Shelley Howells: Finding present tense and past perfect

COMMENT

If you're lucky, you get to run around for a few decades thinking you're special; different. That you won't be knocked-back by the same predictable, lame things that seem to affect others. Then - in this case, anyway - you turn 40. I've seen it happen to others, and pitied - mocked, even - their self-pity.

I'd planned ahead. For years, I've cultivated friendships with people at least a decade older than I, figuring that I'd always be a young thing, at least in their (more wrinkled) eyes.

So it was a nasty shock to be hit by the self-pity I'd schemed to avoid. Denial, anger, bargaining, depression ... snakes alive, I was suffering from grief.

Worse: although I'd been hooked on Extreme Makeover from the start, I'd enjoyed it as a tragi-comedy. The closer I got the big four-oh! the more it was starting to look like down-home common sense.

Most debilitating of all was an attack of nostalgia.

The warnings about pornography, stranger-danger, ripoffs, spam and the rest of the evils of the net should be amended to include the hazards of online nostalgia: denial, anger, bargaining, depression. It started with Tintin. It's his 75th anniversary and, being a fan from way back, and now with a kid who is discovering the boy-reporter's adventures through my battered old books, I decided to take a look at the official web-site. It's a beaut, with lots of lovely Herge graphics to gladden the heart, and desperately interesting details, such as Captain Haddock's name in many languages. "Haddock," mostly.

Also had a look-see at the lovely stuff at the online branch of the Tintin shop in Remuera.

Tintin triggered Moomin memories and, next thing, an hour of life had drifted away online. Had I been forced to head to the library, instead of just park and type "Moomin" into Google, who knows what could have been achieved in that hour? The dishes, possibly.

Instead, I pondered whether Tove Jannson's hippo-like creatures were (are?), in fact, hairy or smooth and calculated the cost of a trip to Finland's Moominworld. A lot of money, sure, but they do promise "a fantastic theme park where any kind of stress and bad moods will soon evaporate and be replaced by joy, laughter and good feelings". A bit like New Zealand under Mominpappa Brash, I guess.

It was dowhill from there: Hollie Hobby t-shirts; the confirmation that the lyrics to the Carl Douglas classic Kung Fu Fighting have no hidden depth; the discovery that a childhood favourite, Jackie magazine, folded a few years back, and that the magazine's name was inspired by the teen version of kid's author Jacqueline Wilson.

Obviously, Jackie led directly to David Cassidy who is still putting out albums, and the Bay City Rollers who, mercifully, are not (but there are, curiously, a surprising number of Japanese Rollers fan sites). Not much of a leap from there to the Goodies and Morecambe and Wise, chocolate fondue, the New York Hustle and Rocky.

And so it came to pass that in the disease, a cure was found.

That time-eating trip down Memory Superhighway revealed that there's nothing like revisiting past obsessions to help you come to terms with ageing, to make a gal feel lucky to have survived such perilous times.

Wrinkles and droopy bits are a small price to pay for putting a few years between your younger, beta-self and the updated version - bugs, viruses and all.

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