A good friend has been passing on to me copies of The Oldie, a British magazine that defies easy categorisation. While The Oldie is stuffed with first-class writing, the bonus has been the pleasure of dipping into print rather than flicking through screenfuls of phone rubbish in a futile merry-go-round of diminishing rewards and increasing self-loathing. I’m not one to wallow in the past, but I’ve found myself mawkishly nostalgic for Sunday breakfasts shared with a deconstructed Sydney Morning Herald (and the Sunday Times in former years). A sudden flashback: In the seventies I was interviewed in London for a job with the British Council. At one point my interviewer (after we had smoked half a dozen cigarettes) asked me what order I read The Guardian in, a question that is nowadays as redundant as the cigarettes.
I now have back copies of The Oldie within reach at various places in the house near comfortable chairs.
At the same time, I’m currently doing some heavyweight reading on theories of psychotherapy which has necessarily involved digging deep into childhood memories. Curiously, The Oldie evokes a memory of a dentist waiting room in the English town I grew up in. The dentist’s surgery is in a posh detached house. The silent waiting room looks out onto a garden strewn with damp autumn leaves. I wait in gabardine shorts and long socks wondering if I’ll have gas today, and thinking about the rubber mask and the sweet smell. On the coffee table is a pile of magazines – probably Hertfordshire Countryside – that are stacked with such precision that nobody dares remove any of them.
The curious power of The Oldie lies in its artful evocation of British middle class life in an idealized and unchanging continuum since the nineteen sixties when I sat in that waiting room. It deftly flicks the present aside with clever articles that archly mock the world of influencers and memes. It celebrates being old and clever and wise. It presents laser-sharp book reviews and articles. It would have been shelved between Punch and Private Eye in 1970, but it has only been around since 1994. It’s no surprise that its founding editor was Richard Ingrams.
Long live The Oldie.
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Stuart Campbell author 