Weaponised Nostalgia – Or how my grandmother's toast may lead to Armageddon

There was something magical about my grandmother's toast. I'm not sure quite what benevolent spells she weaved over what was – to all intents and purposes – just a slice of burned flour and water smeared in congealed cow's milk, but it worked. She would hand slice some fresh white bread, toast it under her eye level grill, then – and I think this may have been where the magic happened – hit the crunchy top with the back of the knife to make little dents all the way around the edge. This meant that the real, thick, creamy butter that she then spread over it would ooze inside the crunchy exterior – creating the most delicious bread and butter experience in the known universe.

I have tried to recreate it myself, but to no avail. I am now the proud owner of those butter knives – handed over to me when I left home in a hailstorm of helpful kitchen items – and I can confirm that there is no magic in them. Bread is just bread, butter is just butter, a grill is just a source of heat. Maybe I need to eat it in the dining room of an unremarkable semi-detached house in walking distance of Guildford station with a glass of warm Ribena, preferably on a crisp late October morning at the beginning of half-term with a bald, cynical old man telling me the story of Sweeney Todd as he plays tug of war with his beloved Labrador?

Maybe it's not the toast.

Nostalgia is a powerful weapon, the right smell, a certain song, an old TV show, a glimpse of a childhood toy, these things all create certain chemical reactions in the brain. Happy fuzzy memories of a happier time, before jobs, mortgages, children, Brexit, Trump and the ever-present threat of apocalypse. I don't think I ever felt safer than on those childhood holidays to my grandparents' houses. Either to Devon – where you could be forgiven for thinking you were in a hotel as the toast came on a toast-rack and the butter was often in sachets (my grandmother was a thrifty woman who presented me with a margarine tub filled with sachets of vinegar, mustard, ketchup and tartar sauce she had 'saved' from the Wrey Arms on our many visits there), the Ribena was substituted for Lemon Barley Water, and the old man had all his hair – with barely a touch of grey – and told you golfing stories while he watched snooker. Different, but every bit as magical, or Guildford – depending on which bit of the country we were living in at the time. Either way, Mum and Dad knew how to get themselves a bit of quality child-free time.

Any excuse to post this - occasionally referred to as

the best song of all time by me - John Mellencamp classic

I come from a generation for which the most powerful of memories tend to be triggered by the TV. I recently questioned the fact that some of my most emotional reactions are for American small towns – despite having grown up in the bleak grey landscape of 1980s Guildford, and the rural idylls of Devon (if you have ever visited Bideford, you will know how much I am stretching the definition of rural idyll) either way, neither of those places bear even a passing resemblance to Kingston Falls, or Hill Valley (same town, different names fact-spotters). As the massive success of Ready Player One confirms, the films we watch as kids have a powerful place in our hearts.

Not just films but all pop culture, who among us doesn't occasionally reread a favourite book, or listen to a favourite album in the hope of glimpsing our younger selves smiling back at us? I am still so in love with the Shire that I can reread just the opening chapters of Lord of the Rings without needing to finish the book. It is like a brief weekend back in a home town that never really existed. I can be lost in happy memories of the corridors of Galactica and the rocky outcroppings of Eternia every bit as much as I can by strolling through Victoria or Stoke Parks on a sunny afternoon – more so, because they remain unchanged.

I say they have remained unchanged, but that's not entirely true. If you have ever been hit with a powerful enough nostalgia wave to watch old episodes of Thundercats, Transformers, Mask etc. etc. on Youtube, then you, like me, have probably been shocked to discover that what you remember as a perfectly crafted fantasy world of good vs evil, powerful characters and dizzying special effects (the effects have not aged well, especially not in one of my personal childhood favourites, The Box of Delights, though it has only added to its charm and I still rewatch it every Christmas) is, in fact, a thinly veiled advert for easily broken toys.

I still have no happier memory than the unbridled joy

I experienced at watching the first episode of Thundercats.

And they have stayed that way. If you spend any time at all on social media these days, you are almost certainly going to see at least one 'Like and Share if you remember this,' meme every day. They are harmless fun, images of Speak and Spells, Worzel Gummidge, Donkey Kong and Stretch Armstrong, reminding you of a simpler time. Why not like them, share them, and bring a bit of joy to your contemporaries?

