Later, in bed, like twentysomethings the world over, you defer sleep with your phone: scrolling through selfies on WeChat, video essays on bilibili, and microcelebrity meltdowns on Weibo. When you open the photosharing app, RedNote, one post catches your eye.

“You’re awake,” the title reads. “It’s ‘08 in a Beijing alley, and the Olympics are set to begin.”

The images flicker through dimly remembered scenes from childhood: cluttered newspaper stands, roadside skewer vendors, kindergarten kids in bright tank tops. Prominently featured are the Fuwa, the five adorable multicolored mascots of the 2008 Olympics. The posts have gnomic, melancholy titles (“Why cry? Wasn’t this the life you always wanted?” or “Never to find those happy days again”) that serve as little daggers to the Gen Z heart.

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But what really gets you — what really sets off the Sehnsucht in your bosom for the lost dreamworld of childhood — is the music. “Beijing Welcomes You”, the old Olympic anthem, is a soaring, catchy ballad that can crack the cool facade of even the most stoic of Chinese Zoomers. Its lyrics (“Open, always, is the gate of my home…”) capture a China that was confident, cosmopolitan, and welcoming; a China that now seems as forgotten as the threadbare plushies of our childhood.

What gives the song such emotional significance is the sheer breadth of its saturation. In the Summer of 2008, you heard it broadcast on the bus ride to school; on a walk with your parents in the park; as you snuck into the cornershop to buy red bean popsicles.

It’s clear from all the comments that the rediscovery of “Beijing Welcomes You” is, for China’s Gen Z, only part of a wider reckoning with the recent past. “In those days we all believed in progress and world peace…” writes one poster on bilibi (China’s YouTube analog). “This song has such pure intentions; there’s no political agenda to it at all. Culture above all else…” adds another. A reply to this notes that the star-studded cast features A-listers from both shores of the Taiwan Strait, as well as the Chinese diaspora: “Back then, everyone set aside their ideologies and national differences to showcase to the world nothing other than Chinese civilization and the Olympic spirit… Truly, those were the good times.” Without getting lost in the vexed politico-linguistic question of Chinese autonyms, it’s notable here that the commenter uses the term “中华文化” (Zhōnghuá wénhuà) for Chinese civilization, which has the expansive sense of an overarching culture spanning all Chinese-speaking people, as opposed to the more parochial “中国文化” (Zhōngguó wénhuà), which refers to Chinese culture within the People’s Republic. Such are the linguistic pains taken by the user to emphasize the ecumenism of Chinese unity manifested during the 2008 Olympics.

British readers might feel a pang of recognition at the potency of Olympic patriotism; images from the London 2012 opening ceremony are still apt to prompt wistful accounts from progressives about the forward-looking, multicultural, welcoming country they thought they grew up in. But whereas Britain’s Olympic games live on in cultural memory as the last gasp of liberal Britain, Beijing 2008 was supposed to be the inauguration of a newer, more open China — a China that never was.

The aesthetic that Chinese Zoomers have fashioned in response to these foreclosed hopes is a variation on “dreamcore”, a style that first took shape on US-based platforms like Tumblr and DeviantArt in the mid-2010s. American dreamcore is marked by its obsession with eerie liminal spaces like hotel lobbies, parking lots, or the yellow, fluorescent-lit basements of old furniture stores that inspired Backrooms, this summer’s horror blockbuster. Chinese dreamcore retains some of the formal elements — eerily empty streets, 2000s internet graphics — while sinicizing its content; this is, in other words, nostalgia with Chinese characteristics. It could even be seen as further confirmation of the late Mark Fisher’s pet concept, hauntology, the idea that we’re living now in the “slow cancellation of the future”, surrounded by the dreams we once abandoned.

That the Chinese youth are just as pessimistic, anxious, even fatalistic, about the present state of affairs as young people in the West may come as a surprise. From Friedrich Merz to Mark Carney, politicians on both the Left and Right often invoke China as the presumptive winner in our global return to bipolar Great Power geopolitics — the country with the technology, infrastructure, jobs, growth rates, and above all, the sense of collective purpose buoyed by national unity. But behind the phalanxes of dancing robots and ribbons of high-speed rail is the stark economic reality facing the generation now coming of age, who, like their counterparts in the West, are coming to terms with the closure of the guaranteed upward mobility that their parents enjoyed.

In the late Seventies, China’s then-leader Deng Xiaoping implemented a wildly ambitious suite of market reforms. As Deng overhauled the creaky Soviet-style economy that he had inherited from Mao, a corresponding ideological makeover of the Chinese Communist Party was inevitable. Gone was the fiery Marxist-Leninist exporter of international revolution, replaced by the staid, technocratic guardian of state capitalism we’re familiar with today. Jettisoning the Mao-era baggage, however, meant losing the story that gave the Communist government its legitimacy — the grand Us vs Them narrative of the working class as co-authored by Marx and Engels, a story second only to the New Testament in its ability to form social cohesion and inspire mass action.

What narrative could fill the ideological vacuum left by Marxism? Political scientist Feng Chen argues that the CCP’s pivot to “eudaemonic legitimacy” accomplished precisely that. Here, eudaimonia, Greek for happiness or flourishing, refers not to any lofty Aristotelian actualizing of human potentialities, but to satisfying people’s demands for iPhones, McDonald’s, electric cars, hotpots, Korean beauty products, and so on. The result was a tacit social contract that “led the masses to link their assessment of the regime to their personal material advancement”. In the post-Mao period, political legitimacy depends on the uninterrupted economic growth that allows the government to deliver the (literal) goods.

One shortcoming of deploying eudaemonic legitimacy as a long-term political strategy is that it’s crassly reductive. Human beings are more than rational self-maximizers; man does not live by designer handbags alone. We have an exasperating tendency to put forth moral, not just material, demands — and when these moral demands are unmet, political stability falters. For Chen, eudaemonic legitimacy depends not only on delivering economic growth to the people, but also on ensuring that those people adhere to a notion of morality that is itself narrowly economic.

In the Mao era, moral character meant subscribing to a mix of proletarian solidarity, anti-imperialism, and ascetic self-discipline. A capitalist China required, at minimum, an abandonment of these collectivist socialist ideals — and, ideally, something to replace them. From the late Nineties, Chinese media saw a number of happiness campaigns — deliberately engineered self-help movements involving everything from TV talk therapy to positivity gurus to a torrent of translated American self-help paperbacks. The plan, as the anthropologist Jie Yang documents, was to inculcate new values in Chinese society — values such as “self-care, self-realization, and self-enterprise”, enabling the Chinese people to positively affirm themselves as autonomous agents, happily engaged in private enterprise.

So as the government delivered on economic growth, the governed reconceived of the good life along exactly such lines. What could go wrong?

The more basic problem with the quid pro quo of political acquiescence for material gain is what to do when growth tapers off. In the popular Chinese consciousness, the tapering took place sometime between 2018 and the beginning of the pandemic, and the record-breaking 17.9% youth unemployment rate recorded in July evinces no change to this downward trend. Attitudes, though, can be slower to change than economic realities, and a distinct generational gap has opened between the Deng cohort, who maintain a sunny and increasingly obsolescent optimism that comes only with decades of double-digit GDP growth, and their children, who are now faced with a job market decimated by outsourcing, automation, and cutthroat competition. In response to this future of secular stagnation, Gen Z has rejected en masse the chipper self-help morality of China’s boom years.

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In the absence of civil society — and in the face of continued state-sponsored optimism campaigns — China’s youth has vented its dissatisfaction in the only direction available: inwards. The ethnographer Dino Ge Zhang has coined the term “Sinopessimism” to characterize the private world conjured up by the slang of Chinese Zoomers. They describe their time in higher education and the workforce with the term 内卷 (“involution)”, or “the experience of being locked in competition that one ultimately knows is meaningless”. The natural reaction to an involuted society is 躺平 (“lying flat”): in other words rejecting expectations of upward mobility and career advancement in favor of alternative lifestyles.

However, Gen Z’s most distinctive neologism must be 历史的垃圾时间, or “garbage time of history”. The term, coined by Hu Wenhui, a newspaper editor in Guangzhou, borrows its meaning from “garbage time” in sports, referring to the final portion of a match so lopsided that its outcome is already a foregone conclusion. Hu, in a 2023 WeChat post shared millions of times, extends this to cultural critique: those living in the “garbage time of history” are stuck in an agonizing interim period when nothing seems to work, when decaying, outmoded social structures refuse to collapse, and when individuals feel powerless to respond. Though Hu limits his examples to the Brezhnev-era Soviet Union and the fall of the Tang dynasty (while making thinly-veiled allusions to contemporary China throughout), it’s written in the same spirit of global pessimism that moves Western Zoomers to drop the term “late capitalism”, or the Gramsci quote that diagnoses the present as the “time of monsters”.

