Nostalgia for an Age Yet to Come

Continued from Fuck The Millennium

The Future Never Happened II: Nostalgia for an Age Yet to Come

Two.

Growing up I supposed that it was only possible to fear the future if
you valued the past, the present merely being a point between the two.
Growing up and looking around me, what was there for me to cherish?
From where I stood older wasn't necessarily better, there never was a
golden age to look back to. Rich people always seemed to see the past
as somehow more civilised, more ordered, more stable than the way
things were now. For me, walking around the red brick terraces of the
old estates, some houses burnt out, carbon like black crayon on brick,
metal boxes screwed over windows and doors as if to keep something in
not someone out, this is what the past was. Empty streets, broken glass
like diamonds in the road, rubbish, the blackened footprints of fires
in corners, piles of bricks and mortar where a backyard wall had fallen
over, a broken roof with latts and beams showing like a the ribs of a
dead thing picked at by crows. The past seemed to be relentless decay
without renewal, or at least it did in Newcastle.

I knew somehow things weren't right. A wish to change the present has
one of two desires. Either the wish to make things as they once were or
the wish to make them into what they might be. A person only wishes for
change when they are aware that a situation has not always been the way
it is and it does not have to be so in the future.

The feeling that I've had all of my life can only be defined as a
nostalgia for a future that never happened. I gave the example of the
Millennium because I think that's when everyone felt a touch of that
big, empty disappointment, the black knowledge that out of everything
that could have happened, very little had, and certainly not to
them.

We'd always felt that someday the future would arrive and we'd be a
part of it. One day, we `would open the curtains in the morning and be
suddenly looking out at the world of The Future, the previous day
consigned to the past. One day the future would kind of just get here,
and everything would be different.

When I was a kid the year two thousand seemed distant enough that all
the things I hoped for still had a chance of happening. 2000AD was the
point at which the future would start. It was also the name of my
favourite comic.

Continued in "Me Mam and Dad", The Future Never Happened Chapter
III