner dragons can never be emphasized enough.

Which is perhaps why Ben Affleck is with Jennifer Lopez again, rumours of a second engagement swirling about after decades. Also why Nicole Kidman wore a one-piece swimsuit with long sleeves in Nine Perfect Strangers, the new TV series, kickstarting a new passion for this old-fashioned piece of clothing. Suddenly our grandmother’s prawn recipe or aunt’s crochet mats are in vogue.

If time machines were available, we’d queue up for a quick tour of our own back stories, a rewind of our childhood and youth. To inhale the cooking smells from a long-ago kitchen, to finger the fabric of a birthday frock, to cradle that first doll, to race that first toy car, to climb that tree, to push that swing. And this time perhaps linger on a friend’s smile, be less harsh to the giver of a love letter, to appreciate a mother who worries and a father who wordlessly assures you he will take care of everything.

Oh, to live your life again, this time with hindsight and goodwill, with the understanding that time once lost can never be found again.