zhisou

Funny how things from our childhood take on a fond fuzzy glow of nostalgic charm.  As seen through the spectacles of jaded middle-age, the simplest of our youthful jinx and nonsense become elevated into something special and poignant.

It´s the “jumpers as goalposts” syndrome.   Playing football in a car park with a tennis ball as a kid seems so much more fun than a proper game with proper boots and a proper goal frame.

I thought of this today when I remembered how we used to say “don´t look at me in that tone of voice” then laugh like children.  I laughed, but not like a child.  I tried to work it into conversation, and partially succeeded, but it wasn´t the same.

Then I got wistful.  I smiled at the memory of the purple Mini my Mother once owned.  I remembered my Father had briefly had a small cabin boat, and – less briefly – a pair of hearty sideburns, though they were called sideboards in those days.  I even had a little chuckle over the time I got mumps and couldn´t eat a Cadbury´s Creme Egg.

I suppose we add value to memories of the past on the principle that, if it didn´t kill you the first time, it´s probably okay to think fondly of it.   This is flawed logic of course, but evolution is not a precise mistress.  Like that email that did the rounds a few years ago, it spoke of the good old days before the health and safety lot put childproof locks on our bleach and child car seats in the backs of our cars.  “We never had any of this mollycoddling” ran the logic, “and we survived!” – why yes, of course you did, or you wouldn´t be reading the damn email.

Those that didn´t make it – those that drank the bleach or shot through the windscreen – aren´t around to make the other side of the argument.

Or maybe it´s just about hope – maybe our heads were forever full of hope as a kid – and as you get older that hope seeps out and is slowly replaced with a heavy knowledge that that hope was just a hollow innocence.

No amount of posh football boots and proper balls were going to change that.  It was never about the jumpers anyway.