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"The out-of-date returns in due course as the picturesque."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, all of them have at some point employed 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 the most senior generation in the world, which given the amount of change you have experienced 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 of all, you know that those two worlds are not the same, and that something important has changed as a result.

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 is 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 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 a similar 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, constructing dens, reading, completing 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).

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 far 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 the responsibilities of those of adults. 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 distracted nor restricted by the demands of the Rat Race.

But for those of you who do think that your yearning for a return to the past is nothing more than the distant echo of the creaking cradle of nostalgia, I politely request that you regress for a moment to the old-fashioned method of looking the word up in a dictionary, because when you do so, 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 the modern world, 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. This is the niggling in the back of your mind which will not go away. Technological progress has without doubt transformed the world into a far more connected, convenient and comfortable place. You wouldn’t be reading these words were it not the case. But has this progress come at a price?

When was the last time you truly used your imagination? In the 1970s and 80s, the imagination was a tool we used on a daily basis, in some cases for our very survival. But so much of what we used to use it for is now taken care of by our technological devices, that an argument could be made that perhaps we no longer need the faculty which was literally responsible for creating those devices in the first place. Could we really live in a world which didn't require imagination?

This site implores you to dismiss any such notion with every aspect of your being. Your true home is still there, but because it is formed of imagination, it needs imagination to sustain it, just like Fantasia in The Neverending Story. It is within your power to prevent Fantasia succumbing to The Nothing.

I hope this site helps you with that a little.