Something Thoughtful

 Nicholas Reid reflects in essay form on general matters and ideas related to literature, history, popular culture and the arts, or just life in general. You are free to agree or disagree with him.

                                                           TIME WAS

 

 

“Am I getting old?” I said one day.

I suddenly realised that I have lived long enough to remember things that are probably totally alien to people in their thirties and definitely unknown to people in their twenties and younger. But I am not senile, incontinent, Alzheimic or confined to a walking frame. I regard myself as quite au fait with the world and society as they now are. Yet here I am remembering social and technological norms that no longer exist.

Do you remember rotary dials on heavy telephones, made with a bakelite shell? Telephones, my dear, were static things always attached to a wall by a wire. They weren’t things you carried around in your hand.  When you phoned somebody you had to spin the dial number by number. And if, in the house where you lived, you wanted to have an intimate conversation on the ‘phone, you had to go out and walk up the road and ring your somebody up on a public telephone. Public telephones – do you remember them?

Do you remember shellac discs that were either LPs or 45s or (if your parents had gramophones that could take them) 78s? My children tell me that shellac LPs are again the vogue among a coterie of collectors. But be honest. In the days of podcasts and laser discs and Bluray and other means of catching music, when even CDs and  DVDs have been superseded, how many people take shellac discs as a norm?

Do you remember a time when newspapers were the major source of public information? Yes, I know that (staggering along and trying to ward off their demise) newspapers still exist, but they are so diminished, so less influential than either television or what can be found on the internet. Pity the poor newspaper columnist who imagines that her ephemeral opinions influence many people. Print journalists still have their dreams, I suppose.

Do you remember the days when we spoke of Chinese gooseberries rather than Kiwifruit, a term made up by some marketing hotshot? Do you remember when Tamarilloes were still called tree tomatoes? Do you remember when duvets were still called bedspreads?

Does anybody remember Brufax? I remember it from childhood as coming in cylindrical  green-coloured tins, with the name Brufax written in bold yellow. Again, be honest. You don’t know what I’m talking about, do you? Brufax was toasted yeast flakes, which Mum would sprinkle on the sandwiches we took to school as often as she would spread peanut butter or Vegemite or slices of cheese. All gone, all lost in these chaotic memories I am giving you.

And consider this. Do you find capsicum, or avocado, or a latte alien? Of course you don’t. They are everyday things that you buy at the supermarket or consume at the café as a matter of course. Yet fifty and more years ago, these things would have been regarded as exotica, consumed or used only be a very small group of foreigners or “artistic” people who lived in such places as Titirangi. They didn’t belong to a meat-and-three-veg culture.

When I was a teenager, I remember my eldest brother following a recipe sent to him by a German-speaking pen pal in Switzerland. It was for something called what sounded like MOO-SHLEE. You took rolled oats, grated apple and a sprinkling of raisins or sultanas and added milk; and after letting it all marinate in the fridge overnight you had made a wonderful breakfast meal. Hardly anybody in New Zealand had heard of this miraculous breakfast. Now, what could be more commonplace than bastardised forms of muesli?

And there was the different ethos of the past. Air travel was rare. A trip from New Zealand to Europe was a huge, life-changing adventure, undertaken only by the very wealthy. Perhaps history is turning back upon itself, and in the age of the  pandemic we might once again be confined permanently to these shores. Even so, how many people would now think of an intercontinental journey by plane as a wonder?

You see, I am sound in mind and body, a sentient member of the present age, and yet I carry in my mind things that most of my fellow citizens have never heard of.Indeed, I must be getting old.