...if you hate the present so much, perhaps you should just die...

You know what - I’m really getting a bit sick of the Good Ol’ Days.

Ever since this financial apocalypse thing started, more and more people find the need to draw a parallel between now and the golden age of the ration book, back in the days when you couldn’t get sugar and your chicken was reconstituted breadcrumbs and lard moulded into a rough chicken shape.

It sounds to me like a hellish era of enforced austerity but apparently I’m in the minority. The masses seem to have come to the conclusion that they’d much rather be spit-roasting squirrels on the embers of the blitz that sitting in front of their freeview ACDCHDTVDVD iGadget wondering which button turns it on.

Okay, so I’m not old enough to remember Spam but it’s not as if I’m a cyber-child, born into a luxurious world of convenience. I’ve lived through some hard times too.

I remember when Teletext was the Internet and satellite TV was something the Americans had. Sure, you’ve got your Xboxes and Playstations now, but back in my day we had Joust and Chuckie Egg or, if we were lucky enough to have a friend with rich parents, we also had Streets of Rage.

Back in my day, a mobile telephone was a regular telephone with an extra-long cable. We used to hide the cable up our sleeve and pretend we were on Dallas. Those were the days before 4OD and BBC iplayer, when, if you wanted to watch something, you had to set your VCR to record it. You’d invariably hang around until your show started to make sure that it did what you told it to at which point you’d just sit down and watch it on the telly anyway. Just as well too because while you were watching ITV, the VCR was recording BBC1.

But I digress.

Maybe things were gentler in the past. Maybe they were simpler and less manic. Maybe there were more cows in the fields and less hoodies on every corner but that doesn’t necessarily mean they were better. The point I’m trying to make is that if you hate the present so much, perhaps you should just die.

‘Where has this sudden burst of indignation come from?’, I hear you ask. I’ll tell you where – Alan Bloody Titchmarch. Granted, he’s not the only culprit in the retrovolution but he’s the most persistent and the easiest to remember. His latest book, predictably entitled ‘When I was a Nipper’, is an illustrated jaunt back to his boyhood which he mostly spent on his bike delivering Hovis down the cobbles to Dvořák’s Symphony No. 9.

Thank you again, Wikipedia.

Now, I would have read some of Alan’s book for professional accuracy but I was so disgusted that I just had to leave immediately and find someone to film me happy-slapping a moving statue. So, since I’m unable to quote an extract, I’ll just make a stab at guessing.

“I remember old Mr. Brown who used to own the beige van on Bland Street. I was delivering some ‘ovis to him one midsummer morning when I fell off of my bike. Some rapscallion had left an old sea-mine in the middle of the road and who ran into it only muggins here. Mrs Mustardey, the baker, was in a right tizzy when she heard the sound of ticking coming from the mine. Luckily, Mr Brown knew a chap in the Ministry of Explosions who promptly sent the instructions for disposal in a telegram. They read simply - open mine, cut blue wire, bob’s your uncle. So Mr. Brown, dutiful as always, got the old boy opened but there was no blue wire, just different shades of brown because in them days, everything was in sepia...”

And so on, and so forth. That’s what I imagine anyway, some meandering lecture about how dull the dishwater was – ‘but it were real dishwater in them days, none of your Cillit-Flash nonsense.’ But you can imagine things for yourself; you don’t need me to do that for you, right?

Too right, and you don’t need Titchmarsh and his ilk doing it for you either, because, let’s be honest, the good old days probably weren’t all that great. In fact, all of these old-school anecdotes probably didn’t actually happen at all – it’s a scientifically proven fact that most of your most treasured childhood memories didn’t happen to you – they happened to someone else

...on BBC1

...when you were trying to record ITV.