Well, why not indeed. It depends entirely on how you feel about data-mining and targeted advertising, or building up fake ratings for pages that can be sold on to the highest bidder (usually some demented racist hategroup or another). If, for example, you continually like clips of 80s cartoons, arcade games, BMX bikes and Garbage Pail Kids, then it can be reasonably assumed you are somewhere in your forties, and a bit of a geek. Or, if you like pictures of sit-up-and-beg racing bikes, stuff-of-nightmares china dolls and teddy bears and Muffin the Mule then you are either racing towards your three quarters of a century, or a fucking hipster. Either way, this helps the corporations bombard you with adverts for whatever they think you should buy, and find the right cartoon to put in that advert to gently nudge you into it. No Top Cat, I don't want another mortgage you sell out bastard, and fuck you Fred Flintstone, you corporate shill. Emotional manipulation via your happiest childhood memories can never be a good thing.

This can only get worse. I confidently predict a Philip K. Dick style future in which we all access the internet directly from inside our brains via a chip – for convenience's sake. A chip which will have incorporated a feedback loop capable of accessing our fondest memories and utilising them to sell us things. A happy world where our heart's desires are transmitted straight to the people able to make them happen, where you only have to think of a thing you want and it can be yours.

A world where they can use the smell of my grandmother's toast to make me believe I want to buy a handgun and vote for a despot.

Not long to go now...

Tis the season to be shopping, fa la la la la, la la la la

Tis the season to be shopping, fa la la la la, la la la la.

I fucking hate Christmas Shopping, fa la la la la, la la la la.

To be honest, I hate all shopping, fa la la, fa la la, fa laa laa.

I'm a grumpy middle-aged bastard, fa la la la la, la la la la.

This is the Christmas tree in the town where I live this year

presented without comment

My earliest memories of going Christmas shopping involve getting the train up to London from Guildford, going round Hamleys (which was very much like a fantasy dream sequence from a movie at the time, all trains and tinsel and elves and magic) and then going to watch ET at the pictures. I'm pretty sure this memory is utterly garbled with a whole load of others, particularly since we lived in Cranleigh when ET came out. I was only five, so I think I'm allowed to misremember this stuff.

Once we were safely relocated to Devon, the Christmas tradition became a family car ride to Barnstaple (seriously, we lived in Bideford, and if you couldn't get it in Woolworths or Jimbos you probably couldn't get it in Bideford) where we would all split off to buy gifts, before meeting up outside Marks and Spencers in time to go home: where my mother would berate me for having bought nothing but Transformers and comics. Gifts are hard.

By the 90s, I was taking my Christmas shopping trips to Barnstaple on the bus, without parental assistance. This meant that my mother was unable to berate me for spending the whole afternoon in Second Spin and coming home with nothing other than Black Sabbath records (original first pressing Vertigo) because she didn't know. Thus began my 90s tradition of running round Gateways on Christmas eve and buying everyone shit biscuits.

Come the millennium everything changed. I don't mean the advent of online shopping, I mean I began my future of working in jobs that are relentless all day every day slog right up until Christmas Day itself. I was a postman then, and on reflection it was much easier than being in the personalised tat industry where I find myself now. The bus to Barnstaple continued to be ridden – though in more of a rush, and usually on a Thursday afternoon – I got an 180g Vinyl repressing of Meet The Residents, and everybody else got biscuits from Somerfield.

Then I moved to the middle of nowhere, the bus to Barnstaple (or anywhere really) only went once a month, if the moon was fat and the wolves were running, and the job in the tat industry began. Thank you internet shopping. In all honesty, once I had moved in with my now wife, then girlfriend, my Christmas shopping became more a matter of handing over money since I could now inhabit an ages old male stereotype and leave the shopping to the missus. She is still not happy about this arrangement, I still use the job as an excuse. I can only get away on Sunday afternoons at best. I still forget that shops open on Sundays now. I am old.

If you go googling for images to illustrate Christmas Shopping

all you get is smug wankers with shiny bags like this

This is nobody's reality

I do still have to buy gifts for the wonderful woman who does the hard work of real christmas shopping, so I am glad of the internet. Working long hours at a computer screen in November/December means you can have a window open on amazon and shop while you work. This used to be the perfect solution. Sadly, Ebay/Google/Facebook/Twitter etc. now log everything you have looked at, and blast it into the pop-up ads of every page you see. I now have to cradle my laptop away from my wife for the whole of December in case it flashes up ads for every single thing I have idly browsed in consideration of gift buying. I think I'm getting away with it by alternately telling her she wouldn't like the German Scheizer porn I'm watching and that I'm looking for her replacement on Guardian Soulmates.

