I have been feeling a bit nostalgic this week. I can pinpoint the exact moment it started on Monday. I was shopping in a local supermarket and saw a dress that looked like the curtains in the kitchen of my home when I was 3 or 4.

I didn’t need a new dress, and out of choice I try to only buy a tiny amount of new items of clothing. Adopting a recycle, repurpose and reuse policy as a small act of saving the planet.

This dress was certainly fast fashion, everything I choose not to engage with. I bargained with myself that I would not buy it because I only wear dresses with pockets and this one, being cheap, would not have pockets.

It had pockets and it came home with me. Nostalgia won.

That started the undercurrent of my week. A slight longing for the past. This very bland set up in my bathroom is nostalgic too. My dad was a man of the seventies and loved his electric razor but he too had nostalgia in his bones and used this shaving mug on rare occasions to have a wet shave as the fancy took him. I use his shaving mug as a regular soap dish, a small act of daily remembrance. And beyond that I don’t really pay it much attention. But because the dress triggered kitchen nostalgia the shaving mug joined in and I pondered how very different my bathroom is from the one the mug lived in during the seventies. My parents bathroom fittings were bright blue, their towels, and facecloths were in bold bright colours and in the iconic designs of the era. Unbelievably, soap was a curious shade of red. Lifebuoy Red.

Lifebuoy red shaped my early life, every part of us was washed with it. I hated it, my face was as dry and tight as the worst sort of sunburn after every face wash, noses and other orifices burned and stung if the lather or suds of the soap got anywhere near them. I soon adopted an independent washing and bathing routine that actually avoided the use of any soap. The only time the soap met water was at the end of my ablutions when I tossed it in the water after I had finished so that I could, in truth, say that I had used soap when my parents questioned my cleaning regime.

During my bathroom nostalgia I pondered that red soap, and wondered if I had just been a bit dramatic about the stuff. Being over-dramatic is always possible, I was an only child with a vivid imagination.

Dr Google has an opinion on Lifebuoy Red ‘ Health’ soap and that opinion is that Lifebuoy Red contained Carbolic Acid.

Which exactly explains why trying to rinse off the soap seemed to make things so much worse. Nobody mentioned rinsing off with alcohol

I may be being overdramatic, but just thinking about that soap gives me the shivers when I recall the lather of that soap going up my nose or south of my belly button. And the effect on my four-year-old face was certainly a mild chemical burn.

Kitchen curtains are one thing, but I can’t imagine a seventies bathroom  ever making me feel all warm and nostalgic.

A cheap dress with pockets is so much more appealing.