The Daily Novel

News at Ten is back, steeped in nostaligia. The usual diet including rich offerings from the current murders, including a report on the first day of the trial of the Suffolk murderer, although nothing happened. And more stale bread from the Princess Di iinquest in which the butler was desparately trying to find something new to say, which he hadn’t used already in his books and television appearances.

All presided over by the avuncular figure of Trevor Macdonald, reassuring us that even in this age of terror all coloured people are not suicide bombers.

Nostalgia is, of course, big business in the digital television age. All those cheap repeats of the sitcoms and comedy shows of a bygone era.

And I got a whiff of it in Colchester High Street over the weekend where I bought a couple of shirts. This morning I put one of them on. It requires cuff links! (Happily I still possess a pair which I wear with my dinner jacket. )

But cuff links went out with my father’s generation. In those days men not only had to hunt for their cuff links, when they changed their shirt. They had to find the collar stud which was necessary to attach the separate collar (often starched) to the shirt (nearly always white). Tommy Handley, the Ricky Gervaise of his age, famously died of a heart attack when down on his hands and knees looking for his collar stud beneach the furniture.

At least we have not yet got back to that. And at least we have not gone back to the days when men could wear a shirt of any colour so long as it was white.