Ahh, nostalgia. I’m a big fan of nostalgia, of sitting in a dark room rocking back and forth, drowning in tear-stained photos of better days; days which will never be re-lived, days which stand out in stark tri-colour brilliance next to the grey, yellowing cardboard of tomorrow.
TOTALLY JUST JOKING!
I love nostalgia because it reminds me of how awesome my life is RIGHT NOW, and all the stupid shit that I used to do when I was young and lame and nowhere near as sophisticated, worldly and good-looking as I am today!
So let’s talk nostalgia.
HOT
Things for Sale
As a child, I used to hang out a lot with my sister and our friend Yaz, who was our neighbour, and she had a crazy dog called Coco who was huge and would push people over and nose them in the crotch, so usually when we hung out and didn’t want to be invaded in our Valleys of Shame, we would hang out at our house.
We would sit in our rooms and eat tubes of Chapstick, or rollerblade around our streets clinging onto telegraph poles and giving ourselves splinters. However, once every few months we would take part in a little ritual we liked to call ‘Things for Sale’. It was fairly self-explanatory – we’d find something to sell, set up a table outside our house with it, and when cars drove past, we’d chirp out, in unison-singsong, “Things for saaaa-ale!”. Sometimes their windows would be rolled up so we’d just sing it a bit louder, enunciating ’sale’ just the way Yaz had been taught to in Junior Vocals.
Once every hour or so, a car would stop for us out of pity, imagining that we were selling delicious fudge filled with beetle wings and hair, like most childrens’ cooking. They were mistaken however, since we were not really what you’d call ‘talented’ children who bake, but rather ‘enterprising children, but only in a stupid way’. Our sale table consisted of bald dolls, costume jewellery and PEELED TWIGS. In an hour of self-delusion we had decided that there was definitely a market for peeled twigs – after all, they’re pretty difficult (yet fun) to peel – and we were willing to cut out the middle man.
Usually our customers didn’t actually have any money, or remembered they totally had to go home immediately for some urgent reason, so we didn’t really sell much at all. I always thought it strange that people driving their Mercedes’ through Bellevue Hill didn’t have any money on them. But now that I’m old and mature and better-looking, I’ve realised that rich people pay for stuff in other ways, like eye-brow gestures and under-table hand shakes and throwing other peoples’ enemies off The Gap.
NOT
Being a shy child
OK, I’m about to share something with you that may choke me up a little. It’s vested with a rich tapestry of childhood emotions, and it meant a lot to me at the time, so I kinda wish you’d just show me a bit of respect for once.
I want to talk about the time that I swapped one half of my supersonic yo-yo with my friend’s other half of her supersonic yo-yo.
If you went to school when I did, (back when there were dinosaurs, right? *Old-person high-five*!), you’d remember when something called Yo-yos with Brains came out. They were intricately detailed and it was always the fucking losers who knew everything about their makeup. How the little black bands inside the yo-yo could be added or removed to create a more satisfyingly bouncy effect. Or you could be like the other kids who just threw them around the classroom to piss off Mr Cobbin.
Anyway, I was playing at my friend’s house with our yo-yos. For the sake of anonymity (SHE TOTALLY GOES HERE!) let’s call her Gertrude. I had a shiny sharp red yo-yo that my Dad had bought me that weekend, a present for being good or having remembered to feed the dog that month or something. Gertrude had a blue brain yo-yo, and I imagine it would have been just as shiny and sharp as mine was when she had bought it TEN MILLION YEARS BEFORE ME because I was always the last kid to jump onto any bandwagon of cool toys, unless the toy required some physical co-ordination, in which case I’d never jump on that bandwagon; I’d just trip over it and break my coccyx.
So Gertrude proposed something, which was rare in itself, as she was a quiet and sober child, a bit like me except I was constantly drunk. She said that if we were indeed BFFE, as we were a little bit, (even though at that time of our lives it was cool to have at least three BFFEs), that we should swap a side of our yo-yo with each other’s.
Reluctantly, I unscrewed half of my shiny red sharp pristine yo-yo and thrust it into Gertrude’s hand, and we made the swap. And I have regretted that decision TO THIS PRESENT DAY, because never again was I able to properly ‘walk the dog’ or ‘rock the cradle’ or ‘just roll it up and down’, the only trick I could actually do, and purely because my yo-yo had an inbuilt brain which did it for me.
