Rose tinted retrospecatacles…

Sometimes I feel like I’m waiting for yesterday to come back.

Not one yesterday, but all of my yesterdays.

Somehow yesterday seems so much better than today and not as worrying as tomorrow. After all, you know what you are getting with yesterday with that lovely rose tint of retrospect surrounding it.

Rose tinted retrospectacles that’s what I want.

As a kid I remember watching ‘All Our Yesterdays’ on TV. I must have only five when those flickering newsreels appeared on our tiny black and white screen, pictures of our boys coming home to blighty on troop ships, fags in their mouths and whistling. Quite a trick really, smoking and whistling at the same time, like dodging bullets and not getting blown to pieces.

I remember watching tiny black and white doodlebugs stopping above the terraced roofs of London and white searchlights moving across the grey sky over a stark and grainy St. Paul’s, sand covered tanks and black bereted soldiers dusting themselves down in the Sahara.

Each programme looked at one wartime year and the newsreels from it, and I think I learnt more modern history in those twenty minute segments than ever I did at school in later years. Of course the war was a much closer thing back then, newsreels not yet an anachronism and still almost reportage.

I have an image of German soldiers goose-stepping in time, stop-start to the music of the Lambeth Waltz, cartoons from some newspaper or other and well known voices reading the captions. I remember my dad laughing.

My dad never missed it.

Somehow Granada TV seemed to take the misery and loss of that awful war and reinvent it as light entertainment, almost as comedy, colouring the old black and white footage with a thick coat of rose tint so that we could all slip on our retrospectacles and warm to the glow, telling ourselves it wasn’t so bad, when for most people it clearly was with death and separation, rationing and constant fear.

What a strange programme.

Maybe I don’t want those yesterdays after all. Perhaps I’ll take my retrospectacles off and be content with the colour of today or even the harsh black and white that tomorrow could be.

Perhaps it’s better that way.