When it comes to receiving gifts, I am a relatively well off forty year old man. I genuinely have everything I need/want except for a whole bunch of records and books, and the only way to find out which ones I would like would be for me to put together some kind of fucking wedding list for you, like a total prick might. The entire point of buying gifts is to show how well you know someone, give them a thing you think that they will like. I don't like things, give your money to Amnesty or chuck it in a homeless guy's coffee cup (as long as it's not the one he's drinking out of). That's the Christmas spirit, not some novelty plastic tat that I will rewrap and give to some other person I want to pretend to care about next year.

I like seeing the people I care about, I like sitting around having drinks with them, I like Christmas movies, I will always cry like a girl watching It's a Wonderful Life, every year. I like family Christmas Cocktail hour (it's never just an hour) and I like Christmas. I still hate the fucking gifts though, don't get me any. Humbug to all of you.

Here is my dog Sky in a Christmas hat

She hates Christmas too

And yes, that is The Box of Delights on in the background

The Perils of Getting Selfies with a Massive Murderous Monster on the Moors

Aside from the first six years which, in my failing memory, have become a gritty urban life on the wrong side of the A3 in Guildford, where a toddler can fall into a snowdrift on a footbridge and not be discovered for weeks, during which time he learns to fend for himself, ultimately running a gang of sentient snowmen on the mean streets of Stoughton (my parents assure me I was not in there for more than thirty seconds and I should stop moaning about it and telling massive great lies) I have lived most of my life in beautiful Devon, and have lived with a dog for more of it than I haven't (I would say I've owned dogs, but that would imply that I have some kind of control over the stubborn furry wankers). This is why it is surprising that for most of my life, I have shown little to no interest in the bits of Devon that aren't pubs.

In my defence, my first dog, Rambo, was more than happy to just walk round the corner to the Portobello, where the barmaids would feed him kit-kats and Guinness. He was very much a town dog, since we lived in Bideford at the time, and his favourite walks were on weekend mornings – hoovering up leftover takeaways from the pavements – he only needed a lead for the look of the thing and very rarely moved more than a couple of feet from my ankle. By the time we moved out here to the countryside his arthritis was so bad that it was all he could do to get to the pub for a saucer of Guinness and a bag of pork scratchings without me having to carry him most of the way back.

Rambo and I, when we were young and pretty

Rizla, my second dog, was fond of big walks up on the moors, but since she was so easy to walk on the not-Dartmoor-moors near home – since she was terrified of sheep and cows, and could run around off lead wherever we went – I didn't often get out to the real Dartmoor-moors with her. My cat, Kahlo (sometimes referred to as Bitey) also got sulky if she didn't come out for walks with us, and we couldn't take her in the car, so nearby was where we went. Rizla was also far too easily tempted by the lure of pork scratchings in the pub, and was friendly enough that that was what we did.

Rizla was every bit as upset about the cat muscling in on her walks as she looks here

There used to be two cat-dogs running about with her until Heisenberg died

But since I got Sky a year ago, it's all been a bit different. She's an Alaskan Malamute, which, if you've never owned one, is a bit like having a pet cow. She is enormous, stubborn, needs rubbing down, brushing and drying as soon as you get in from a walk if you don't want her to get a million different weird skin infections (so maybe it's more like having a horse than a cow?) and seems a lot less murdery than she really is (not cow-like at all, poor choice of simile, I apologise – wolf seemed too obvious). My step-daughter doesn't believe me that Sky is quite so murdery, but then she hasn't witnessed it firsthand since she doesn't live with us anymore. She just sees the big cute fluffy doggy and can't believe it is actually mostly wolf, with all the prey instincts that that entails. Her view of the animal kingdom has been warped by a weakness for Disney films, and she tends to anthropomorphise dogs. Also she has never seen Sky throwing a rabbit around the garden prior to ripping it to pieces, or dragging a mole from its hole, or ripping the tail feather off a pheasant. I have, and I am getting a lot better at stopping her now.

My wife now works nearly every Saturday morning, so I resolved, about a year ago, to go up a different tor every weekend and get a selfie with the big dog. Thus getting out and about on the moors, and getting valuable instagram likes at the same time. Sadly, as with everything, there have been mitigating circumstances: Devon weather (such as the weekend we went up there last year and I couldn't see Sky if she went to the end of her lead – I have never been so glad of having a navigation app on my phone); laziness – it is all too easy to just hop out of the door and have a quick run over the not-Dartmoor-moors by the house – especially since there's usually a bit where Sky can get off the lead for a bit there: I'm relatively confident that she can't take out a cow; Sky's current reluctance to just get in the fucking picture – which is leading to me getting covered in crap trying to hold on to a wolf that has just rolled in everything awful while waving a phone in its face; and hangovers – which joyfully continue to affect most aspects of my weekends.

