After my time
On my currently rather obsessive television quiz, “Pointless”, the presenters have a habit of getting waggishly annoyed if a contestant comments that the subject of a question is “before my time”. They will point out that events such as one’s parents’ births essentially pre-date us, but we learn to remember when they happened. True up to a point, but they sometimes underestimate how much our generation has to do with the content of our general knowledge. For instance, I was astonished when presenter Alexander, whose own range of knowledge is awesome, failed to recognise Nikita Khruschev in a round of famous faces. It’s not that I have studied Soviet leaders or anything, just that the men of the Kremlin cast a long and dark shadow over my early years. And, you see, I am twenty years older than Alexander. Khruschev was before his time.
My friend Andy the other day circulated something he had received online which was a humorous guide to who is and who isn’t a ‘backnumber’- using the slang of my era for it. Perhaps ‘gammon’ might be an equivalent — but I wouldn’t dream of professing to know! I was always an old-fashioned member of my own generation, wearing ties later than most people did, and so on. There are photographs which make me wince. “Your sons and your daughters are beyond your command” Dylan sang in his first, protest song, phase. While I wasn’t a rebel in any ordinary sense; in fact, in some ways I fitted rather awkwardly into certain peer groups. But altogether I was no misfit. After all, I had a solid background, a very decent education, passionate interests and some terrific friends. Anyway, that’s the young Roger.
The old Roger fits many of the ‘backnumber’ tests. “Interestingly, ordering a Cappuccino is the number one sign that you are officially uncool, with 52% of young Brits agreeing only an old person would do this.” This is all after my time. I eventually learned not just to ask for ‘a coffee’. What I call ‘just a cup of coffee’ has to be specified as an Americano. As for tea (much more in my line and I have already sipped my way through my first cup of the day while writing this), I had to stop and think what the equivalent of ‘Americano’ is — after all, it’s ages since I’ve had a cup of tea that I didn’t brew myself, or one my wife had brewed. Is it ‘workman’s tea’. No, I realised it’s ‘English tea’.
I remember in the ‘eighties someone who was much more of a drinker than me laughing about how “we used to drink gin and tonic”. No one had told me before that this was by then a ‘backnumber indicator’. For all I know the pendulum has swung back to G-and-T. The pendulum is always swinging.
As I could have predicted, having a DVD collection roots you firmly in the past, in these days of streaming. Or a CD collection, of course. But this is only the latest development which has left me behind. I never bought a 78 record, except as a ‘retro’ item. I belonged, just, to the LP era. And very much to the world of ‘singles’ and pop chart ratings. The first record I owned individually was a 78, however, a present from my uncle. My first tape recorder was a reel-to-reel. Then cassettes came in, and I began to fear that record players would become unobtainable — in a world of built-in obsolescence, as they say. I undertook a huge programme of re-recording my LPs and LP sets on cassette — I have them all upstairs, all labelled, in a plastic unit of tape drawers. Things move on, and so often not as you expect. Music centres still routinely have a record deck. All the media co-exist. Except that we can’t conveniently play videos any longer, and I keep saying I’ll get rid of them all and make some shelf space.
Yes — a backnumber from the days when ‘wireless’ meant radio. Though I think I’m over-egging it now. I think people had switched to saying ‘radio’ by my youth. I think.
And, yes — our new television was a development too far for me, and just as predicted by the email Andy circulated, I have difficulty with the remote. And the world of Netflix, Blu-Ray and so on is a puzzlement to me (not to my wife). I keep trying. Well may Andy have titled his re-post “Ha!”
