Tales from the Time Chair Introduction

"The out-of-date returns in due course as the picturesque." (Agatha Christie).

The image of a strong and loyal log fire burning in a secluded cottage keeping you safe and warm from the wintry conditions outside, serves as an eternal metaphor as to the inextinguishable nature of the human spirit. The bleak weather is the harsh external world, the cottage is the body, and the fire is the divine spark within.

It doesn’t seem too long ago when such imagery was commonplace. Christmas cards, fairy tales, music videos, nursery rhymes, television programmes and story books, have all at some point conjured such evocative imagery as a means by which to transport us back to earlier, what are often described as, “simpler” times.

If you were born between 1965 and 1980, then within in the next decade or so, you are set to become part of the most senior generation in the world, which given the amount of change you have witnessed in your lifetime puts you in a unique position. You knew the world before digital technology; and you know the world after it. But most importantly, you know that those two worlds are not the same, and that something significant has changed.

As a child, you might recall that your primary concerns along with the rest of the animal kingdom were first and foremost the basics of survival. Shelter, warmth, food and water. The cyclical (and sometimes brutal) nature of those times meant that we were in many ways more in harmony with nature than we are now. If you've ever walked through a park early in the morning and watched a bird gather worms from the ground, what may seem like an idyllic and picturesque start to your day, is for the bird an essential task which is crucial to its very survival. It doesn't do what it's doing for fun, and yet that's how we often perceive it, just like we do a lot of our childhood memories.

For many children in the 1970s and 80s, extremes were common and had to be endured; not avoided. Most of our understanding of the world came by way of direct interaction with it, and not by simply reading about it or looking at images on a screen like we do today. Economically, times were difficult, but this often went unnoticed because everyone else was in the same boat. Financial credit hadn’t yet taken a hold and created what would become the haves and have-nots, debt wasn’t widespread because no one had any money to lend you in the first place, and Gordon Gekko had yet to declare that greed, for lack of a better word, was good.

To help offset some of the hardships, various past times and forms of entertainment were available such as: exploring derelict (often haunted) buildings, building dens, reading, doing puzzle books, listening to the radio, playing cassette tapes or records, watching television, and a variety of self-devised outdoor sports and activities. Toys were limited, and home-made modes of transport such as a bicycles, skateboards and go-karts were commonplace. Any new items we did receive came via traditional portals such as Christmas and birthdays, and apart from pocket money, income streams were limited to delivering newspapers, returning empty drink bottles to the local shop, or building a makeshift table at the front gate from which passing old people could sympathetically purchase your old items for 10-pence each (or 2-pence for the more desperate kids). You do remember some of this, don't you?

Now if you study the history of the late 1970s and 1980s, in addition to the widely-analysed political, social and economic changes that occurred during those decades, there is also a subtle, less-spoken-about anomaly, a kind of underlying temporal oddity which is somewhat different than that of the other often-celebrated decades such as the 1950s or the “Swinging" 60s. A key feature of the 1980s for example, is that it was the bridge between the old world of the analogue, and the new world of the digital. But for some of us who witnessed the rapid transition between the two in real-time, there is something about it which doesn’t quite sit right, and I don’t mean something as obvious as when we get older we tend to become more resistant to change, or think of youngsters with their technological gadgets as gormless shells who, “Don’t even know they’re born.” I mean it in a more serious sense.

There is little doubt that Generation X were in many ways responsible for dragging the world out of its Victorian slumber and into the modern era, however, when you examine those changes, or more precisely the rate at which those changes occurred, in amongst the seemingly logical progression there is also a niggling in the back of the mind which simply won’t go away. It’s almost as if we sacrificed something very important amidst the process in exchange for something which would eventually lead to the world becoming a far more banal and drearier place. Never before in history have we had access to so much finance, technology and entertainment than we do today, and yet happiness and satisfaction (irrespective of ‘official’ data claiming otherwise) appears to be waning year-on-year, so much so that we find it necessary to search for books and anecdotes online about life from half a century ago as a temporary reprieve from the present.

The most obvious suspect in our search for an explanation, is Nostalgia. But nostalgia is often frowned upon, particularly from an academic perspective. The reason for this is because it can easily be dismissed as nothing more than vacuous sentimentality, or as a longing for the return of lost youth and innocence. In support of this notion is the reality that when we were young, we weren’t burdened with adult responsibilities. Mortgages, rent, work, bills, taxes and parenthood didn’t feature prominently amongst our thoughts. It’s little surprise therefore, that things seemed less-complicated if you were a child in the 70s and 80s. That’s because they were, and in the absence of complication, our minds (particularly our imaginations) weren’t restricted by the demands of the Rat Race.

But to those of you who do think that a yearning for a return to the past is nothing more than the creaking cradle of nostalgia, I think you might be on to something, but not in the way you might expect because if you look the word up in a dictionary, beyond its primary definition you’ll find that Nostalgia has another meaning, which is that of the condition of, “Homesickness.”

Where is your ‘true’ home? Is it amongst the concrete, glass and steel of a modern town or city, or between the physical walls of the house you grew up in? Is it even in the physical world at all? For some of us, the answer is, No, and that our true home is in another place which is not of this material realm, and the entrance to it is not made of stone, wood, plastic nor microchips. It is made, of Imagination.

The main purpose of the Tales from the Time Chair site is to help remind you that, just like Fantasia in The Neverending Story, the world needs your memories and imagination to sustain it, and to prevent it succumbing to The Nothing.