Peter Jackson column

Jul 28 2005 By Peter Jackson, The Journal

Nostalgia is definitely not what it used to be. By which I do not mean that nostalgia is going to the dogs, but that the memory plays tricks and we often don't remember things as they truly were.

One does not like to speak ill of the dead, but, after the sad, recent demise of Edward Heath, I was left wondering whether I, as a schoolboy, lived through the same premiership as some of those paying tributes.

Who would have thought at the time that industrial upheaval in the face of prices and incomes policies and the Industrial Relations Act, the Three Day Week, striking miners and the Cod War would later be remembered a halcyon period of social peace and an economic golden age?

Of course, television was better then. Wasn't it? Well, OK, I suppose it's true that for every Fawlty Towers we had to suffer a Some Mothers Do `Ave `Em or a Black and White Minstrels Show.

The fact is that memory tends to suppress the truly awful (who, for example, remembers leg warmers or Cannon and Ball?) and bathes the rest in a warm rosy glow.

Which means, for the shrewd entrepreneur, that there's always money in nostalgia.

Take, for example, the German businessman who has cashed in on fond - and almost certainly false - memories of the old German Democratic Republic.

Life has been hard in East Germany since reunification and many look back wistfully to the guaranteed employment, generous social care and state holiday camps.

Thorsten Jahn noticed this and, in particular, the cult status of East Germany's small, tinny, chugging, polluting Trabant car.

So, not one to ignore a gap in the market, he has canned Trabant exhaust fumes, which he sells on-line for £2.74 each.

He had a friend produce 1,800 cans in four days by holding pieces of cotton wool into the exhaust pipe of his Trabant, which, claims Herr Jahn, also filters out the toxic particles.

So for anyone with a bit of imagination or a selective memory, there's really no limit to what can be done.

With clever marketing, someone could even sell the Morris Ital, or Bass's Brew X Bitter.