Back in the day: reminiscing about spam, bubblegum and bakelite phones

When I was younger, I used to move house a lot.

I realised that I had grown older, and lived in the same place for a while, when I started to refer to pubs, cafes and shops by the name of their owner, rather than the title of the business.

Now that I’ve been around even longer, I often call local stores by the name of their previous owner – or even the one before that.

I’ve also noticed that I give directions with reference to places that aren’t there anymore: e.g. “Turn left at that big building that used to be a theatre. Until they knocked the street down.”

It’s just that things don’t seem to change in my mind as quickly as they do in the outside world – although sometimes, I’m probably refusing to acknowledge that they’ve altered at all, because I liked them better the way they were before.

Progress is a great thing, of course – without it, we wouldn’t have email newsletters, air fryers or Double Big Macs, and we’d all still be living in houses with patterned wallpaper, pebbledash driveways and lava lamps.

But I can’t help but feel as if some things of value have been lost since my youth – and even since my early middle-age.

I miss Bakelite phones, for example, mostly because you didn’t (and couldn’t) carry them with you wherever you went. They were used for, well… making phone calls – which is perhaps the only thing that my kids don’t regularly do with their phones.

I don’t even have a landline anymore, but every now and then I ring an older person at home and they answer by reciting the number I have just called (“Bangalow Bottom, double-six-oh-four”).

I’m not sure why they do this, as surely the number you have dialled is the one thing in the world that they could be certain you’d already know. But then, strangers regularly greet me in the street with, “You’re Mark Dapin!” – as if this were somehow news to me.

In the old days, you sometimes used to get a few accidental wrong numbers on your Bakelite phone. That doesn’t seem to happen much anymore – these days, it’s just spam.

And sure, I find spam infuriating, but I’d rather have it on my phone than on my plate.

Modern life has many blessings, but some of them are mixed.

Don’t get me wrong: I love Spotify. I can’t think of a single recent invention that has brought me more pleasure. But I miss records. I miss them as objects. I miss lyric sheets, sleeve notes and album-cover art.

I miss record shops, too. I know there are still a few around, but they cater to hobbyists, obsessives and retro-fetishists, and tend to be overstocked with new death-metal releases rather than remaindered copies of early Bee Gees albums. I’d love to buy records again (although there wouldn’t be much point, as it’s more than 40 years since I owned a record player).

Record players, like racing bikes, used to come with three speeds: 33 revolutions per minute (rpm) for LPs; 45 rpm for singles; and 78 rpm for, er, 78s.

This meant you could play most records faster than intended, except for 78s, which you could only play slower. Playing stuff at the wrong speed died off with CDs but seems to be experiencing a renaissance at the moment, with half the charts (although they’re not really the charts, of course) comprising songs speeded up by record producers: in the old days, we didn’t need producers, we made our own entertainment.

I miss corks in wine bottles.

Although they were fiddly and annoying and, apparently, pointless, they made opening a wine bottle seem like an occasion (albeit, a very regular occasion in my house). Now that sense of something special is reserved for champagne, but perhaps that’s how it should be.

Not so long ago, weekend newspapers were something to behold – vast, fat (or, rather, “living with obesity”) and full of useful information, and useless columns written by people like me.

Like uncorking a bottle of wine, unfolding the Saturday paper used to be an occasion.

Now it’s barely more exciting than opening the weekly real-estate free sheet that which gets pushed through my letterbox like a note from an angry neighbour.

On a different note (get it?), I don’t understand why the big cinemas don’t display the names of the movies on show anymore, and I find it sad that they no longer advertise new releases with a case of black-and-white “stills” from scenes that didn’t appear in the film anyway and seem to be re-enacted by dress-shop dummies.

When I was a kid, I used to spend hours (well, minutes, maybe) staring at the stills outside the movies on slow Sunday afternoons. I even collected them, briefly.

I wonder what happened to my collection.

It’d make me smile to see a bubble-gum machine again. Not only do I quite like bubble-gum (although I couldn’t say when I last chewed a piece), I used to relish the frisson of not knowing whether my favourite flavour (or, more accurately, colour) of gum would be the one to roll into the mouth of the dispenser.

Mind you, modern life provides that same element of chance through online shopping, when I might order a kilo of Granny Smiths only to find the apples substituted for a“similar product” such as a Nerf gun or a prosthetic limb.

So, there’re a few good things that have gone ...

... but many more that I don't miss at all, such as:

- everybody (especially me) smoking cigarettes all the time

- rubbish dinners served in pubs

- cars breaking down on the road

- shops closing at the weekend

- casual conversational racism (see also homicidal homophobia and wolf-whistling sexism)

- people who didn’t pick up their dog’s turds

- unnerving strippergrams in saloon bars

- indescribably bad TV shows

... and older people going on and on about how much better things used to be back when they were young.