Retro lunch, retro rant

So we did a pot luck lunch today where loads of people bought 1970s party food. All hail the cheese and pineapple on a stick! Or better still the silverskin onion. We had Ritz crackers, vol-au-vents, cherryade and prawn cocktail, quiche and French bread (no, it isn't a baguette; the word had not crossed the channel at that time); and party rings and iced gems galore.

More importantly it was sociable, sharing and simple.

Personally I've got a certain nostalgia for the 1970s. I started the decade with school discos with Gary Glitter (this in the days before most of our icons had been discovered to be paedophiles) and ended it pogoing to punk music at Uni. 

I'm not a nostalgist really. My bright orange flares with a butterfly patch sewn on to the right thigh were with hindsight, hideous. And memories of the grim days of the 1974 miners strike with power cuts and three day weeks, still make me shudder. But life was a lot simpler. I find opening the Radio Times at Christmas now makes me nauseous - there is an impossible amount of choice and ninety percent of it is I suspect derivative bollocks - , and I can only cope with five minutes of Facebook a day before wanting to run for cover. I think we have lost the power to discriminate. We worship the fast and the furious, we bow down before infinite appartunity (yes I did just make that word up - it means an app for everything, which really doesn't make my life better), and are starstruck with the cult of the personality (not least our own).

What is timeless? The basics - having a roof over your head, clothes on your back, food in your stomach, someone to love you, a decent circle of friends and the ability to find beauty in the world. Those things haven't changed but for some reason we have put so much unnecessary paraphernalia around everything. If cheese and pineapple on a stick were invented tomorrow it would be by Otolenghi in The Guardian, the cheese and pineapple cookbook would be on kindle in a month, an app on your phone would tell you where the nearest cheese and pineapple restaurant was, and Amazon could sell you 1,648 different varieties of cocktail stick (including hypoallergenic gluten free ones).

Old man's rant ... but as I say I'm not a nostalgist. I just want to spend more time with people, talking over a glass of wine. That's timeless. 

Three more sleeps.