I must have been 12 years old when Jaws came out.
First year in the big school. I remember going to see it with my dad in the Palladium Cinema, Coleraine. [1] I took one of my Action Man pistols [2] for security. I can't remember now if I ever actually pointed it at the screen. But it felt good to have it in my pocket just in case.
That's almost 40 years ago. I was taken aback when I read somewhere this week that this was an anniversary year for Steven Spielberg's film. 40 years. Lord, half a lifetime ago.
The children's author Katherine Rundell wrote not so long ago that "the 1970s and 1980s are as much history as the 1500s". But then she was born in 1987. For those of us who were aware of our position in the temporal slipstream back then it sometimes feels like a time that's not so far away; like a set of keys that have just slipped down the back of the settee. If we reach down far enough we can maybe just brush past them with our fingers.
As you get older the past becomes more interesting to you. It's not just because we're remembering those we might have loved and lost. It's the sense that all our yesterdays - however blurred or sepia-tinted - are still known to us, can be reclaimed in some way if we think back hard enough.
All the usual stuff takes me back. Music, movies, Vesta ready meal packaging. I've been reading Original Rockers, the memoir of the music writer Richard King about his days working in a Bristol indie record store. It has made me recall the record stores I used to visit. Good Vibrations in Belfast once or twice a year and, when I moved to Stirling, The Other Record shop in the old Arcade once or twice a week. [3]
And that is the danger of it. You get caught up in nostalgia and, let's be honest, nostalgia lies to you. It paints a picture obscured by sentiment and covered in a patina of gloss. I could paint a picture of my indie record store haunting past but it would have to be painted in murky oils. Because while I went into The Other Record shop I probably bought as much, if not more, in Woolworths. (That's certainly where I picked up Orange Juice's Texas Fever and Prefab Sprout's Swoon on the same day. Ah the joy of student grants. Remember those?)
Sorry, where was I? Nostalgia. Bad thing. Right. But the temptation's there. To pretend that time can go both ways, even though we know it can't.
Anyway, the good news is I don't need to take a toy gun to the pictures any more. I can just hold on to J's arm during the scary bits.
[1] Itself gone 25 years now. It closed a week after the first multiplex opened in the town.
[2] A luger possibly.
[3] I did go into Listen in Sauchiehall Street once, maybe twice, way back when but it felt too dark and I hadn't got my toy luger with me.
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