Nothing expresses the ennui of the Sinopessimism generation better than Chinese dreamcore. Time will tell if it remains a trendy hashtag or develops into a full-fledged artistic movement. But for now, if nothing else, Chinese dreamcore stands as a melancholy corrective to the widely-held assumption that the passing of the globalized era (which counts, as one of its fading triumphs, the Beijing Olympics) also heralds a new epoch of winners and losers: namely the oft-repeated narrative of China’s inevitable rise, and the West’s gradual decline. It seems misguided, to say the least, for Western progressives to spread narratives of Chinamaxxing at a time when the Chinese youth are themselves avoiding their economic present by escaping to the safety of the past. Ultimately, this new epoch of isolationism may consist only of losers and other losers.

If there’s any doubt about the crisis in China’s youth outlook, take a look at the panicky, hectoring responses it has elicited from the establishment. Discussion of “lying flat” is censored online; meanwhile a battalion of mainstream academics have come forth with thinkpieces rebutting the concept, decrying it as a “fraudulent academic concept,” a “logical fallacy,” or, my particular favorite, the “absurd fantasy” of “idiotic literary youths.” And, in direct response to Chinese dreamcore, a recent article published in the Social Sciences Review of Gansu Province warns of the “latent ideological risks stemming from the glorification of ‘negative emotions’”. More than just a case of bad vibes, officials are treating the pervasive pessimism as a serious ideological challenge — the one really obvious lesson from the 20th century being, after all, that keeping around a bunch of nihilistic, directionless, and economically downward young people tends to be really, really bad for political stability.

Still, one comment under a Chinese dreamcore post stood out to me as a corrective to the idea that China’s recent past really was so much brighter. It was from a bewildered Gen-Xer. “The 2000s were a time when I was scared to leave the house at night, back when trash piled in the streets, and my hometown didn’t even have streetlights. I don’t know where exactly the romance is.” So even the golden years of childhood prove no escape. If Western pundits idealize a non-existent future for China, its youth romanticize a non-existent Chinese past. All attempts at escape turn up only dead ends. How, then, can we comfort ourselves amidst this time of monsters? Perhaps there is a slender hope: that one day, with enough distance, our present may also be misremembered as beautiful.

That this clash of earthy charm and trendy crowd is now a common sight in London is thanks to the likes of Jimmy McIntosh (AKA “London Dead Pubs”). It is a combination that could have been created only by the internet. McIntosh is a “pubfluencer”, one of a host of TikTokkers introducing Gen Z to London’s historic pubs. Pubfluencers talk seductively of a prelapsarian age where there was a “proper boozer” on every street corner, without food, exposed lightbulbs, or bespoke “apps”, where everybody knew your name and could understand your job title. Their short-form videos pitch the last of the capital’s authentic drinking spots as living museums where, if you are really fortunate, you might even see a real-life Cockney.

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The desire to retreat into our drinking past has never been stronger, all while our pubs face armageddon: 161 pubs closed in the first three months of 2026 (that’s about two a day), and only last week HMRC ordered officials to levy higher business rates on pubs based in “attractive locations” or “character properties”. At the same time, an £8 pint of Cruzcampo means that, in many town centers, drinking on a Tuesday can feel like everyone but you has been warned of an imminent earthquake. In London, however, that is exacerbated by a lack of true locals, with a transient population moving between expensive pubs for their weekly extravagance. Perhaps it is asking for too much to allow us to take our heritage for granted, but in London, we have done something deeply un-English to our national pastime: we have made it a treat.

Amid all the fuss, it’s no wonder that young people have started seeking out a bit of old-fashioned London character on Instagram. McIntosh boasts 100,000 followers and (in a neat example of nominative determinism) a capacious Mackintosh coat. He has earned a cult reputation for producing articulate and thoughtful videos about old haunts, aided by surreal humor. In his scrutiny of the city, he has been likened to Ian Nairn, the boozy architecture critic who railed against half-witted postwar town planners. McIntosh similarly bemoans threats to cherished venues, but the usually exasperated Nairn was fighting when all was not lost. Making social media content about the state of London’s pubs in 2026, all McIntosh can offer is nostalgia for how they used to be, and recommend a few that still carry the torch.

Niall Walsh, one of McIntosh’s rivals in the nostalgia game, straddles old and new just as awkwardly. An Irishman with an account called “Proper Boozers”, he celebrates the right things, even if he could be more subtle in his working-class bingo: horse racing on the box, tat on the ceiling, cheap pints at the bar. In each video, his disembodied voice judges the pub on whether it meets his threshold of authenticity with the simplicity of a Roman sparing or condemning a defeated gladiator. Turner’s Old Star in Wapping, with its scratched wooden floor and fizzing Fosters? Proper boozer. The Blackfriar on Queen Victoria Street, with its pretty murals and overwhelming food? Not a proper boozer. “Maybe that’s nostalgia,” Walsh laments of his ideal pub. “Maybe those pubs are disappearing.” If they are, they are doing so slowly enough for Walsh, who has created a handy interactive map of London’s authentic hostelries, turning previously rough dives into the Bermondsey beer mile.

Given Gen Z’s inclination to nostalgia (one recent survey said that 47% of adults aged 18-29 would rather live in the past), they were clearly ripe for the taking as an audience. Each generation covets something of the previous, of course, but Gen Z’s obsessions seemingly slip into envy. It may be because they are fed images of the past every day; without the internet, of course, previous generations could live in relative ignorance of what their parents got up to. The past should seem quaint, yet it appears increasingly normal — more normal than the present.

The pubfluencers know that, repeating the phrase “bygone era” to death, sending a shiver down the spines of those who want what they have never had. The pub slots neatly into an imagined history of simpler, slower times, with images of grizzly regulars and sticky carpets providing an antidote for our characterless age. Yet if the ceremony of past pub going clearly appeals to young people, with all its etiquette and icons, so too does its sense of opportunity, of what might happen and of whom you might meet. As Gen Z envied previous generations their music, their Saturday jobs and their houses, now they envy them their carefree nights at the pub.

To be fair, pubs, as with all weighty traditions, have long been associated with nostalgia. In his quietly irritable essay “The Moon Under Water”, George Orwell described his ideal pub as “uncompromisingly Victorian” with the “solid, comfortable ugliness of the nineteenth century”. Tellingly, though, pubfluencers are more reluctant to put a date on when exactly a pub trip should be harking back to. That may be for a canny reason. Visiting lonely-looking pubs up the Holloway Road, McIntosh talks vaguely of a “fading way of life”, but it is up to the viewer to work out whose way of life is fading. It is useful to keep the nostalgia in the eye of the beholder, blurry and rosy at the edges, rather than show too much truth about the proper boozer.

It is now acceptable to turn up and order a pint anywhere in London. The “fading way of life” that McIntosh mourns was a socially conservative, white-working-class one, which wouldn’t always have been so eager to welcome a diverse, young crowd. Even 40 years ago, London’s proper boozers had tight clienteles who supported them day in, day out, drinking as routine in a manner now vanished. The establishments frequented by them were not places where today’s hipsters could feel comfortable saying what, or dressing how, they wanted. After all, landlords used to carry mallets. But now that the white working class has largely disappeared from London, leaving only a few of their pubs behind, those who remain will take whatever company they can.

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The wistfulness, anyway, seems rather misplaced: that fact is that the “proper boozer” has never been more pleasant for outsiders. Gone are the days when a young filmmaker zooming in on a chap in high vis at the bar would be gifted a black eye to match his stout. In a bleak financial environment for pubs, he is received with open arms, and so are his followers wishing to sample the Guinness themselves.

Still, if the choice in London is between an expensive treat and a kind of false pageantry, I would rather retreat to the provinces. Nostalgia, it’s clear, can be wearisome, and there is a fine line between treasuring history and living on past glories. In middle England, a semblance of locality offers some contrast to the ills of the capital’s pubs, and it is often pleasant to drink where no TikTokker has been before you. Even if a pint is still relatively pricey, the pub will often be the only place to go for miles around, and so locals will gather as locals do. That might be at an identikit Greene King pub, but you can’t choose your local; the local chooses you, complete with a bar layered with charity collection boxes and grim-faced staff in green-and-black-check uniforms.

Jimmy McIntosh would not be caught dead filming in that kind of pub. Pre-printed chalk boards, fairy lights and, God forbid, some middle-class drinkers would be a tough sell on social media. Yet is not attitude as important as a period carpet? The Camel is a fun yet exhausting place to drink. There is a lot to look at, but it is far from authentic — it feels like TikTok with pork scratchings. Compared that to the average chain pub, a far closer match for our indistinct “bygone era”. You can still find pubs around the country that people sleepwalk into; it is only in London that we set calendar reminders and ask the landlord to see the receipt. At least in an unremarkable, suburban Greene King pub, you might notice the quiet behaviors that really make you feel like another round, where people still wile away a whole afternoon. As an added bonus, you can be sure that you won’t have someone in a large coat rehearsing a script by the jukebox.

