When I was Your Age...

Nostalgia can be a saucy mistress, but every so often she removes the veil to reveal herself a buck-toothed, wart-ridden, grumpy old bitch.

Case in point, I recently purchased a 2003 Meatloaf album (Bat Out of Hell 2: Back into Hell, if you’re wondering) and a flood of ‘Good Times Gone’ exploded in my brain and dripped from my teary eyes (ah, the memories).

I remember braais in the garden at Nansen Road, the time I lost my virginity in a drunken encounter (very unsatisfactory for the other party… my apologies), my first job at a seedy bistro where I got profound satisfaction asking guys older than me for ID, all the while listening to the melodramatic tunes of the aforementioned Meatloaf.

What a wonderful experience!

On the other hand, a few years ago I found a copy of an old movie the bunch of us watched ad nauseum in my youth. I don’t remember the name (repressed, maybe) but it starred the Brando of B-grade – Rutger Hauer.

I’d remembered this as a great work of art – brilliant acting, massive action, thought-provoking dialogue and a plot tighter than the seating in a Cape Town taxi.

Alas, sometimes that mistress Nostalgia – as I mentioned earlier – doesn’t age well.

Take the ground-breaking ‘Terminator 2’ as another example. When the Bad Guy first walks through the bars to get Sarah Conner in the mental asylum, geeks in cinemas around the world drowned in their own four-eyed, fanboy jizz-tsunami.

Those FX haven’t held up and to look at it now you might wonder what all the excitement was about.

Books can be the same. So many novels that at the time changed my life by readjusting the way I saw the world, upon rereading come across as trite and obvious.

So the dilemma: Is it safe to go back?

I think it’s safer with music. No matter how plastic-poppy-poofty that music was, it’ll still bring back bitter or sweet or bittersweet times. Hell, even when I listen to Abba or Julio Iglesius I’m lulled into the arms of the farmward bound roadtrips of my youth.

Tv shows are the most dangerous. I remember catching an episode of Airwolf around fifteen years after its initial airing (no pun intended). I’d remembered a high-tech machine with formidable gadgets, and then realised it was just a cut-out of a helicopter and a second-hand motorbike helmet with a red dot on the visor.

I haven’t bothered with the A-Team of the Eighties. Even as a kid I thought it odd that no one ever died in the fiery car crashes; not even their hair was messed up.

But I suppose it’s worth the risk. I don’t mind the disappointment as much as I enjoy being catapulted dreamily back in time, whether those times were good or bad.

So no matter if Nostalgia has tight, milky thighs and a firm bosom today and a hairy chin and orange-peel arse tomorrow, I’ll let her in.