In His Day

A head trip and a nostalgia trip, but above all an endlessly intriguing, page-turning romp

- by John Francis O'Neill

It was the sound of the aeroplane that first alerted Shay to something strange. As he was strolling back down Viewfield after the nostalgia visit to his primary school, St Michael's, he was given cause to look up by the unusually loud noise of a jet engine. He was wondering whether it was so loud because it was flying low. He realised that he wouldn’t know: he couldn’t remember the last time the sound of an aeroplane had caught his attention.

Ten feet further on, he passed a woman in her mid-thirties. She struck him as somehow old-fashioned. It wasn’t one thing. In fact, it was pretty much everything. Her short but neck-hugging hairstyle, her knee-length denim dress, her beige tights... These days, women’s tights were almost always black. Had been since he was in his late teens in the early eighties. In fact, at first black tights had seemed quite shocking - they looked morbid, or even slutty. A couple of minutes later, an orange van passed him with a distinctive white logo on its side reading “LEB”. The same logo had appeared on every electricity bill his household had received when he was a kid. The London Electricity Board. He hadn’t seen that logo in years — decades, even. The LEB had ceased to exist long ago.

Continuing his way up Viewfield, he idly noted that a car parked at the kerb had a metal bumper. It also had a ‘G’ suffix on its registration plate, from before the letter system was scrapped. He snorted when he saw that the car parked immediately behind this one also had a metal bumper and an old registration number, in this case “J”. Must be retro-oriented round here, he thought. But he had a strange feeling in his stomach, not least because he was fairly sure the cars he had passed on the way here were modern.