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Tell your husband everything, except when you have a crush on a German cello player you found on the internet

It's been a bit of a week for nostalgia. 

Instance of Nostalgia #1

I was perusing the internet as I am wont to do of an evening (or morning, afternoon, etc) and came across a reference to Jeannie C. Riley. It took a while for me to remember why this name meant anything to me, but when I did, whoo boy did it bring back memories. 

When I was about twelve, mum went back to teaching. This meant that I sometimes got home from school before she got home from work, which meant I could watch  afternoon TV, which was a very big deal. Not to go all Angela's Ashes on you, but we were really not allowed to watch TV (or eat refined sugar, or have a Cabbage Patch Doll, not that I'm still bitter) and aside from a few pre-approved educational bits and bobs, and, for some reason, Australia's Funniest Home Videos and Hey, Hey it's Saturday on weekends, I really didn't have much exposure to the wonder of the modern age.

As a result, I am the perfect example of why you should expose your children to advertising under controlled circumstances from a young age. With my trusting little mind  and the lack of supervision, I was totally unprepared for the lure of those thirty second inducements to buy, buy, buy, and there was one ad on high rotation which managed to totally brainwash me. It may even possibly have been one of those Demtel* ads, and it was for a box-set of cassettes (!) called Hits of the Sixties. 

As commanded by my infomercial overlords, I asked my parents for this box-set every. damn. day. And eventually they caved and bought it for me. The collection actually was quite wonderful and though I've long since thrown away the cassettes, I remember the music so clearly. I can still remember every word of Needles and Pins. Of Itchycoo Park. Of Summer Afternoon. While my contemporaries were discovering Nirvana, U2 and REM, I was obsessing over Downtown and Summer in the City. Because I am a nerd.

But there was one song in particular that set my twelve year old soul on fire. And of all things, it was Harper Valley PTA.

I still don't really know why. I mean, that voice still sends shivers down my spine. And the story of the song - spunky woman takes on a bunch of mealy-mouthed hypocrites and gives them all the finger - still makes me cheer. But I couldn't for a second tell you why I liked this particular song so very much. Anyway, time went on, I got a bit older and started to feel embarrassed by my humiliatingly unhip music tastes, and threw away all my tapes, and I hadn't thought about that song in (god, now I feel old) fifteen years. But a passing reference in a blog post brought it all flooding back and I've been happily belting out this and other Hits of the Sixties for the last few days, much to the dismay of my family, dog and neighbours.

Instance of Nostalgia #2

More internet perusing, this time for work related reasons. I was cruising about the websites of Sydney-based chamber music ensembles for reasons too tedious to go into when, on impulse, I opened the 'About Us' section of a certain group's site. The first profile that popped up made me squeal like a teenage girl at a (whoever it is that the young people like - I think I've established that I am not your go-to music buff) concert, which attracted the attention of various people in my office who came over to find out what all the squealing was about. The photo was of someone I used to know very slightly, and who I used to have a massive, all-consuming, unrequited crush on. I hadn't thought about him in  years, and yet here he was on my computer screen, gazing at me soulfully in a way he had never done in real life, as much as I'd wanted him to once upon a time. I found myself trying to explain to my colleagues why I had been so swoony over this particular chap, who these days is really not my type. But the era of this crush  was back when I was just out of high school and living away from home for the first time, and seeing this person's picture reminded me so strongly of that time in my life that it took me a good minute to talk myself out of contacting him just out of a sense of wanting to be reminded of who I was then, because so much has changed since then. It's just as well I didn't email him as he would have no idea who I am, but just being reminded of who I was at eighteen was completely terrifying and also strangely comforting, especially now that I'm hurtling towards thirty.

Instance of Nostalgia #3

The other night at dinner, apropos of the ongoing crisis in Japan, we started talking about Children of the Dust, a book we'd all had to read at some point in high school. Holy crap. Turns out I've been suppressing a lot of what this nightmarish piece of apocalypse porn did to me as an impressionable pre-teen, because as soon as the topic came up the horrors of the book came flooding back. For those of you who have not had the pleasure of reading it, Children of the Dust is a novel for children aged 9-12 about the aftermath of nuclear war. Included in its rose-tinted pages are the following; lavish descriptions of radiation sickness, multiple lingering and messy deaths, the "marriage" of a teenage girl to a much older man and the death of all of the babies she conceives with him, and just to round things out, mutants, mutants, and more mutants. God only knows why they thought this was appropriate reading for a bunch of eleven year olds. At about the same time we were also required to read Z for Zacharia and When the Wind Blows, also to attend a screening of the film version of Children of the Dust.
 