Where does the mystique come from? No country has ever allowed the journey of an American traveler to so decisively articulate its soul, not least a softly spoken Iowan with a penchant for silly place names. The mid-Nineties, as Alwyn Turner notes in A Classless Society, showed no signs of a Bryson lurking on the horizon. This, after all, was an age seemingly desperate to escape a cloying parochialism and rediscover itself in time for the new century. “John Major hankers after a Darling Buds of May Britain circa 1955,” lamented a Times leader a year before Bryson’s travelogue, “its relevance to the increasingly nasty and brutish world that so many of today’s Britain endure is something of a mystery.”

Two decades on, the reverse seemed to have happened. For if it seemed like we were edging towards Cool Britannia and Blair’s “New Britain”, the decade’s most memorable speech ended up being Major’s evocation of thick-set insularity, with its “warm beer… and old maids bicycling to communion”. Starmer’s recent party conference speech offered his own version of this collective reverie, with his “half-time oranges” and fence painting. Yet the Prime Minister could barely compete with Bryson’s more enduring take on Major’s whimsy. For it is his formula of curmudgeonly humor and nostalgia that has come to set the terms of the nation’s search for itself over the recent decades.

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Our literary travelogues are an incongruous paradox: both tomes of national reckoning and overindulged almanacs stuffed with historical curios and serendipitous encounters. H.V. Morton’s In Search of England is a triumph of the genre, a book that wavers between religious experience and the triteness of a National Trust leaflet. J.B. Priestley, another inspiration for Bryson, went off again 10 years after Morton in the midst of the Great Depression with his motorcar and driver, at a time when the National Government feared communist insurrection. He discovered three Englands which both inform and overshadow Notes From A Small Island, the synthesis of which, to this day, no traveler — not even Bryson — seems able to truly comprehend.

The first of these Englands entranced Bryson with the eternal mystery of parish spires, hedgerows and village eccentrics. The second, he found tricky and drab: the towns and cities, their “left behinds” that even in the Thirties, like now, seemed lost in the shadows of the 19th century. But it was that last England that irked Priestley and indeed Bryson the most. In 1933, it represented the burgeoning ersatz of the American century: an unfamiliar, seemingly impenetrable world of suburbs, modernist experiments and individuals set free from the grasp of both provincial and industrial England. It was a place that Priestley anxiously regarded as belonging “far more to the age itself than this particular island”.

But today there’s a new third England, one which looms over the national psyche and would give Bill Bryson a nervous breakdown. It is defined by a mixture of the new arrivals of the last two decades, who have added 60% to its population growth; the critical mass of the population who live increasingly free from the old hearth of media and institutions; the generation under 30 who have spent their formative years online and to whom even Bryson’s pick and mix of patriotic fare seem alien. For any would-be traveler, this Britain can be glimpsed in its fastest changing places: Peterborough, Reading, Leicester, the suburbs of Birmingham, London’s periphery.

The nation’s popular cultural establishments, shorn of any real interest in understanding this New Britain, now serve as a cozy escape. And Bill Bryson is the patron saint of this increasingly oblivious cult. To reread Notes From A Small Island today is a bit like discovering the Rosetta Stone for deciphering the origins of every fleeting phenomena that has worked to distract us from a Britain in the midst of wholesale change. From the whimsy of “Keep Calm and Carry On” (Brits, Bryson tells us outside a shop in Windsor, are “great at pulling together”), to the self-aware griping of “Very British Problems” and the geriatric charm of a Richard Osman thriller. This is what Bryson, after all, clings to: the queuing, the self-aware eccentricity, the playing up to type, all fueled by the wistful determination to recover a happier trip to the country he took as a young man in the Seventies.

Unsurprisingly this disguised trauma tips his affection for England into a self-parody, one that has become perversely useful as a stand-in for any national reckoning. The Nineties, like the Britain of 2025, was obsessed with brokering and mediating an understanding of Englishness. This was a foreshadowing of today’s parlor game, with novelists and columnists eager to reconcile Britain’s lost prestige and power with a new identity for the 21st-century future. Inevitably it ended up as a drive towards the lowest common cultural denominator. Julian Barnes’s parody of the decade’s penchant for existential taxonomizing, England, England, was published at the height of Bryson mania. The Isle of Wight, crammed with the nation’s symbols and icons, is transformed by Barnes into a theme park for tourists and emigres, an upgrade of the old nation shorn of its divided soul and reborn for a Global Britain. Plotting this New England, market researchers compile a list that could have fallen out of Notes From A Small Island: emotional frigidity, thatched cottages, black cabs.

The theme park’s purveyor was seen by critics as a stand-in for one of the decade’s opportunistic spivs, a Murdoch or an al-Fayed. But the ultimate purveyor of Britain’s cozy, post-national handrailed theme park was Bryson. Tasked with this fantasyland gatekeeping of bonhomie and repression, the writing in Notes From A Small Island offers the drearily familiar criteria for our own way of seeing the country now: England’s landscapes are “stunning, peaceful, beautiful and very nice”. Cities, the small bits we get to see, are always impenetrable with “sprawl”. Human beings, especially those still living, barely feature.

“The trouble with English towns,” we are told, arriving on the shores of Dover before the journey even starts, “is that they are so indistinguishable from one another.” Rather than a point of interest, such gripes always seem to deliberately peter out. The disappointment of a village on the Dorset coast, once enchanted by childhood memories, is resolved by a rant about the car park and bad pub food. There are English voices, but only as catchphrases, faint caricatures muttering anachronisms from the past. Bradford is so distressing that Bryson has to stop the trip and briefly go home.

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As Blair took power and enacted his New Britain, one where the nation would be “young again”, the reading public only became more obsessed with Bryson’s England. In hindsight, its greatest cultural achievement was to launder England’s reactionary provincial impulse, one which Blair and the modernizing vision of New Labour sought to lance, into a sort of folksy, politically sterile jamboree. Notes remained a bestseller for the first two years after New Labour’s victory. Then, 1999 saw Bryson unleashed on television: bearded, squat, a gentle lisp, like a child’s cartoon bear for adults, holding their hand as he tried to explain post-industrial Liverpool on the eve of the new millennium. The remit for the nation’s newfound cuddly and erudite uncle steadily expanded. In the aftermath of the Columbine massacre, he was tasked by BBC News with trying to explain why a pair of teenagers had gunned down 16 of their classmates.

A similar ploy tried on Australia in 2000 failed: Down Under was poorly reviewed. The soul of Oz, apparently, was too irreverent to be deciphered by a prying American tourist. But back in Blighty, Bryson’s now decade-old travelogue had transcended the sum of its parts. In 2003, while Britain was invading Iraq and the country was being plastered by the “pseudomodernism” of New Labour’s wave of civic building, the book was voted as most representative of the nation in a World Book Day poll.

For Bryson, national treasuredom and its lappings ensued: honorary doctorates at half a dozen universities, including the Chancellorship of the University of Durham and the Presidency of the Campaign to Protect Rural England in 2007. Detractors, like James May, were few. “If there’s one thing I can’t stand,” he told viewers of Top Gear in 2004, “it’s beardy, sanctimonious, patronizing Americans in tartan trousers coming to England and trying to persuade us to turn it into a museum.”

But nothing, not even Top Gear, could touch Bryson’s rising star. By the end of the decade, he had partnered with the monarchy to present Icons of England, a collection of essays featuring everyone from Kevin Spacey to Benjamin Zephaniah, which further taxonomized an England that had become even more unfamiliar for most people over the preceding decade: village shops, canal boats and even a Majoresque evocation of the “mist”. Notes from Little Dribbling, the sequel, came in 2015 at the behest of the publisher, and apparently the nation. This almost-reluctant journey, via the “Bryson line” through the middle of the country, seemed to take place in a world he now quietly resented. The British, he noticed in the Lake District, had begun to behave in “quietly disgraceful ways” when no one else was watching.

He was the country’s last acceptable reactionary. His gripes were those of a smoldering old colonel (bad manners, litter, an inability to recall the nation’s basic facts), while he took refuge in the matriarchal decency of Angela Merkel and the “shared experiences” offered by Fiona Bruce and Huw Edwards. Blithe anti-Americanism, in an age of populism, seemed the most acceptable way to complain. The biggest change among the British, he told Stephen Sackur in a Hard Talk Interview, one where he was bluntly accused of wanting to preserve the country in aspic, is that they had become more like his countrymen, “quite self-centered in a way they never used to be”.

