Weaponised Nostalgia – Or how my grandmother's toast may lead to Armageddon

There was something magical about my grandmother's toast. I'm not sure quite what benevolent spells she weaved over what was – to all intents and purposes – just a slice of burned flour and water smeared in congealed cow's milk, but it worked. She would hand slice some fresh white bread, toast it under her eye level grill, then – and I think this may have been where the magic happened – hit the crunchy top with the back of the knife to make little dents all the way around the edge. This meant that the real, thick, creamy butter that she then spread over it would ooze inside the crunchy exterior – creating the most delicious bread and butter experience in the known universe.

I have tried to recreate it myself, but to no avail. I am now the proud owner of those butter knives – handed over to me when I left home in a hailstorm of helpful kitchen items – and I can confirm that there is no magic in them. Bread is just bread, butter is just butter, a grill is just a source of heat. Maybe I need to eat it in the dining room of an unremarkable semi-detached house in walking distance of Guildford station with a glass of warm Ribena, preferably on a crisp late October morning at the beginning of half-term with a bald, cynical old man telling me the story of Sweeney Todd as he plays tug of war with his beloved Labrador?

Maybe it's not the toast.

Nostalgia is a powerful weapon, the right smell, a certain song, an old TV show, a glimpse of a childhood toy, these things all create certain chemical reactions in the brain. Happy fuzzy memories of a happier time, before jobs, mortgages, children, Brexit, Trump and the ever-present threat of apocalypse. I don't think I ever felt safer than on those childhood holidays to my grandparents' houses. Either to Devon – where you could be forgiven for thinking you were in a hotel as the toast came on a toast-rack and the butter was often in sachets (my grandmother was a thrifty woman who presented me with a margarine tub filled with sachets of vinegar, mustard, ketchup and tartar sauce she had 'saved' from the Wrey Arms on our many visits there), the Ribena was substituted for Lemon Barley Water, and the old man had all his hair – with barely a touch of grey – and told you golfing stories while he watched snooker. Different, but every bit as magical, or Guildford – depending on which bit of the country we were living in at the time. Either way, Mum and Dad knew how to get themselves a bit of quality child-free time.

Any excuse to post this - occasionally referred to as

the best song of all time by me - John Mellencamp classic

I come from a generation for which the most powerful of memories tend to be triggered by the TV. I recently questioned the fact that some of my most emotional reactions are for American small towns – despite having grown up in the bleak grey landscape of 1980s Guildford, and the rural idylls of Devon (if you have ever visited Bideford, you will know how much I am stretching the definition of rural idyll) either way, neither of those places bear even a passing resemblance to Kingston Falls, or Hill Valley (same town, different names fact-spotters). As the massive success of Ready Player One confirms, the films we watch as kids have a powerful place in our hearts.

Not just films but all pop culture, who among us doesn't occasionally reread a favourite book, or listen to a favourite album in the hope of glimpsing our younger selves smiling back at us? I am still so in love with the Shire that I can reread just the opening chapters of Lord of the Rings without needing to finish the book. It is like a brief weekend back in a home town that never really existed. I can be lost in happy memories of the corridors of Galactica and the rocky outcroppings of Eternia every bit as much as I can by strolling through Victoria or Stoke Parks on a sunny afternoon – more so, because they remain unchanged.

I say they have remained unchanged, but that's not entirely true. If you have ever been hit with a powerful enough nostalgia wave to watch old episodes of Thundercats, Transformers, Mask etc. etc. on Youtube, then you, like me, have probably been shocked to discover that what you remember as a perfectly crafted fantasy world of good vs evil, powerful characters and dizzying special effects (the effects have not aged well, especially not in one of my personal childhood favourites, The Box of Delights, though it has only added to its charm and I still rewatch it every Christmas) is, in fact, a thinly veiled advert for easily broken toys.

I still have no happier memory than the unbridled joy

I experienced at watching the first episode of Thundercats.

And they have stayed that way. If you spend any time at all on social media these days, you are almost certainly going to see at least one 'Like and Share if you remember this,' meme every day. They are harmless fun, images of Speak and Spells, Worzel Gummidge, Donkey Kong and Stretch Armstrong, reminding you of a simpler time. Why not like them, share them, and bring a bit of joy to your contemporaries?

Well, why not indeed. It depends entirely on how you feel about data-mining and targeted advertising, or building up fake ratings for pages that can be sold on to the highest bidder (usually some demented racist hategroup or another). If, for example, you continually like clips of 80s cartoons, arcade games, BMX bikes and Garbage Pail Kids, then it can be reasonably assumed you are somewhere in your forties, and a bit of a geek. Or, if you like pictures of sit-up-and-beg racing bikes, stuff-of-nightmares china dolls and teddy bears and Muffin the Mule then you are either racing towards your three quarters of a century, or a fucking hipster. Either way, this helps the corporations bombard you with adverts for whatever they think you should buy, and find the right cartoon to put in that advert to gently nudge you into it. No Top Cat, I don't want another mortgage you sell out bastard, and fuck you Fred Flintstone, you corporate shill. Emotional manipulation via your happiest childhood memories can never be a good thing.

This can only get worse. I confidently predict a Philip K. Dick style future in which we all access the internet directly from inside our brains via a chip – for convenience's sake. A chip which will have incorporated a feedback loop capable of accessing our fondest memories and utilising them to sell us things. A happy world where our heart's desires are transmitted straight to the people able to make them happen, where you only have to think of a thing you want and it can be yours.

A world where they can use the smell of my grandmother's toast to make me believe I want to buy a handgun and vote for a despot.