It's funny how intense my reaction to the discussion of the book was. It was a physical reaction as much as anything else; butterflies in my stomach, cold hands, just as it was when I read it more than half  a lifetime ago. As a child I was very 'sensitive' ('highly strung' how my mother tactfully describes it) and given to frequent bouts of extreme anxiety during which I would get myself so wound up that I brought debilitating migraines on myself (and still do, though much less often these day), and these books tore a hole in my fragile little psyche. I actually remember lying in bed one night sobbing uncontrollably at the thought that this could really happen. I wasn't scared for myself so much as terrified that everyone and everything I knew and loved could be taken away so easily. Ah, for the days when you could inflict this sort of thing on a child without having to have counsellors on hand.


So all in all, it's been a bit of a backwards looking week. I really didn't mean to write this much, I just got swept up in reminiscence. Now I'm off to watch The Neverending Story in my bike-pants-with-matching -t-shirt-and-scrunchie outfit while I play with my pogs. And Fido Dido, remember that? 

 

*BTW, did you know that this company still exists? The fact that it marches on, even in the face of the global financial crisis tempts me to label it the cockroach of finance. It will never die. Even after humanity has been mercifully extinguished, Demtel ads will continue to exhort whatever life remains on the face of the earth to purchase steam mops.

I am wrong about something and also a massive nerd about something

I take it all back. I love the London Science Museum. We'd been there a few weeks ago and I'd sneered all over it, but I later discovered that the Science Museum contains something very special. The working model of Charles Babbage's Difference Engine. Oooh. So we went back so that I could have a good nerdy perv at it.

Despite the fact that I am as hopeless with maths and science as it is possible to be without actually being in a coma, I am a massive fan of the concept of maths and science in general, and a massive fan Charles Babbage in particular. He's amazing. He spent almost all of his life (1791-1871) trying to construct a machine capable of performing accurate, complicated arithmetic, and though he came close several times, he never managed to make it work. In 1991 a working model was finally made from his plans, but it was a huge job even with the more advanced technology the engineers had available then. He's often called the father of computers, but this isn't quite accurate as what he was doing didn't really prefigure modern computers in any significant way. I mean, it did a bit, but it's a bit of a stretch to call him the 'father of modern computers'. 

But this isn't the reason that I love the guy. On a superficial level I love him because he called his machines the Difference Engine and the Analytical Engine, which is brilliantly steampunk, but more than that I love him because he was such an interesting guy. He was acquainted with Darwin and Dickens, and was sought after for all sorts of fancy parties, in spite of his various eccentricities. He could be a bloody minded crank - he almost wasn't awarded his degree because he refused to apologise for making remarks that were thought to be blasphemous during a debate. He could also he a crotchety old bastard - he hated street musicians, and in his later life he launched a one man campaign to have them banned. He once wrote to Alfred Lord Tennyson to correct his poetry;

In your otherwise beautiful poem, one verse reads,

Every moment dies a man,

Every moment one is born.

 ... If this were true, the population of the world would be at a standstill. In truth, the rate of birth is slightly in excess of that of death. I would suggest [that the next version of your poem should read]:

Every moment dies a man,

Every moment 1 1/16 is born.

Strictly speaking, the actual figure is so long I cannot get it into a line, but I believe the figure 1 1/16 will be sufficiently accurate for poetry.

He was a proper mad genius. I mean, how many other Victorian-era scientists can boast of being the inspiration for a way cool web comic?

So I was very excited about seeing the Difference Engine. And it was pretty good.

But guess what else they had at the museum? His notebooks!

And his brain!

I was thrilled. I lingered for quite a long time over the case with the notebooks in it, along with a middle aged chap with a notebook. Neither of us said anything, but we exchanged looks that said it all; 'Babbage, eh?' But in a reverent sort of way. When we finally moved away from the case,a museum employee swooped in behind us, gave the case a little squirt with Windex and a wipe with some paper towels, then looked at us reprovingly. I didn't think I'd even touched the case, but apparently we had managed to displease him by breathing on the glass too messily. 

But officious glass polishers couldn't get us down. We weren't finished with the Science Museum yet, not by a long shot. 

We wanted to see the History of Medicine exhibit. Or, as we came to call it, the History of Human Suffering exhibit. It was pretty gruesome. But also fascinating. Doctors and surgeons in the past often did more harm than good (leeches and bleeding, for e.g.), but it was surprising to see how much they were actually capable of. For example, I wasn't aware that they had such things as prosthetic limbs and glass eyes. I also didn't realise that they were actually able to do things like bone setting and removal of bullets, and all sorts of surgery that, while it must have been pretty grim, must also have saved the odd life here and there.

The museum also had these on display;

Neat!

Lest you think that I'm some kind of weirdo obsessed with bits of famous dead people and trepanning, let me leave you now with some pictures of old-timey calculators. If these names don't make you smile, you're probably much better at parties than I am. 

The Adometer and Cordingly's Computometer

Totalisateur

The Arithmometer