…and I am listening to “The First Noel”. A synthesised and re-arranged version of the carol with accompanying flourishes from the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. A version better known as the theme tune from “The Box Of Delights” (see Christmas Blog Seven). Before that I listened to the theme from The Tripods, and then the theme from The Changes. All courtesy of TV Cream, incidentally.
Blog Seven this month is a blog about childhood. Mine, yours, other peoples, the idea of it. And about the idea of adults revisiting childhood things – is it a good thing to do, justifiable, or just sad? eBay, MP3s, .pdfs – the digitisation of memory has opened up parts of the lost and forgotten countries of childhood for anyone who cares to revisit them. On the one hand this means nostalgic meandering, on the other it can result in sharp and delightful criticism and insight.
And of course the parts of childhood that can be recreated are the public aspects – the TV shows, the books, the comics. Does this homogenise memory, repressing more personal elements of childhood? To what extent is my indulgence in things like old TV themes creating a smoothed-out false-memory version of childhood – I never even watched The Changes, for instance.
Also, not all childhoods are happy, and not all are prosperous. The nostalgia industry creates a rolling ‘perfect childhood’ – changing with each generational microshift but always rooted in trauma-free, comfortably-off experience.
Will Blog Seven address any of this stuff in more depth? Maybe not, but even if half the Internet seems to be rooted in it, there are intriguing things about childhood yet to be said.