Nostalgia not what it used to be

London- After six long years of research and seventeen million pounds of tax payers money; a Government team looking into the question of falling standards in nostalgia have come to the conclusion that it's not as good as it used to be.

The team, based at the London school of Idealization, decided to publish the report two weeks early after the government declared it was looking into new ways to rose tint the past.
Recent Government initiatives in this area have taken the form of a glossy pamphlet entitled "She was alright really" which tries to encourage people to look back on the Thatcher years with an ill remembered fondness.

Dr Xavier De Bernard, leader of the research team, told me earlier how his six man team came to their interesting conclusions "What we basically did was place volunteers in a sound proof booth and show them things from the past and then things from the present, and ask them to rate the examples on a simple sliding scale. For example we showed them a picture of the infamous tortures carried out by American forces involved in "Operation Phoenix" during Vietnam war and then photographs of todays torture rooms at Abu Gharib.
It was then a simple process of running the resulting information through a bank of super computers; we were then able to calculate that although things seemed much better in the past; our remembrance of it loses its sharpness over time leading to a dramatic fall in nostalgia levels."

Only time will tell if the team's valuable research into the decline of nostalgia will be worthwhile, and surely it will be only future generations that will be able to say weather it was worthwhile or not.