Nostalgia

Barnsley. The final frontier. To boldly go where no man or woman has gone before and remained sober. I’ve been four times in the past seven weeks. Don’t judge me.

I’ve rented a storage unit to store some stuff – cripes this is riveting – in a tatty warehouse on a tatty trading estate in a tatty part of town. It’s convenient and functional, so job done. Several times a day I’ve driven to the warehouse in my Honda Jazz – the little car that thinks it’s a large Tardis – unloaded the boot and trollied several packed boxes up the ramp, down the corridor and into the unit. Repeat X3 until car is empty.

One day was different. When I opened the door to collect the trolley, I could hear the most beautiful organ music. Evocative. Soaring. Not a church organ but an Art Deco theatre organ. I could tell it was ‘live’ and not a recording by the timbre oozing through the buildings’ pores and massaging its sinews. Dad would have loved it. I welled up. Pulling myself together, I finished stacking the boxes, locked the unit and wandered into the bowels of the warehouse, following the yellow brick road of promise. Through double doors, I saw the back of a white-haired gentleman sitting at a stunning white organ with layers of keyboards and an oversupply of stops. He was playing his heart out. I crept forward so as not to disturb him and found myself on a dancefloor surrounded by tables and plush dining chairs, tablecloths and napkins.

“Can I ’elp yer, Flower?”

A second elderly gent had materialised and rumbled my trespassing.

“I ’ope yer don’t mind,” I said, trying to sound local, “I couldn’t believe the music I was hearing so had to investigate.”

And he was off. Chatting that is, not careering around Doncaster Racecourse. I had stepped back in time, he explained, “to the nostalgic sight and sound of the cinema organ … A living, breathing musical giant.” Built in 1934, this instrument was "one of the largest and finest examples of its kind in the whole of the United Kingdom." Over 1,200 pipes from a few inches long to over 16 feet tall combined with drums, cymbals and other percussion instruments, “all at the fingertips of the country’s finest cinema organists … the music includes marches, sweet ballads, film themes, showtunes and big band favourites.”

The organ is the focal attraction for lunchtime recitals and afternoon tea dances and can be hired for private practice. Later that week, while offloading another pile of boxes, the weekly tea-dance was about to commence. Throngs of elderly ladies and gentlemen, resplendent in their Sunday best even though it was a Wednesday, rolled up in their cars and taxis. Had they been heading into a bespoke cinema or theatre, say, then the scene would not have looked incongruous, but the warehouse-location felt a bit odd to me, obviously not to them. The music had summoned them to relive ‘This England’, long remembered, never to be forgotten as long as events like this, places like this, people like this fan the flames of halcyon days.

Was 1930s’ Blighty really worth remembering? After all, there was economic gloom, endemic inequality, industrial pollution, dodgy working practices, war, the Empire in decline... One of the frequent accusations fired at we the people who voted for Brexit is that we want Britain to return to something that never existed. Britain was never that prosperous or enlightened or morally upstanding or happy. Brexiteers are nostalgic for an idyll not a reality. Apparently.

Actually. Brexiteers are no more guilty of viewing our history through rose-tinted spectacles than remainers/rejoiners are guilty of a glass-half-empty mindset when it comes to Blighty, and a glass-half-full for everywhere else.

Brexiteers and (including?) those happy, nostalgic organ fans are sensitive to Blighty’s imperfect past, but also have a soft spot for the good bits. Perhaps the good are remembered or imagined disproportionately fondly because they made up for or distracted from the bad. If there had been fewer bad things going on, the good might not have been appreciated as much and remembered now with such rosy tints.

I left the Barnsley ravers to their nostalgic idyll, to their patriotism, optimism and good humour, the organ pulling at my heartstrings, the heavy boxes having done for my hamstrings. I thought of the second elderly gent, who called me “Flower” and steered me on an impromptu tour with his hand on the small of my back. Wouldn’t he have got an earful, if not a police-complaint, from the wrong person, someone ignorant of the Yorkshire way and in thrall to the woke culture of suspicion, intolerance and self-righteousness. Whatever 1930s’ Blighty was really like, it had to be better than woke.