And still, amid England’s current woes, Bryson endures as the nation’s whisperer. “This is still a country that’s pretty devoted to decency and common sense,” he assured us after being pushed for some “Bryson Positivity” in a recent Times interview promoting his latest re-release. But this could only fall on deaf ears. England, after all, is still in thrall to Bryson’s pastoral whimsy. Nearly every bestselling travelogue in the past decade has concerned itself with the rural, the pastoral, a cult of anodyne heritage that has turned the old broadcasting establishment into a sedative. Yet at the root of these obsessions is one of the country’s unspoken anxieties we still refuse to reckon with: will there always be an unchanging national character passed down through the generations and its national touchstones, with its recognizable set of quirks, idioms, eccentricities and jokes? Or is it fading into the future of a new country — that of the third England we have always quietly feared and never really wanted? Thanks to Bill Bryson, we still don’t really know.

With over 3,000 tons of water cascading down every single second, that’s a lot of lithium baths. No wonder 14 million jolly tourists cram here each year, together contributing $2 billion to the local economy. But pass a little time in Niagara, where Ontario meets New York, and you’ll realize this Canadian town is about more than river spray and mist. There are other reasons to be cheerful, too, from the ziplines to dinosaurs to the motels, 165 at the last count, together wallowing in a veritable lithium bath of kitschiness. It all speaks to an instinctive rejection of middle-class “curation”, in favor of good-old-fashioned garish dazzle — elitist snobs be damned.

The sheer power of Niagara panicked the first Europeans to see it. In 1678, an early Belgian visitor described the “surprising and astonishing manner” in which the water barrelled down. But, by the 19th century, the Falls became popular. In 1801, Vice President Aaron Burr’s daughter chose Niagara for her bridal tour. Three years later, Napoleon’s little brother Jérôme did the same. Those proto-influencers soon turned Niagara Falls into the honeymoon capital of North America, a title it’s retained ever since. Perhaps it’s that gigantic lithium bath, or else the easy drive from Toronto, but 50,000 happy couples still flock here each year.

The Falls are surely part of the romantic allure. Bob Fitzgerald, who runs the Falls Wedding Chapel on the New York side of the border with his wife Sally, has wedded everyone from popstars to WWE wrestlers. Regular punters from as far away as Singapore arrive to tie the knot here too, as well as one Australian in her 20s, who came to Niagara to wed her beloved before passing away from a terminal disease. “The Falls,” says Strand, “are a giant magnet that attracts human impulses.”

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Spend time gazing at the torrent — “At last, fortissimo!” quipped Mahler when he first laid eyes on it — and it’s hard not to be impressed. Yet chat to the Fitzgeralds and it’s clear Niagara is about more than nature unleashed. Consider, if nothing else, the helicopter ceremonies the couple offer above the Falls, with newlyweds exchanging vows in the cabin. And if that hints at a town comfortable with showiness, there’s plenty more where that came from.

A great example here is the Zipline to the Falls, carrying daredevils 2,200 feet down over the abyss. Rebecca and Elizabeth, who work at the attraction, giggle as they recall the 98-year-old woman who took her own high-flying lithium shower. It’s unlikely even she could have managed other Niagara pastimes. Since 1850, 11 stunters have tightroped across the gorge, while 15 have barrelled over and survived.

Such kookiness is clear away from the Falls themselves. On the Canadian side of the border, you can golf with a Brontosaurus at Dinosaur Adventure Golf, or encounter Vlad the Impaler at the Castle Dracula Wax Museum, or take aim at moonshine jugs at the Hillbilly Shooting Gallery. Until 2002, the local museum even boasted the mummified remains of Pharaoh Rameses I, which somehow turned up in the mid-19th century.

But the true apotheosis of Niagara kitsch is in the accommodation. Visit the Cadillac Motel and you’ll see what I mean. Pinch-your-cheek cute, the tidy retro property features 23 themed rooms, ranging from “Ghostbusters” to “Marilyn Monroe” — who, according to local lore, once stayed the night. Ray and Lisa Brock, the owners, regularly rent half the place out to hockey teams and stag dos, who happily gorge themselves on home-cooked barbecue and what Lisa calls a “pig trough” full of beer.

“A fascinating accretion of human culture and goofiness that piles up around the Falls,” is how Strand summarizes the town. “It is a fun place that illustrates a side of human absurdity.” But if that explains the what, we’re still left with the how — how is it that, amid the unending march of neoliberal drabness, places like Dinosaur Adventure Golf and the Ghostbusters room survive? The price is probably a good place to start, even with the Falls themselves. There are crowds, sure, but the torrent is visible a half a mile down the Niagara Parkway, making for a cheap day out. “You don’t have to stand in line,” Bob Fitzgerald says. “It isn’t Disneyland. You don’t have to pay or elbow people aside.”

Yet if the accommodation is similarly light on the pockets — a night at the Cadillac will set you back just $85 Canadian dollars a night in the off-season — Niagara is about more than fun on a budget. “People like the unique,” Lisa Brock says. “The big hotel chains don’t care.” Certainly, it’s hard to imagine the Hilton putting out pig troughs full of LaBatt Blue pilsner for thirsty hockey bros.

And I wonder, too, if Niagara thrives on something else: nostalgia. Fast capitalism delivers boutique “experiences”. But even us globalist anywheres are ultimately from somewhere, and Niagara’s kitsch taps into that nostalgic impulse that pines for the authenticity of yesterday. A “Zombie Attack” interactive theatre is not your grandmother’s country fried steak — or, as we’re in Canada, a classic poutine. But retro connects us to our history. A round of mini-golf with vinyl dinosaurs evokes memories of vacations past. In Niagara, vacationers have that rare thing: fun. Rewilding or yoga retreats may offer a “bespoke wellness experience”, but they’re ultimately just contrived excuses to clamber back on the hamster wheel of self-improvement. Nostalgia, meanwhile, answers that simple yearning for gentler times.

Not that Niagara is stuck entirely in the past. A mile from what the Brocks affectionately call the “Caddy” is Basell’s Restaurant and Tavern. Like other spots in town, it’s dripping in Sixties atmosphere, all neon signs and checkerboard floors. In other ways, however, Basell’s feels strikingly modern. Founded by two Greek brothers, the spot is now run by Fang. Indian-born and of Chinese descent, the recent Canadian immigrant has kept the booths, the steel-stainless counter, and the “evil eye” keeping watch.

At this point, Strand once more returns to the power of the Falls, bestowing the spray with almost mystical power. “It is a pilgrimage that helps define you as an American and Canadian,” she says. “Like the 19th-century Grand Tour, when elites went to the Falls to embrace their new nation. Bathing in the spray of the Falls it naturalizes you. It is almost like a baptism.”

A case in point is Fred Fakouri. Tall and affable, the 27-year-old owns and runs the Persepolis Inn with his father. Typical of old-school Niagara, the 52-room motel is small and intimate, with heart-shaped baths aplenty. As the property’s name suggests, the Fakouri clan hail from Iran, fleeing the Islamic Republic to gentle Ontario. “The hotel is a healing process for us,” he explains. “The family is pouring everything into the hotel and Niagara Falls.” A town settled by the British, Niagara beckoned as a path to freedom for enslaved African Americans. This welcoming tradition continued into the 20th century, when the Falls powered industry that attracted migrants from Eastern Europe.

Yet if nearly 20% of Niagara’s population come from an immigrant background, and many, like the Fakouris, are integrated and happy, it’s wrong to see the town as a haven from all the world’s woes. Niagara Falls is the temporary home to more than 5,000 asylum seekers, the highest per capita rate of any Canadian city. Mayor Jim Diodati warns it’s at “breaking point” — telling reporters that the shelters are full, the transitional housing is full, and the drug problem is “like it’s never been before”.

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There are other challenges too. Before Covid, the Fitzgeralds once averaged 701 weddings a year. These days, they hope these numbers will return, so they can pass the business to their daughter. Fakhori tells a similar tale. Since the pandemic, he says, business is down 50%, and refusing to fully rebound. Last year, overall tourist numbers were still down 7% from their 2019 peak, a shortfall of 1.5 million visitors and tens of millions in spending.

Of course, Niagara Falls isn’t alone in feeling the legacy of lockdowns. But the town is arguably at particular risk thanks to the very nostalgia that lends it strength. Those mom-and-pop joints may bring in customers, Lisa Brock says, but they’re also vulnerable to being snatched up by big Toronto investors — who strip their new assets for upscale customers unenthusiastic about heart-shaped baths.

These days, indeed, the bulk of accommodations at Niagara are now classified as “high-end”. A local newspaper editorial even bragged that the town is “positioning itself to become a more substantial player in the upscale hotel market”. These high-end chains replace a series of iconic establishments that were utterly unique to the town. Among these were the Foxhead Motor Inn, made famous by the Jim Crow-era Green Book travel guide, and the Inn on the Niagara Parkway, a late-Fifties gem that styled itself a “modern resort motel”. Nor is this just a Niagara phenomenon. In 1964, more than 61,000 motels, largely of the mom-and-pop variety, dotted the North American roadside. A generation later, that number is 16,000 and dropping.

