Idealising the past is nothing new, but there is something peculiarly revealing about the way a certain generation of Facebook users look back fondly on tougher times
At 7.59pm on Christmas Day 2019, a meme was posted to a Facebook page called Memory Lane UK. It was a square, low-resolution image, the kind where a few words of text are layered on top, to be shared, copied, tweaked and reshared. In no fewer than three different fonts, and adorned with two union jack flags and a Facebook logo, it read as follows:
“Memory lane UK
WHO REMEMBERS
proper
binmen”