Not quite the march of progress

It is a curiously British obsession. While the Americans point their noses forwards, marching like hell towards a shining future, innovation and modernity, the Poms turn around, go against the current, to preserve a golden past filled with hedgehogs, greasy spoon cafes, warm beer and panting steam trains smelling of hot brass and coal-smoke.

And diesel engines, too, and old computers, games and software, even though they aren't in the past yet.

Look up "computer preservation society" on Google and you get 11 million hits. There's a sizeable crowd of obsessives out there, spending their weekends drinking weak lemon drinks, munching on beetroot sandwiches and talking fondly of the golden age of computing.

Or of cinema organs, church organs, fairground organs, barrel organs; of public clocks, The Goon Show, television programmes in general, old films, railways, the Great British Breakfast, windmills ...

Whatever it is, if it has outlived its usefulness, the last of their like will be gathered together by enthusiasts, and a new society will be born.

Other nations do not do this. The French, whose cafes are disappearing (some sources claim up to 75 per cent have closed down since the 1960s, driven out by McDonald's, television and le stress) restrict themselves to a non-committal grimace.

Americans don't so much preserve their past as reconstruct it without too much concern for historical accuracy, or even for whether the past they are preserving is actually their own.

Larry Page of Google reportedly visited the Venetian Hotel, Las Vegas, to ride in a fake gondola on an artificial canal in what sort of looked like Venice - but was really a shopping centre. "Cool," he was quoted. "It's just like on the internet."

You can see what he means. Real reality is rapidly becoming overshadowed by not only on-screen virtual reality, but by online virtual life.

We are used to having everything at our fingertips, the world a click away, our lives mediated and flattened by the LCD screen. Real reality is too limiting, too dangerous, too dirty, noisy and unpredictable. Yet we go on wanting to preserve it.

There is a strange fracture line at the heart of British society - and, in particular, English society. The Scots don't really go in for this sort of thing, and even when they do - in the case, for example, of animal feedstuffs like oatmeal and herrings - they don't form preservation societies and make a fuss; they just get on with it.

The Welsh seldom let go of anything long enough to want to preserve it and, as they are reputed for being so notoriously touchy, we will say nothing more about them.

But the English, sunk in an affably geeky nostalgia, preserve like mad. I used to work with a man who would spend every moment of his spare time driving up and down the country buying up redundant organ-pipes, bellows, and other organ parts (have you any idea how many parts there are in an organ?) in order to preserve the instrument in his own local church.

When I asked if I could come and actually play it, he looked at me as if I had suggested we pop outside and sodomise a goat. Playing it was not the point of preserving it. The point of preserving it was preserving it, so that, presumably, you could say: "We preserved that organ. If we hadn't preserved it, it wouldn't have been preserved, and then where would we be?"

The instinct must be a standing and terrible reproach to a deracinated man-of-the-"future" like Prime Minister Tony Blair.

Charles de Gaulle wondered of France, how it was possible to govern a country which had 246 varieties of cheese. How much harder to govern a people who don't care much for the modern world and are far happier hand-grinding gudgeon-pins and hand-painting 19th-century narrowboats.

The nostalgia and the genuine care that motivates preservation societies is also a great luxury, born of freedom from the very things we wish to preserve. The people who run the Cyber Telephone Museum can only do so because modern equipment has supplanted the dreadful old telephone system which they wish to preserve.

Railway-engine enthusiasts get to the yard or the train shed at the crack of dawn on Saturday morning in their modern, reliable cars, free from windswept platforms and delays due to sheep on the line at Twazzocks.

The Milestone Society - keen to preserve the roadside markers of yore that allowed travellers to see how many days of drudgery they had left - would, at the time they were of significance, be lucky to have seen more than three in a lifetime.

Yet the society boasts a magnificently formal objective - "To represent the historical significance of milestones in appropriate forums ... to establish groups to delegate and devolve the society's business."