The forces of globalization and gentrification, then, are at the gate. But at least the Falls remain. Inspired, perhaps, by their unending roar, the Fitzgeralds still have ambitions to make Niagara Falls the “wedding capital of the world”. And, at places like the Cadillac, the old charm endures for at least a while longer. “See how old fashioned we are,” the receptionist tells me proudly. “We still use a key.” I can’t think of a better lithium bath.

It’s not the act of reading I remember so much as an image and a feeling: a bald history teacher, who had seen me wearing an Anti-Flag T-shirt some weeks earlier and had since tried to become “buddy buddy” with me, now standing above me, looking down. I had the novel on my desk.

“Gatsby?”

I looked up: “Huh?”

“That novel has the best opening paragraph in all of American literature.”

I wanted him to go away.

“In my younger…”, he began, looming over me, looking directly at me.

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I was dismayed. What was happening? At first, when he got to the phrase “my father gave me some advice”, I thought that he was telling me about his own father, but as he continued, I realized that he was, in fact, quoting the aforementioned “best opening paragraph in all of American literature” from memory. I nodded, and he explained to me how important the concept of privilege was.

Gatsby lives on in the American consciousness in precisely this way: it is a high-school novel; a novel one is forced to read at a time in one’s life when one cares more about literally everything in the world other than classwork; and a novel one remembers very little of. It’s a novel about the terror of nostalgic longing, and the American Dream — the romantic delusion that you can become whoever you want, through sheer force of will — but it masks itself in our collective memory as a high-school meme.

My friend Kevin, who teaches high school in Dallas, has his students spend 10 minutes at the outset of each class reading silently. He gives them a list of books they can choose from, and he tells me that all the girls pick Gatsby. It’s nice to know that somewhere in at least one American high school, students are still reading novels. Kevin and I have an ongoing riff, based on a conversation he’d overheard between two students on the day of a quiz, during which one student asked another what The Great Gatsby was all about, and the student replied, “it’s about this guy named Big Joe Gatsby”.

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Over the phone, we concocted a scheme: he would ask his 12th-graders to write answers to the question: “How would you describe this book to someone who hasn’t read it?” Here are some of the answers:

“Gatsby is an interesting book with a rich + mysterious theme to it involving mostly Gatsby in that category.” “I would describe Gatsby as one guy crashing out and yearning for a married woman over 100 pages.” “This book is about wealth in society, new money and old money.”

Others identified the feeling of regret: “The Great Gatsby is a book full of the idea of ‘but what if they had just done this?’ As you read [it], you constantly find yourself in the position of asking, ‘But it’s so simple, just do it’.”

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Each of these contains hints of the double-motion of Gatsby in America: a hazy intuition of the classic American fascinations — wealth, envy, complicated romantic entanglement — and a barely literate initial engagement that degrades them over time into their simplest, most flippant form.

In 2013, two years after I graduated high school, a new major motion picture version of The Great Gatsby showed at the theater in my hometown in Ohio. It was the first movie I knew of that had 3D effects. I took pills and went to see it: something with the water — green light — wealth — romance; I remember money flying out of the screen into my eyes. The experience felt profoundly a-literary but also profoundly American — Gatsby no longer as novel, but as parodic, garish gluttony; seductive displays of wealth and a “conversation about privilege”.

In a culture oversaturated with discussions about privilege, some of the more obvious social “insights” of the novel fall flat today, but there are moments of phenomenological acuity, psychological precision, and descriptive defamiliarization — making the familiar strange to reveal it anew. These work to create a compelling portrait not so much of a country warped by wealth, but of a man possessed by nostalgia, and the dream of making and remaking himself.

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Jay Gatsby is nostalgic in a limerent, romantic way; he builds wealth, constructs his own identity, and turns his life into a performance for a memory. But when the fantasy becomes reality, in the face of Daisy, it crumbles. The real breaks through the dream, and Gatsby cracks.

Formally, the novel is less boring than I’d expected when I reread it recently. It produces textual nostalgia in the reader through its formal structure: Nick Carraway tells the story from the future, wistfully looking back on the time of the novel. Thus, as the scholar Niklas Salmose has noted, the reader experiences a kind of phenomenological nostalgia as he reads, which is part of the novel’s genius.

Like America, Gatsby is, in the words of the critic Gautam Kundu, “made gorgeous by the magic touch of a romantic imagination that nevertheless moves inexorably toward eventual disintegration and dissolution”; and yet we can’t help but be emotionally drawn into it, even as we stand at a semi-distance and watch with horror.

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Still, cultured people’s relationship with the novel borders on ironic, which is understandable. In 2014, my friend Adam Humphreys, a filmmaker, directed a six-minute film titled Baseball that also centers around a recitation of the first paragraph of Gatsby from memory. The protagonist, played by novelist Zachary German, is having an affair while his girlfriend is out of town. He is at his mistress’s apartment when his girlfriend calls and asks him to read the beginning of Gatsby, which she’d left on the bedside table — “Read from the beginning,” she commands him. “The part you always say.” After fumbling around at his mistress’s bookshelf, he can’t find a copy of Gatsby, so he stands upright and tries to recite it, pretending to read.

“In my younger and more vulnerable years,” he begins, “my father offered me some advice that I’ve been mulling over in my head ever since.” The camera switches from the mistress’s apartment to his girlfriend. “He told me there would be times in life when I would feel compelled to judge the actions of those around me, but that I should always remember that not everyone has had all of the advantages that I have had.”

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He takes a long pause; his girlfriend starts silently crying. “He told me that human goodness was not distributed equally, and that it would be unfair to act as though the alternative was true.” The camera pans to Singaporean baseball on TV. “This, giving the benefit of the doubt to my fellow man, has led me to a number of worthwhile moments.”

Today, I searched “Gatsby” in my Gmail inbox, and found: an interview with me that never came out, from 2013, in which the interviewer says that his roommate read What We Talk About When We Talk About Love after “having not read any fiction since The Great Gatsby when we were 16”; nine unopened emails from a rare bookseller; the word “Gatsby” in the Substack of a person whose name I don’t recognize and which I don’t remember subscribing to; The Great Gatsby on a list of Michael Clune’s “25 best American novels”; an email I forwarded to my now-dead friend Russell, who used to write college papers for a now-dead guy named Lucas, who I vaguely knew from Twitter, and for whom I edited the papers in 2015, for money; a screenshot of a one-star review of an apartment building called “Gatsby on Ross”, which ends, “The real Gatsby would be ashamed and horrified”.

“The real Gatsby” made me smile: Gatsby, the commodified literary object; Gatsby, clichéd symbol of wealth; Gatsby, phantom high-school impression; Gatsby, Leonardo DiCaprio; Gatsby, like all things in America, reduced to two opposites, always in tension with each other but unified in destroying every part of the culture they touch — worship of money and conversations about privilege; Gatsby, Big Joe Gatsby. The Gatsby we forget is the Gatsby we should most remember: a man possessed by a fantasy or fixation because his life has become devoid of spiritual significance.

It’s been 100 years since the novel came out. Much has changed, and much has stayed the same. Reading the novel today produces, at least for me, a slightly unrelated nostalgia for a time when American literature was more serious and more ambitious. But Gatsby also offers a timely exhortation to those who, giving into this nostalgia, wish to return to a past mode: nostalgic yearning is disguised, impotent pride. Many remain crippled by a kind of longing for an idealized past that never really existed, one that was empty in much the same way as the present, as an excuse for living impotently within the nothingness of modernity.

The Great Gatsby was a failure when it came out, but it is still worth reading a century hence. Its bleak, cynical view of self-determination was unpalatable to American readers then, and, as evidenced by the way culture has preserved it as a butchered meme, may still be unpalatable now. But it feels eerily relevant to today. May it become more than a nostalgic memory.

It must have been August, let’s say… 1980. The phrase “beach read” was a decade away from being coined (it only emerged as a marketing tool in 1990). I was 13, and had spent July at summer camp. While I was away, my uncle Ted — a writer who often received free books from publishers and newspapers — stayed in my room for a few days and left on my bedside table a copy of California Generation by Jacqueline Briskin. There is no way that Uncle Ted, who rightfully fancied himself an intellectual, read this novel before giving it to me. He probably glanced at the first page to see that it featured high-school students, and thought I might like it.

