3 May

“It’s like England was 50 years ago.” This is a phrase often used these days to describe our rural idylls, to justify our life-changes, the relocations and ruptures and new starts and beginning-all-overs. You here it said about all those counties on the margins of being fashionable, and sometimes it’s even said about those chi-chi little places that have in reality changed beyond all recognition. It’s said about France, about Ireland, Scotland, Wales, New Zealand. I have no quarrel with the phrase, I’ve used it myself. There IS something quintessentially 1950’s-ish about East Anglia. The trouble is though is that when someone trots it out, I’m never altogether sure what they mean. It’s one of those phrases open to endless meaning and endless interpretation. I have stood in paralysing discomfiture listening to one person rant about the lack of immigrants fifty years ago, or another nod with satisfaction at the memory of the all-white southern English faces around him. I have raised a quizzical eyebrow or stole a surreptitious glance at R when someone has launched into a diatribe about how the summers were hotter then (are you sure about that?), or a reminiscence about the total lack of crime. To some people, fifty years ago means a perpetual rendition of Knees Up Mother Brown in the pub and communal meals on a crime-free (and ethnically pure) village green. I think the majority of us who use the term, however, speak from a broadly similar place; we look back to a slower, calmer way of life, one where we can live simply but live well, hopefully losing some of frenetic elements of two fast-paced careers that are required just to finance a shoe-cupboard in an urban sprawl. We welcome a sense of community, a sense of belonging, a sense of living more closely with nature. Whether or not that time ever actually existed is immaterial; nostalgia is rarely fuelled by facts, after all, but by feelings.

I am all for nostalgia, and all for a slower pace of life, but I am relentlessly twenty-first century with regard to my food and my clothes. I don’t want ‘gastro’ in my local pub necessarily, any more than I want asian-fusion from the local Chinese; I’m rarely happier than when faced with a simple ploughmans or a plate of ham egg and chips. Neither am I a fashionista any more (if I ever was) – I was still in my bootcuts long after the yummy mummies had progressed to skinny fits and boy jeans. But I am grateful that we don’t have to buy olive oil from the chemists any more, and I like a restaurant to give a passing nod to parmesan that doesn’t come in a plastic container, just as I like to know I can get a linen shirt or a pair of kitten heels within a fifty-mile radius, if the mood takes me. One of our neighbours, a man possessed of a quavering voice and a stooping gait, but possessed also of a steely determination to get his point across, blithely ignoring whether or not you have the time to listen, once advised my husband on where he should buy his clothes. We visited the shop once, on a whim when we were in town, and immediately recognised that it was one of those places that either makes you want to laugh, or depresses you, depending on your mood. It did both to me; I giggled at it’s total lack of style and total lack of any stock that you would want to buy, but something about it’s musty interior, the piles of polyester trousers and grey plastic slip-on shoes made me sad too. I’m not being a snob, far from it – the stuff wasn’t even particularly cheap. It was just redolent of an earlier, shabbier time – no retro finds here. It made the Grace Brothers store in ‘Are You Being Served?’ look like the Conran shop.

Our local town is set for development and we will shortly be the recipients of a brand new retail development. Despite the instinctive flutter of excitement as I think about lovely posh shops, I have no doubt the costs will spiral out of control and we will be left with one of those windswept and soulless malls that sit so uncomfortably in the English countryside. The store I mentioned above is set for closure, no doubt along with many other high street shops. Suddenly, I want it to be fifty years ago.