Annie Proulx’s tragic short story Brokeback Mountain reaches its devastating conclusion when Ennis discovers an old shirt of his, purloined but hitherto presumed lost, hanging under one belonging to Jack, his murdered lover – ‘The pair like two skins, one inside the other, two in one.’ He then buries his face in them and nuzzles the cloth, hoping it will still smell like Jack. But crucially it no longer does.
That’s the awful, excruciating thing about trying to awaken the past: we can’t ever quite make those limbic associations last more than a second or two, though we strain every nasalis in our futile attempts to do so. Like a butterfly or a whiff of perfume, the memories simply hover in the air, just out of grasp, easily stirred but only too quick to vanish the moment we go to pounce. Vamoosh! And they’re off, until the next time. Meanwhile, we cling to the material artefacts – a chipped plate, a kitschy glass ornament, a Picquot Ware teaset – with which we, like latter-day necromantics, strive to summon whatever ghosts. Such is the power of nostalgia, which the American professor Michael Kammen once called ‘history without guilt’, because our reminiscences tend to be idealised and unreliable.
And so it is with me and my 45-year-old bedsheet. Forty-five years old and counting actually! That’s more geriatric than some of Princess Anne’s frocks. It is just a sheet, so not exactly on a par with Proulx’s cowboy shirts or one of Proust’s madeleines poetically speaking, but it’s perfectly nice nonetheless – a groovy burnt orange verging on paprika, with a yellow piped detail along the top and the label Yves Saint Laurent for JP Stevens & Co – and sort of precious, albeit bathetically so, not least because it’s easy-iron polycotton. Plus, my two dogs now sleep on it. Unlike the memories attached to it, this thing, this nostalgic totem, was clearly built to last, having survived countless hot washes and house moves.
My mother bought it for my bedroom some time at the end of the 1970s on a giddy account-card-fuelled shopping spree in George Henry Lee, the John Lewis Partnership’s former department store in Liverpool, which back then was all bottle-green velvet carpet underfoot, hosiery displayed on fanned-out fibreglass legs, and mannequins parading around the restaurant modelling outfits available from ladies’ separates. ‘It’s an Yves Saint Laurent, you know,’ said my mother, as if the couturier himself had hand-stitched the seams in his white work coat, a cigarette balanced between his lips.
Every time I wash it I feel that potent, painful happy-sad yearning for what once was – or rather a room or mood that once was. If I could just inhale deeply enough, I think, I will reach beyond the smell of Aldi’s ‘Clear Skies’ fabric conditioner and lock in the spirit of that space and the innocent little boy who occupied it. There will be a rust-coloured feature wall once more, a tubular chrome sling chair with brown-cord loose cushions, a faux flokati rug, bought with my pocket money at a market, which was so synthetic it gave off static. Ed ‘Stewpot’ Stewart will be on the radio and I will be rearranging my bedroom furniture, ignoring all injunctions to go and get some fresh air like a normal child. But no, it fades as fast as it hove hazily, tantalisingly, into view.
‘What tense are you living in?’ a friend who is a therapist says she asks certain clients preoccupied with the past. I get that impulse, as you’ll have gathered from my odd attachment to ancient bedlinen. And so too do a great many others, going by the epidemic of nostalgia-laced interiors with their scalloped lampshades, cutesy café curtains and twee gingham bunting strung across the front of kitchen dressers. In an uncertain world torn by strife, the past feels invitingly safe, and so we can perhaps be forgiven for indulging in a little avoidant regression by visiting it on occasion.
Anyway, whoever quipped that nostalgia ain’t what it used to be clearly expired long before the advent of cottagecore and (yawn) Mid-century Modern, to name but two tiresome fixations symptomatic of this desire to escape. Nostalgia, contrary to that joke, has never looked more robust nor so reassuring, thank you very much. Don’t believe me? Search for ‘vintage’ on Ebay and you’ll see something like 43 million return entries, while the word ‘retro’ garners more than five million and ‘mid-century’ 460,000-plus – indicative, surely, of just how backward-looking we’ve become collectively. If religion was once the opium of the people, nostalgia itself is now a powerful substitute narcotic, especially in the realms of interiors and taste.
But who am I to judge, a man who trawls that very website for Pat Albeck fabrics, Dartington glass and anything else that might evoke my personal history and make it tangible? So I’ve no objection at all to nostalgia, which is as human an emotion as anger and envy, though more nuanced and complex; but I do take issue with it being monetised and sold back to us, wrapped up as something authentic and soulful for profit’s sake. I blame whoever first decided to heavily market hygge, which, as far as I can tell, simply means throwing a sheepskin over the back of a rocking chair and lighting a few overpriced candles. Ditto hiraeth, a beautiful Welsh word meaning wistfulness and longing for the past, but now merely an excuse to flog tapestry blankets and the mere idea of nostalgia. Sometimes, just sometimes, you long for a time when we lived in the present – a burnt-orange YSL sheet optional – but then when have we humans ever really managed to do that?
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