I’ve been wallowing in nostalgia this week – to protect me from barmy, backward-looking Brexiteers

What was it about an image of my jumpsuit-clad self fleeing to the helicopter that struck a chord this week?

‘We’re getting out of here. Want to come?’: my tweet and photo struck a chord (Photo provided by Anneka Rice)

It’s fascinating how one quickly a tweet sometimes catches the zeitgeist. Once, at a particularly low point of Brexit I tweeted:

“I wonder what David Cameron is doing today? Cotswold pub lunch? Golf?”

It went viral. On Tuesday, as the news of our new prime minister broke, I tweeted a photo of me running along a seaside pier, taken during while filming the 1980s TV show Treasure Hunt, with the caption: “We’re getting out of here. Want to come?”

The reaction was swift and joyful. No one really questioned where we might go or why we might want to get out of here, there or anywhere, beyond a general feeling of disquiet for the status quo. This was a chance to dive into a different landscape, Mary Poppins style.

My jumpsuit-clad self and Graham the cameraman in tow were irrelevant. It was what the photo represented that caught the imagination: an invitation to join the circus, to run away. Anywhere! Why not! It was a passport to wallow in some rose-tinted nostalgia, the sea glinting beyond, the promise of ice cream and picnics. You might have white ankle socks in mind. Maybe a conker in your back pocket.

Anyway, it all made me wonder about nostalgia as I was on my way that very evening to meet up with three male friends I hadn’t seen for 45 years. The curiosity about my teenage past was based on a need to know and understand my hinterland. But nostalgia can easily get into the wrong hands.

There’s definitely good nostalgia and bad nostalgia. Much of the Brexit campaign was delivered on a platform of nostalgia for a supposed better and brighter British past, but it came across as anachronistic and subversive, with no link to how we live today.

My sense of nostalgia centres around community, family and friends. The three “lads” and I had made contact again after I read some extracts out for the My Teenage Diary show on Radio 4. My 15-year-old boyfriend, Glen, and I had been devoted to each other when we were at school in the Seventies. My diary reveals endless nights of Harry Nilsson’s “Without You” being played from public phone boxes to each other every evening, love letters in turquoise ink wafting through the letter box.

But then on 9 June 1973 came the devastation of turning up at a friend’s house and finding Glen with Claire!

Anyway, 45 years later I was able to put that story to bed, not literally I hasten to add; that would have been inappropriate as Glen’s gorgeous wife was also at the reunion. It turns out that none of them even remembered the “Clairegate” that has tortured me all my life. Boys, eh? But we all agreed hinterland is important to us humans. It anchors us.

And rather than a blind rosy Brexit kind of nostalgia, we remembered freezing houses without central heating, power cuts, and endless Saturday jobs and babysitting. Maybe we’re about to go full circle.

It made me wonder how my sons will remember this current turbulent period in history. Will their children be learning about it from a new tranche of Horrible Histories, the decade reduced to alliteration and comic characters. The book can’t be called Barmy Brexit, as that’s already been snapped up by the Barmy British Empire. But it could be Baffling Brexit I suppose? Cox’s Codpiece will be in there somewhere. I can never unthink that thought by the way. It’s damaged me.

The future is a very different place. Perhaps the only safe place to go is backwards. A friend gave me an ancestry DNA testing kit for Xmas, which has remained resolutely in its box. I may just get it out this afternoon and go back even further.