À la recherche du temps perdu (’And it’s a battered old suitcase to a hotel someplace, and a wound that will never heal’.)
Staff at a Slimbridge wildlife park in Gloucestershire are using a mechanical gadget to feed an orphaned baby crane. The idea behind this is that if the young bird got used to a human hand feeding it, it would then be less able to cope for itself in the wild when it was grown.
That sounds like good thinking but is it really?
The basic idea is correct, I’d say. As human little girls want to marry daddy and their little brothers want to sleep with their mama, birds also tend to want to be with someone they can remember from an early, impressionable age.
However, where the Hell is this baby crane going to find a mate that even vaguely looks like the machine those kind keepers at the wildlife park have built for it?
Still, the story does, in a way, show how strong the forces of nostalgia are. A smell of childhood; memories of a kinder past. We long for all things that are gone - and forever, consciously or not, try to explain and improve the present through some imagined Paradise Lost.
So, we long for the days of the American Dream, before it turned into the ugliness of Iraq and Guantanamo Bay.
We long for those days when families where big and not custom-made to satisfy some single or parental co-op desire. When the food was bad - but shared and shared alike.
Like Marcel Proust we love the smell of temps perdu in the morning – and we can take that to very silly extremes…
What’s more, these days we can get nostalgic about things that happened only round history’s corner.
When we read certain stories we almost get rosy-eyed with longing for the days that even scary stories had a certain, simple charm. Like, Remember that good old Anthrax scare? Ah, bless!
So, when someone starts up the Kill Rushdie chants again or says something nasty about the Da Vinci Code, we almost go, Aaaah, how cute!
Mind you, some forms of nostalgia we need like a Chinese facial – or a garden gnome needs a snake up his arse. I mean, a Spice Girls reunion…??!! Christ on a cuckoo clock; how low can you go?
Still, not everyone likes nostalgia. Some people find the past so inconvenient they deny it ever happened. Puzzled and furious they’ll go, Dinosaurs? What dinosaurs?! There were no bloody dinosaurs, alright!!!
Come to think of it though, these dingbats do seem to long for certain old days - and certain old ways. If thine eye offend thee, pluck it out, and all of that.
So, those good folks would certainly approve of a certain husband’s action to help his wife kick that dangerous and foul habit of smoking.
It was, evidently, the only real Christian thing to do.
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