The cover promised “SUN, SIN, AND SEDUCTION”. And the back-cover blurb: “They’re the California Generation. The golden spoiled youth in a sun-drenched land of dreams — where the stars come out at night to see and be seen, where money, beauty, and sex pave the way to success, and where everyone hopes to ride off into the sunset…”

Briskin’s novel doesn’t disappoint: it delivers almost every kind of sex you can imagine — or, at least, every kind you could have imagined in 1980. But it’s more than just another bonkbuster (a portmanteau that was coined later, in 1989). There’s counter-culture rioting, lots of adultery, and several abortions. It also features a good deal of drugs, including an LSD trip where a dandelion communicates the secrets of the universe.

Did my parents object to me reading about such precocious topics? Did my father phone his brother to rebuke him for leaving wildly inappropriate material in my room? The answer to both questions is a resounding no.

My parents always let me read whatever I wanted. Our living room was lined with bookshelves containing everything from a complete collection of The World Book Encyclopedia to Fear of Flying, and I was free to help myself. Once, when I was staying at a friend’s house, her father caught us reading Judy Blume’s Forever. He roundly scolded us both (“You will not read this kind of trash in my house!”) before confiscating the book. I was fantastically jealous; it would have been much more fun to read Forever if I’d had to sneak around to do so.

With no such limits imposed upon me, I read all about SUN, SIN, AND SEDUCTION in plain sight — lounging in the living room, or on a chaise lounge in our backyard. I brought it to our country club to read on the pool’s dry deck, and I carried it to the dentist’s office and read it in the waiting room. I looked young, even for my age, so I’m sure I was met with disapproving and/or astonished stares as I flew through Briskin’s 534 steamy pages.

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First published in 1970, California Generation begins on the eve of graduation for California High’s class of 1960, and follows several characters through that tumultuous decade. There’s a vacuous beauty queen who must get married when she gets pregnant before graduation, a movie star’s son who’s addicted to heroin, and a straight-laced social climber who’s “struggling with his own homosexuality” (thanks again, back-cover blurb).

Despite the sensational marketing, the novel intelligently depicts important events and topics of the era, including the civil rights movement, John F Kennedy’s presidency and the Vietnam war. All of the characters are what EM Forster himself would have called round: morally complex, with rich and vivid histories. As a teen, my favourite storyline was the romance between Ken, a Japanese-American artist and son of a gardener, and a rich white girl named Leigh.

But when I think of reasons to forbid my impressionable young self from reading this novel, Ken and Leigh rank chief among them. Theirs is a volatile relationship, and more than once Leigh bears bruises after their arguments. “Masochism’s a nasty habit,” Ken tells her, when she confesses she likes it when he hits her. Both characters are portrayed as highly sympathetic, and a sensitivity reader today might worry about communicating a harmful message.

If my mother had picked it up — which she may well have, noticing how many times I re-read it over the years — would she have become concerned about me romanticising a violent relationship? Doubtful. The only time I remember my parents being troubled about a book was years later, when I was 16 and engrossed with Jean Stein’s oral biography of the tragic Warhol muse, Edie Sedgwick. Even then, my father didn’t tell me to stop reading it. He just explained he was worried I seemed to relate to such a troubled young woman, and asked if I wanted to speak to a therapist. I said, “No, thank you” — and went back to reading.

As a parent, I hewed to the philosophy I was raised on, and always let my daughter read anything she chose. She never picked up California Generation, but if she had, I might have initiated a conversation about many of the attitudes in the book, including the dated psychological analysis of the gay character, Marshall. But I also trust that my child has the ability — and the well-developed prior knowledge — to discard whatever wrongheaded or antiquated attitudes may be embedded within any novel’s pages. I trust her instincts and intelligence, and her ability to interact with a text, rather than adopt it as gospel.

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It never would have occurred to my parents that a book might be a brainwashing device. On those living room shelves, they had both testaments of The Bible, as well as William Peter Blatty’s The Exorcist (the mere title terrified me so much that I used to turn it around, spine facing inward). They also had a copy of Mein Kampf — not because they didn’t find its ideas abhorrent, of course they did; my father’s father died fighting in the Free French Airforce, and my mother is Jewish — but because they believed in the written word as a record of history, and that both the good and the evil were worthy of examination.

The eclectic breadth of my parents’ library, their utter lack of censorship and the conversations I heard them having about books gave me the freedom to retain my own mind, no matter what ideas I encountered on the page. Stories and characters, whether fictional or nonfictional, were never credo, but fodder for my own imagination and burgeoning teenage intellect.

Several years ago, a friend of mine house-sat for me with her teenage girls, who stayed for a few weeks in my daughter’s bedroom. My friend is a stricter mother than I, and had forbidden her 12-year-old from reading John Greene’s The Fault in Our Stars. When I got home and changed the sheets on my daughter’s bed, I found that very book wedged between the mattress and box spring. Did I rat the girl out to her mother? Of course not. Instead, I laughed, and slid it onto my daughter’s bookshelf, where she could find it any time she might want it.

The thing about books that contain adult content is that they also contain adult ideas. The best ones do not telegraph moral messages. At 13, while being thoroughly entertained by Briskin’s just-salacious-enough storylines, I was also learning about the sexual revolution, and the history of birth control and the evolution of the very ideas that may have led to my parents being so permissive about reading material.

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Surely, in this age of TikTok and unfettered internet access, there’s much to appreciate about first encountering adult material in the form of words, rather than video clips. And, unlike your average influencer, a novel will never tell you what to think. In this age of memorising hashtags and calling them opinions, what better exercise for young minds to get lost in stories from which they must draw their own conclusions, and develop their own ideas?

A name from the pages of legend: one of the finest independent bakers in all Hertfordshire! Surely, surely…

And it was then, peering through the glass, that she saw it. A squat golden figure, grinning and goggle-eyed. There could be no mistake: here was E.T., the Extra-Terrestrial, made entirely of marzipan.

Sarah knew at once that this was a gift from the gods. Only a few weeks before her father had taken her younger sister, Mary, to see E.T. at the cinema. Both had wept buckets. What was more, her father adored marzipan. She looked for a price tag. One pound seventy-five. Bargain!

If you’re wondering how I know all this, the answer lies in an online report on the BBC’s “Beds, Herts and Bucks” news page a few weeks ago, though I may have added a little fairy-tale stardust of my own. The marzipan E.T. figure still exists, which is why it made the news. As Jim’s daughter Mary explained, she found it after his death last year, perfectly preserved. A miracle? Well, not quite. Her father might have loved marzipan, Mary said, but he had enjoyed E.T. so much that he never wanted to eat it. “I am now its keeper,” she added, “and I’ll never eat it either.”

For those of us of a certain age, the only thing more terrifying than the prospect of eating 40-year-old marzipan is the realisation that fully four decades have elapsed since Steven Spielberg’s E.T. ruled the box office. I was almost eight when my parents took me to see it. I well remember my fascination with the basic premise — dwarfish alien botanist, disastrously stranded in the cultural desert of suburban California, is desperate to find his way home — and can even more vividly recall my utter desolation when it seemed the ugly little fellow’s race was run. And I’m happy to report that Spielberg’s film has lost none of its power. We watched it with my son during one of the lockdowns, and my wife’s decision to invest in a huge packet of tissues was richly vindicated. (He cried too, but not as much as me.)

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The story behind E.T. is well known, and has never better been told than in the review by Time’s critic, Richard Corliss, a few days before the film’s release in June 1982:

Once upon a time there was a little boy named Steven, who lived in a mythical land called Suburbia. His house was just like everybody else’s house; his family’s car and dog and swimming pool were just like everybody else’s too. But little Steven’s dreams were different. He dreamed of telling the stories of his strange land — wonderful tales of his home and his school, his parents and especially his friends — and making them shine like new. So every night he would tiptoe outside his ranch-style house and make a wish on the brightest star in the suburban sky. Over and over he would whisper, “Help me tell the story …”

E.T. is a fairy-tale about growing up in suburbia and dreaming of the world beyond. It’s a film about feeling different and struggling to fit in, about the outsider hiding within us all. It’s also, very famously, a film about a child — the hero, Eliott — wounded by his parents’ divorce. Spielberg had been deeply hurt by his own parents’ separation in the early Sixties, and had actually been working on a fictionalised version of their story before he turned to E.T.. And even now, 40 years on, it remains a sublimely affecting account of what family trauma does to an impressionable child — all the more so because it is, of course, a child’s escapist fantasy.

But E.T. is also very obviously a film of a particular era. The late Seventies and early Eighties are much in vogue at the moment. ABBA — peak years 1976 to 1981 — have retaken the stage to rapturous applause, albeit in digital avatar form. Star Wars’s Obi-Wan Kenobi, created by Spielberg’s close friend George Lucas in 1977, now has a Disney series of his own. A fourth Indiana Jones film, continuing the story Spielberg and Lucas began in 1981, is out next year. Even Tom Cruise’s Top Gun: Maverick, which currently dominates the box office, tries to recapture the spirit of the mid-Eighties, Ronald Reagan’s shiny, swaggering, shoulder-padded heyday, when it was forever morning again in America.