Sky refused to even turn around, I am making all the effort in this relationship

Despite Dartmoor's reputation as a huge, bleak, lonely place – which I can see from my garden: Yes Tor, looming like Mount Doom in the distance – it is in fact almost impossible to find a weekend when the moors are not covered in school kids doing Ten Tors training. It's not just the kids with massive rucksacks though, it's as crowded as Oxford Street out there on a nice day, hikers of all ages with all the gear, crushing themselves into awkward positions on the ground trying to get the perfect angle for their selfie – ensuring they get the sheep, the pile of rocks, their artfully made sandwich, travel coffee mug and all their expensive hiking gear in shot to maximise those all-important instragram likes.

I can be as withering about them as I like, bouncing around the moors in my cheap wellies and battered straw hat, but I am no better. Since I started writing books, and thus having to have a marketable online presence (apparently) I too now have to rack up those all-important instagram likes. Which means getting those selfies perfect, this is where the photogenic doggy becomes indispensable. Just this morning I was lying in a muddy pit atop East Mill Tor, holding on to the sheep-poo-covered neck of my filthy Malamute and begging her to stay in shot so that we could get that perfect picture.

This was a lot more painful than it looks

Neither of us are actually happy

Instagram is a lie

A couple of weeks ago I was in a similar position on top of High Willhays when my hat blew away in the relentless Devon wind. I let it go just to get the picture (then gave chase, and got it in the end) which makes me question my judgement. I never took photos before this. I still forget to most of the time, I find memories better than photos, since they can be fuzzier, blurrier and paint a more flattering picture of you when you look back on them later.

This picture serves no purpose and I very nearly lost a perfectly good hat to get it

Sad to say, I do spend a lot of my walks with Sky wishing I had done them with Rizla – who as I have said, was very well behaved off a lead. She would run off, but come back as soon as I whistled the Superman theme to her (much of this may have been tempered by nostalgia, she rolled in fox shit as much as any other collie). Whereas this is Sky's idea of recall.

Never let it be said that dogs don't have a sense of humour

Added to which, the most aggressive thing Rizla ever did to another animal was lick a kitten's head slightly too aggressively (by which I mean she put Bitey's entire head in her mouth when she tried to steal her dinner) whereas Sky will try and eat anything that looks edible, especially if it's moving, so she is not ever allowed off her lead. This makes short cuts across moorland rather more treacherous than expected, since those ever so handy not-quite-paths are easy enough to pick your way across on your own, but when you are being dragged by a 30 kilo wolf trying to get at a sheep that looked at her funny, they are a little more tricky, and I spend an inordinate amount of time digging my boots into the mud, trying and failing to haul her back in and praying I don't smash my head in on the rocks as I slide ever further downwards on my heels. I fell over once (I say once, it happens a lot these days), she just got to the end of her lead and looked back at me with a shrug, didn't even come back to check I wasn't dead.

This is quite problematic for a writer, since we spend a lot of time while walking desperately trying to scrawl down notes for the amazing idea we just had. This is simple when your dog happily jumps about not trying to kill everything in sight, and lets you get on with it. Not so much when she is attached to one of your arms by a rope and doesn't want to stop – ever. This is why I have started falling over more often, and have no record of my amazing ideas. It also leads to long cuts through bogs and marshes as we have to leave the nice, flat, easy-to-walk-on-with-a-big-dog-on-a-lead path because some other, smaller, better-behaved dogs have turned up.

Ultimately, I am very lucky to live where I live, and be able to go walking on Dartmoor within ten minutes of leaving my house. Admittedly, the nearest bit we can get to is also an army firing range, so it does present a few unique dangers in that respect, but what's life without a little danger. I am also very lucky to share my life with a very beautiful (also time-consuming, annoying, badly behaved and stubborn) animal, that listens to all my crap, inspires me to write, gets me out of the house, melts my heart every time she looks at me and will continue to earn me those all-important instagram likes (along with those few accounts that automatically retweet anything hashtagged as #Dartmoor and #Devon). Long live our never ending Tor Tour.

P.S. Do please follow me on Instagram if the hints dotted throughout this piece were too subtle for you to pick up on.