Not long to go now...

I'm Not A Fan

I'm Not A Fan

The only time you'll find me spinning around is on the dancefloor, though come to think of it, just being in my presence will make you instantly cooler, so maybe I am.

Fan, short for fanatic: –

(informal) a person who is extremely interested in something, to a degree that some people find unreasonable

(disapproving) a person who has very extreme beliefs that may lead them to behave in unreasonable or violent ways

Not admirable qualities right? Those with the patience of a toddler who hungrily pre-order every release from their favourite band/author/movie franchise/crockery creator etc. The people who camp out in the streets to be first to get the new shiny thing/tickets for band that should have stopped touring thirty years ago/a look at a posh baby. The one-upmanship of those desperate to be first, who fuel the ebay sales with 500% markups of things that will be easily available at a huge discount in a few short weeks time (hi record store day friends). Handy for a certain sector of consumer capitalism that relies on blind hero-worship and impatience though.

Once upon a time I did pre-order books, movies and records to get them at full price on release day, then pore over them for days until I knew every part of them. Now I know if I leave it a bit, I can probably get them for less than half the price when those early adopters have finished, and it has been a long time since I read anything twice (although that is more to do with my fear of dying before I have managed to get through the mountainous to-read pile next to my bed – which is quite likely to be the cause of that death).

This isn't some smug money-saving tip like the millionaire fashion icon 'oh I get all my stuff from charity shops' might give you in order to fuck up the chances of anybody else ever getting a bargain again. It's because that deadly to-read pile has sibling to-watch and to-listen-to piles and the last thing I pre-ordered was still sitting around unread by the time I first saw it as a 99p kindle special offer. It's really just me: getting old leaves a lot less time to laze about consuming pop culture. I have had The Last Jedi DVD sitting on my shelf for nearly a fortnight now, and am starting to regret paying full price – cheapskate twat that I am.

This is how I will die – although not in such a hideous shirt

It's the competitive nature of fandom that will always confuse me. Those who, when I mention that I quite like band A, will immediately tell me 'I've seen them live,' with a smug face as if buying a freely available ticket in accordance with market forces is some kind of achievement. The tracking down of rare bootleg recordings did indeed used to be a difficult game, the sense of achievement could be earned, until you removed the treasured tape-of-a-tape-of-a-tape-of-a-tape from its photocopied cover and played a crackly, not-quite-as-good-as-the-officially-licensed-live-recording-from-another-date version of a song that should make you question your life choices. Being smug about owning a rare record these days is just being smug about having a lot of money and a discogs account, before it was a sign of having way too much time (also money) on your hands.

In my youth I did indeed bow down to the gods of rock. Until I learned to play well, write killer riffs (spoiler: they may not have been that killer) and understood how it all falls into place. I had no time for contemporary heroes – Kurt Cobain, Thurston Moore, Graham Coxon, Bernard Butler – the grunge-lords and britterati. But the ancient titans of rock – Jimi Hendrix, Ritchie Blackmore, Alvin Lee, Jerry Garcia – still held a certain magic: even once I had read biographies pointing out just how spoiled, twatty and broken most of them really were. But then I got older, I came into real life contact with a few actual rock stars in the course of my apathetic failed musical career and they lost their glitter. I still love the songs, but their creators are no more to me than craftsmen doing a job. Love the song, not the singer.

With that realisation I stopped with the envy, and the contempt and all the other vague, bitter stirrings from my artistically unfulfilled heart that I aimed at the unworthy contemporary chart toppers. Truly blinkered fans – you know the ones, they'll tell you 'Octopus's Garden' and 'Maxwell's Silver Hammer' are just as good as the overwhelmingly excellent finale of Abbey Road, that Titus Alone is every bit as brilliant as Titus Groan, that Star Wars movies aren't just jolly adventures for kids (they are, and that's why they're great), the kind who think Tusk and Physical Graffiti should not have been single albums without all the shit on, who want to hear David Gilmour do his non-Pink-Floyd material live and didn't cancel their Amazing Spiderman subscriptions when Dr Octopus took over as Spidey – never get to this realisation. Their religious fervour for their idols is truly terrifying. I have friends who, if I were so inclined, I could drive to tears with a pithy take-down of their favourite Green Day album. People whose entire identities are so entwined with their obsessions that to lose one is to lose the other entirely.

'Sheldon, you didn't have a personality, you just had some shows you liked'

Separating art from artist becomes increasingly necessary in the current environment – especially if you're a bit of a lefty and you like Morrissey: like most Morrissey fans. You can try and draw a line and say you only like his work up until the point he became an awful racist cunt, but I think he may always have been an awful racist cunt. Also 'Spent The Day In Bed' is a fucking great song. So are 'Cat Scratch Fever', 'Rock and Roll part 1', 'Rooftops' and 'Jake the Peg' and I will still listen to them however cuntish their creators.

Difficult people can write great music and if you didn't know the terrible crimes of the artist you wouldn't care. Bowie and Jimmy Page both slept with underage girls (consensually, as far as I am aware, which is a crucial difference) but we're all still very happy to listen to their music. Phil Collins was always a massive tax-dodging tory but... okay, only tax-dodging tories like Phil Collins – same goes for Gary Barlow. But there are fans who are devastated when the ideals of their idols fail to align with their own.

Kill your idols, believe in nothing but yourself, your false religion will ultimately disappoint you. Believe in the music, for it shall set you free, worship the power of the instrument in your hand to change the world, for this machine kills fascists.

Love the art, fuck the artist.