There’s an obvious generational explanation for all this. If, like me, you remember sobbing at the cinema as E.T. lay dying, then you’re probably in your late forties or early fifties, easy prey for the nostalgia industry. Life is more complicated than it used to be: more hectic, more stressful, more fraught with compromise and disappointment. As the accountants at Disney’s streaming service know only too well, it’s natural to yearn for the simplicity and innocence of childhood. When you watch E.T. now and feel the tears pricking at your eyeballs, are you crying for the alien, or for Elliott — or for yourself?

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Were the late Seventies and early Eighties really a more innocent time, though? No, of course not. Flick through the pages of any newspaper and you see stories just as heart-breaking and hair-raising as any you’d find today: revolution and war in the Middle East, bloody repression in Poland, a child-abuse panic in America, terrorist atrocities in Northern Ireland. For Spielberg’s generation, the scars of Watergate and Vietnam were still painfully raw – as were memories of the Holocaust, which his Orthodox Jewish parents had often discussed with him when he was growing up. “I was a scared kid,” he told an interviewer from Rolling Stone in 2007. “I was born a nervous wreck, and I think movies were one way of transferring my own private horrors to everyone else’s lives.”

But there was a palpable difference between then and now, and you need only rewatch a film like E.T. or the original Star Wars to see it. For all Spielberg’s talk about private horrors, both films are fundamentally, unselfconsciously optimistic. People are decent, Han Solo has a heart of gold, and tomorrow really will be brighter than today. In E.T., for example, much of the tension surrounds a shadowy group of government agents who are determined to capture the alien for themselves. At first glance it seems all very Watergate, echoing Seventies conspiracy thrillers like The Conversation or The Parallax View. But it turns out that their leader, “Keys”, is actually a thoroughly decent fellow, a grown-up version of young Elliott himself. Official America, in other words, isn’t so bad after all. “I’ve been wishing for this,” Keys says at one point, “since I was 10 years old.” It’s hard to imagine a US government agent in 2022 being given a line like that.

Both films also share a fundamental faith in modernity itself: in science, technology and the idea of the future. In Star Wars, it’s true that the ships and uniforms are battered and grubby, reflecting a sense of decline since the Empire replaced the Republic — a very Roman theme. But none of the characters ever doubts that technology is good for them. There are no environmental costs; you can fire up your speeder as often as you like without worrying about climate change. Nor does anybody really question their society’s reliance on walking artificial intelligence, except for the barman at the Mos Eisley cantina (“We don’t serve their kind here”). Like E.T.’s alien plant-enthusiast, droids are useful, good-natured, even kind-hearted. They’re not trying to take over the world. They’re just trying to help.

If you want an insight into the mentality behind films like E.T., perhaps the best place to go is the Nasa visitor centre at Cape Canaveral, a vast monument to the optimism of a vanished age. The entire experience is infused with a sense of faith: in America, in technology, in progress, in humanity itself. On the screens above you, a succession of elderly men and women with reassuring Midwestern accents talk of comradeship and teamwork, duty and commitment. None of them questions whether it was worth it, or doubts that they were doing the right thing. And the entire experience is underpinned by a sense of narrative, a story driving towards a moment of apotheosis. That moment, of course, is 20 July 1969, when Neil Armstrong stepped onto the moon. “The first thing I think about when I think about the Sixties,’” Spielberg told Rolling Stone, “is when we landed on the moon.”

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But my overwhelming impression after visiting Nasa a few months ago, rather like my feeling after rewatching E.T., was simply one of nostalgia. Armstrong’s giant leap for mankind was more than a half a century ago; for children today, it is as remote as the Battle of the Somme was to children in 1969. To put it bluntly, the moment has passed. The Space Race is over. Nasa’s government funding has dried up; it relies heavily on private sponsorship now. When we think of technology today, we often think of the costs, not the benefits. Despite the miracle of the Covid vaccines, a believer in scientific progress today runs a gauntlet of cynicism and disillusionment. And who now believes in the future?

So if there was a film in the summer of 1982 that foreshadowed our present, it wasn’t E.T.. It was a competitor released just two weeks later, which performed very poorly at the box-office but became one of the most aesthetically influential science-fiction visions ever made. With its neon cities shrouded in smog and pollution, its streets crowded with rogues, immigrants, whores and replicants, its nightmarish future of driving rain and endless night, Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner could hardly feel more different from the moral universe of Spielberg’s fairy-tale. But today our world seems closer to Scott’s vision than to Spielberg’s. And perhaps that’s why E.T. still commands such power, as a reminder of what we’ve lost.

All of which, of course, brings us back to that marzipan. As Jim Robson’s daughter Mary told the BBC, they would get it out now and again in the intervening years, to remind them of days gone by. “It was nice to see it again, it’s like a familiar face, so finding it wasn’t sad because it just always made us laugh,” she said wistfully. “I took it home to look after and I haven’t put it away. I like to see it every day.”

A bittersweet story, then. But perhaps the last word should go to St Albans’s equivalent of the engineers behind the Apollo missions, the director of Simmons Bakers. He was pleased to hear that their creation had lasted forty years, he said. “But I still wouldn’t recommend eating it.”

Melancholy then, exactly 400 years ago, was understood as a condition which affected the body, the mind and the soul. The humours were imbalanced, overtaken by an excess of black bile. “There is no greater cause of melancholy than idleness, no better cure than business,” Burton wrote. Lovers, solitaries, thinkers, artists, scholars, the sad and the fearful were all prey to it.

In her superb new monograph about Burton’s work, A User’s Guide to Melancholy, Mary Ann Lund, a scholar of Renaissance literature, explains how melancholy has always had a span as wide as the mind’s horizon. Feeling doleful, dejected and withdrawn? That would be melancholy. Mad as two snakes? Melancholy again.

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Although we have abandoned melancholy as a medical condition, we have retained something of its broad and pervading air. It has become a thoughtful sort of sadness, one that is not necessarily entirely unpleasant. There is longing, nostalgia and some regret in it. Welsh has an untranslatable word for it, hiraeth, a kind of melancholy produced by feeling alienated from one’s dream of home. We may feel melancholy without knowing quite why; we may even enjoy it, which former ages saw as one of its dangers.

“It is Siren-like and alluring, promising the pleasurable life of solitude, leisure, and contemplation before it traps its victim into an inescapable cycle of loneliness and self-destructive thought patterns,” Lund writes, of the melancholy Burton studied.

She picks out some of Burton’s case studies of melancholy’s extremes. Here is the man who was afraid to urinate lest he drown his town; here the baker who believed himself made of butter and became understandably fearful of standing near his oven; here is Charles VI of France who believed he was made of glass, and the Emperor Charlemagne, who became infatuated with a woman, and on her death with her ring, and after the ring was cast into a lake, with the lake.

It is not for us to diagnose these conditions. As Lund puts it, wisely, “substituting our new words for old detracts from the dignity of those who suffered, talked about and treated mental disorders in the past’.

Rather, what is thrilling about melancholy for us now is that it is a holistic condition. It is a disease which afflicts the soul and spirit as much as the body and mind. As a consequence, Burton suggests, it must therefore be treated in a multi-dimensional way. He is adamant that there is no universal cure: treatment must be tailored to the individual.

My favourite of Burton’s case histories is the story of the Earl of Montford, afflicted with dejection, who was treated by the Paduan physician Giambattista da Monte in 1549. Da Monte told his patient to leave the stressful environment of Court, to abstain from pork, fish and sex, and to spend easeful time at the Earl’s family home on Lake Constance. The Earl asked for and received a compromise on the sex ban, did otherwise as he was told, and healed. One suspects most of us would.

But the lesson here is Da Monte’s diverse, comprehensive and individual approach. For a model which concentrates merely on symptoms, as much contemporary pharmaceutically led medicine does, cannot be as effective as one which also addresses causes.

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In 2018 I had a breakdown — an extreme case of melancholy, in Burton’s terms — complete with mania and delusions. I did not imagine that I was made of glass or butter, thankfully, though such at least might have kept me quiet indoors.

Instead, comparatively workaday fantasies of aliens and security services — and the possibility of world peace, if only I could bring it about — led me to range around madly, to write off my car, to wind up, naked but for my boots, on the roof of an alarmed farmer’s Land Rover, and eventually to hospital.

Writing Heavy Light, the story of my breakdown and healing, worked for me in the same way that Burton’s Anatomy seems to have done for him. You research, arrange and explore what happened to you. By talking through your experiences in an intimate dialogue with the reader — a generous, forgiving, interested figure in my conception, and slightly more time-pressed than Burton’s seems to have been, given Anatomy runs to over 1300 pages in paperback — you find a kind of harmony with them, and with your condition.

