EDDIE WILLIAMS discovers that nostalgia doesn’t always belong to older people.

RECENTLY, I was on the radio with Paulene Cairnduff on 2CC’s ever popular “Garden Gurus” program. The morning started slowly, with only a smattering of listeners calling with questions. 

So, Paulene and I were nattering away on our own and, after an off-air conversation about coconut oil, I asked the audience: “What did you used to have in your medicine cabinet?”

Suddenly, the phones lit up, the SMS went into meltdown, and the email inbox was full to the brim.

Gentian violet! Blue bag! Calamine lotion! Iodine! Mercurochrome! Everyone wanted to reminisce about their family’s old medicine cabinet, and how their childhood injuries and ailments were treated. Home-remedy nostalgia was in full swing.

Most of the callers were, respectfully, older members of the audience. But nostalgia is not limited to those of a certain age.

News reports about the Johnson & Johnson vaccine recently took my mind to a 1990s kids’ TV show, “Johnson & Friends”. The star of the show was a talking pink stuffed toy elephant, and his friends included a concertina called McDuff, a hot water bottle named Alfred, and Squeaky the robot.

I absent-mindedly took to social media, tweeting a picture of Johnson & Friends with the caption: “This is all I can think of when I hear about the Johnson & Johnson vaccine”.

The post obviously struck a chord. Within a day, my picture of Johnson and his friends had been seen more than 75,000 times, with thousands of engagements and hundreds of likes – well beyond any response I’d had before. 

Here were some of the replies:

“Thank God, I’m not the only one. I’ve been having the same surreal visualisation.”

“This was a totally forgotten childhood memory for me until now!”

“The concertina still freaks me out.”

“I really disliked that hot water bottle. Annoyed me to no end!”

“Memories…”

It turns out people in their 20s and 30s are pining for the past just as much as anyone else.

If you listen to FM radio (and obviously I’d urge you not to), in between the latest hits, you’ll also hear throwbacks to the ’90s, 2000s and 2010s – because you’re never too young for nostalgia. Oh, remember what life was like in 2011! Cast your mind way back to 2019! 2015? Feels like yesterday! 1992? Can’t remember it!

This leads to the question – in a few years’ time, will anyone be nostalgic for 2020 and 2021? Will today’s school children grow to yearn for remote learning? Will present day uni students end up reminiscing about online lectures? Will we remember fondly the days of panic buying? Will grandparents of the future have a twinkle in their eye, as they tell the story of getting a covid test, and eventually, the vaccine?

Ahh, nostalgia. I’m missing it already.

Eddie Williams is an award-winning producer and a presenter with 2CC.