Just took Coast of Utopia down from the shelf. May we live up to it.

🤣 well it was that it Ballykissangel and you might just be too young.

Ah now, you're going to bring The Corrs to mind at this hour.

Plus 2011 happened and it becomes really difficult to go back, I guess, even if some would quite like to, if only for the money.

I've noticed this too. Mind you, what would you pick for nostalgia, the days of Dev, of Haughey, of the Tiger (well, perhaps). It becomes difficult doesn't it, to pick a time when people could broadly coalesce around, wasn't it better—then.

I wonder, sometimes, and here I am thinking aloud, if the 1960s revival in the early 1990s (which was strong in the UK) had something to do with this. Then again, I expect it has more to do with the advent of always on internet and a sharp (and rapid) decline in historiographical standards.

And I'm not sure if Irish nostalgia for the 1950s would have quite the same resonance, because who would want to go back *there*, but by god is it massive on Facebook for Britons in their 60s and 70s.

Oh yes. But we've been stuck on certain moments of twentieth century history for so long that few have noticed that 1945 is 80 years ago, not the 50 or so we imagine it to be because we hope it's still around 2001.

Oh sure, but that was also the argument of Hoggart and Williams and others in the 1950s, and they were hardly postmodern thinkers. Which makes your argument even stronger since, frankly, that's going back to debates between generations born before 1939.

It depends a little on the context, I suppose, but from the 1920s onwards there's always a mix of technology and precisely that sense that it has stripped away some element of humanity. Admass in the 50s making folks stupid, as you say, not just susceptible.

And they aren't even the originals: what are we to make of the 1920s scares, those of the 1890s, and so on. F. Scott Fitzgerald is due some royalties!

Oh, I'm not so worried about Labour, things will turn out okay in the end: the legacy the Tories left was easily the worst of any government handing over to another of modern times. But it will be a smidge bumpy for another year or so. After that...we'll see.

I have those with pastry! But seriously, why anyone is invested in them and not, e.g. the Greens, is beyond me. If the left is to fracture, then it might as well be along the Red-Green spectrum like, erm, almost every other European system. Quite bizarre behaviour but then, look at the folks...

They aren't, it's a scam for has-beens.

I think Czechoslovakia is about as close as it gets, Ned, partly thanks to New Wave cinema and so on, but it's not exactly close is it.

How Swiftian of you!

Don't tell anyone local... But it is my favourite bookshop of all.

I shall - and do my best not to bankrupt myself in Blackwells bookshop.

Some nods in the paper to @phghaslam.bsky.social's work and the thoughts we have knocked back and forth; to @tricksterprince.bsky.social, because one must, and as a way of putting right something I broke years ago when academe broke me; and to others not on here and so recognised elsewhere. Ta!