Investigating options for my treatment and researching the many ways in which we have conceived of the mind’s distempers was engrossing and often shocking. Recovery rates from breakdown were as good as ours in the early twentieth century, when it was accepted you could have a nervous collapse and then get better.

Psychiatry accepts that things went badly awry in the early 1960s, with the chemical imbalance theory, which held that distress came from a deficiency or excess, not in the humours, but in our brains. Psychotropic chemical solutions were mass-prescribed. The problem, as the sublimely melancholy Blackadder of the trenches said of the alliance system preceding the First World War, was that the theory was bollocks.

Happily, we are moving towards a Burtonian conception of mental distress which gives equal roles to the mind, body and spirit in the restoration of wellbeing. If you are suffering, we now know, you need time off work, a support group of family and friends, exercise, the guidance of a physician who may or may not prescribe medication, an acceptance that we all suffer sometimes, as well as the help and perspective offered by the arts, nature and creativity.

This was Burton’s original prescription, and we now share it. Researching Heavy Light, I found a widespread and growing conviction, shared by psychiatrists and psychologists, that holistic treatment — what the President of the Royal College of Psychiatrists, Dr Adrian James, refers to as “the biopsychosocial approach” — is the most hopeful way through what Burton would have seen as a worldwide crisis of melancholy.

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All of us know someone who suffers. This may partly be due to the pandemic, which forced introspection on to so many, and partly because we talk about it, with a frankness that the internet has surely multiplied. I found that Burton’s conviction that what ails you ails you alone, in a specific and personal way, was vital to my recovery. Taking control of the language was crucial.

“How would you have treated me when I was in the grip of delusions?” I asked Yasmin Ishaq, a leading NHS practitioner in Open Dialogue, a progressive treatment for psychosis and schizophrenia which achieves dramatic results through talk and support, with a minimal role for medication.

“We normalise them,” she told me. “I would have said, ‘This is an absolutely understandable reaction to what has happened to you.’” Open Dialogue understands delusions as a kind of emergency language, a way of making sense of a world the sufferer can no longer bear.

Still, I was haunted by the fear that despite a long and robust recovery, I might not ever quite come back from what had happened to me. But then came a quietly amazing thing. “It’s not about curing, it’s about healing,” Yasmin Ishaq said.

It was so simple and yet it was an epiphany. In Burton’s terms, I was given permission to think about my path as an ongoing rebalancing — of humours, in his conception; of body and mind, of work and life, of rest and relationships, in ours.

Discussing melancholy and acute traumatic crisis with Mary Ann Lund and the psychiatrist Ahmed Hankir on Radio 4 last week, I used the term breakdown. The astonishing Hankir, an award-winning clinician who has performed his stigma-busting show The Wounded Healer to 75,000 people in 13 countries, queried the term. He experienced his crisis, he said, as a breakthrough.

And this is why I rather love the idea of Burton’s melancholy. It accepts a universe of different experiences and reactions, a universe as vast as humans are various. In his Ode on the subject, John Keats saw “veiled melancholy’s sovran shrine” as omnipresent – in his case, even in the “temple of delight”. Burton’s expanse of melancholy, he suggests, if only in tints and splashes, is part of all of us.

Horatio Clare’s Heavy Light: A Journey Through Madness, Mania and Healing is published by Chatto & Windus. 

It was home sickness, and there wasn’t a pill for that. I was already many miles from home and about to be ‘dropped off’ — as the phrase goes — at boarding school. Even today, nearly half a century on, that passage of road makes me feel physically ill.

Within the school gates, home sickness was generally regarded as a sign of weakness; a sickly condition that affected boys of a more delicate constitution. So, as a child, I learnt to hide it. It would upset my mother too much if she knew how much I missed my bedroom, my toys, my little comforts, my family. And it would mark me out as weedy and fragile. I think all the boys hid it one way or another. Better just get on and make the best of it. Man up!

My wife left her home, Israel, after the army, to go to university in the UK. And she stayed. She found a job, got married, had children, and made a life for herself a long way from her home. Like many immigrants, she learnt not to speak too much of homesickness. It was regarded by some as a sign of disloyalty to the place in which she chose to settle. “If you miss it so much, why don’t you go back?” Migrants are told to integrate, to put the old behind them. Get on and make the best of it. Homesickness is a condition that dare not speak its name.

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But it wasn’t always thus. Not that I made the connection back then, but the classical texts we were reading at school often articulated precisely the sort of longing that we were all being trained to supress. Odysseus’s ten-year journey back to Ithaca, Ovid’s poems from exile, they all carry a deep yearning for the familiar patterns of home. And the Bible itself, the core text of my pathologically Christian school, is saturated with the same desire. “By the rivers of Babylon, we sat down and wept when we remembered Zion.” Such sentiments stayed with the Jewish people throughout nearly two thousand years of exile.

For the past two months, I have been living in Tel Aviv, learning a new language, learning new ways. And perhaps because of the evident joy and pride of so many here, living once again in their historic homeland, my own yearning for home has started to bubble up. Tea, bath, a proper bacon sandwich, irony, church spires, soft grass — the list is my own, but one that may not be wholly unfamiliar to those who have gone to live abroad. I love Israel. But I have started to miss my home.

So when and why did homesickness become a feeling that is now ever so slightly looked down upon, suspected, discredited? Consider the way in which the word “nostalgia” is used in current political debates around Brexit. Brexit is driven by nostalgia, argues Michel Barnier, the EU’s chief Brexit negotiator, and “nostalgia serves no purpose.” Likewise the historian Max Hastings argues that Brexit is motivated by a “crazy nostalgia”. There are hundreds of examples like these. As Freddie Sayers puts it in his latest Post “Nostalgia has become one of the taboos of our political age.”

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Ok, the word nostalgia has developed a slightly different nuance to that of homesickness, but they are strongly connected — the word being a combination of the Greek word “nostos” meaning “homecoming”, and “algos” signifying suffering or grief. And the term nostalgia was coined in the late 17th century by the physician Johannes Hofer to describe a condition that was said to have particularly affected Swiss soldiers on manoeuvres abroad. As Krystine Batcho writes in her study of nostalgia for the American Psychological Association: “Much of the early interest in nostalgia was motivated by the concern for optimal performance of military resources during European conflicts.”

How, though, could a feeling that was so valued by ancient texts as something noble have come to be so delegitimised — and with Hofer, medicalised — at the advent of modernity.

Susan Matt, in her fascinating history, Homesickness: An American History, recounts the story of the journalist Katherine Lanpher, who in 2004 moved from Minnesota to New York City. Feeling homesick, she decided to cheer herself up with a manicure. Lanpher tells the Korean woman who is working on her nails how she is feeling. The manicurist, though herself far from home, is totally unsympathetic: “Don’t be big baby!” she responded.

Now you could read this as the nail bar woman challenging a wealthy white woman to check her privilege. Nonetheless, “Don’t be big baby!” has become the characteristic attitude of modern life to the feeling of homesickness. It developed, according to Matt, because homesickness was regarded as a threat to the well-being of those who travelled far from home, especially those who left home in search of work or in order to fight for their country.

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Homesickness was re-described as something backward looking. It didn’t cohere with the philosophy of rugged individualism characteristic of the pioneer and the forward-looking entrepreneur — it was un-American. Matt sees the rise of international corporations in the 20th century as largely responsible for the disparagement of homesickness, seeing it, as they did, as an obstacle to a mobile workforce. Homesickness indicated a lack of ambition, it was the very hallmark of a loser.

As Matt recounts, child psychologists began to tell parents that they should prepare their children for a life of mobility. The behaviourist psychologist John B Watson advised parents not to hug their children, as this would create emotional attachments that would be difficult to break when their child left home. Matt tells of one doctor who understood overly affectionate parents to be “America’s gravest menace” because they kept their sons from fighting the Communists. Homesickness was infantile dependence.

All of which illuminates something of what is behind the charge of ‘nostalgia’ so commonly levelled as an insult against Brexiters. Part of what I have against the Remain campaign is that it regards as inadmissible any sense of a yearning for lost home. It demands of Brexiters that they explain the advantage of leaving the EU, of the reclamation of national sovereignty, in exclusively economic terms.

Like the cod psychologists of the 20th century, they warn against attachments. In the borderless, globalised future they fondly imagine, home will be everywhere and nowhere. In order to keep up, people will need to be as fluid as capital. What they are saying to us is basically: “Don’t be big baby!” I remember this damaging line from my prep schools days. I didn’t like it then. And I don’t like it now.

Some months ago, UnHerd tasked its columnists with the invention of a new political party. I called my party Home. Perhaps only now, as I remind myself of the feelings I had on that miserable road to school, do I really begin to understand what that was all about. Homesickness is as legitimate a political instinct as any other.

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