It also has archetypically 21st-century safety concerns: "The fact that milestones, because of their original purpose, are most often located at the sides of roads means that a serious study can be hazardous in view of the juxtaposition of the researchers, road traffic and other pedestrians."

Preservation, then, is a luxury with an irony at its centre: we preserve only that which has lost its significance. If it's still useful, it's not being preserved.

Nor does preservation, in general, restore anything resembling the original. The private-line steam locomotive, glistening in the summer sun, is the avatar of an imaginary lost British world of cheery station-masters and guards who were guards, not "train managers" (and passengers who were passengers, not customers), a world where everyone went to church on Sunday, and there wasn't all this sex, and children knew their place.

The real working steam locomotive was dirty, smoke-blackened, jerky, and unreliable; the carriages smelt and the upholstery scratched your legs; the buffet car had stale tea in an urn and one lightly curling, bacteria-farm Jurassic ham sandwich.

But in Preservation World, it is still Adlestrop, and you can hear all the birds of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire.

British preservation is a kind of mechanical saudade, that Portuguese lament for the loss of something you never actually had. It establishes the stage set on which its aficionados can live other lives.

The smiling solicitor driving a restored engine is not, to himself, a solicitor driving a restored engine; he becomes a "real" engine-driver in a "real" world which may have never existed, but for which he has a deeply satisfying internal narrative.

But for all their make-believe and all their wonderful loopiness (and their complete lack of self-consciousness, posting pictures of unidentifiable bits of wood or, in the case of the Trident Preservation Society, the wingless, tail-less fuselage of G-AWZK, propped on blocks like a big, white tube) - the preservers are engaged in a genuine shriek of justifiable outrage at the modern world.

"Look!" they cry; "Look how the world could have been, and once was!

"Look at the texture! Look at the lovable inconveniences, the almost-alive quality of the thing, the colours, the care, the craft, the love! Look how this thing is different from all other things; how it is, above all, itself."

In the world of today, it seems everything is interchangeable. There is nothing to distinguish, fundamentally, your computer from your camera, your digital darkroom from your MP3 player, your electronic notebook from your mobile phone, or your television from anything else.

Modern life is increasingly lived on screen. However, the life which is not on-screen aspires to the on-screen condition - odourless, smoke-free, affectless, harmless and, above all, deeply inauthentic.

The desire to restore or preserve things which break (or whistle, or creak, smoke, smell, clank, rattle, get hot, bite, peck, shriek, burst into flames and all the other adventitious qualities of reality), and which require skill and knowledge and experience to work is, therefore, an urge that becomes all too human.

Scott Fitzgerald wrote at the end of The Great Gatsby: "So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past."

But the urge to preserve is a defence against the far stronger current which is bearing us ceaselessly into a future in which the individual human being seems to have little to do or say. 


The preserve of the weird

* The British hedgehog preservation society
This is the sort of organisation that must make Poms both proud and appalled to be British. The society has a campaign to change McDonald's McFlurry packaging - the shape of which, once discarded, was "trapping and ultimately causing the death of hedgehogs"

* The Classic Cafe preservation society
Under siege from the terrible inauthenticity of Starbucks and the like, we are offered hope by the self-confessedly ramshackle and ineffective CCPS. Classic Cafe coffee may be indistinguishable from Classic Cafe tea, but have you tried asking for a Special with extra beans in Starbucks?

* The traffic cone preservation society
Dedicated to preserving and studying "Helpers of Humanity". The society reports on its website that pint-sized "pygmy" cones have been discovered by "amateur cone enthusiast" Christopher Perez in Alabama while out on a stroll one warm, sunny morning.

* The Deltic preservation society
The Deltic was one of the early diesel locomotives. We all hated it. It drove away steam. Free of glamour, ugly, brutal, smelly, dirty and charmless, its preservation says more about the British than any steam-powered Adlestrop-yearning revivalism ever could.

* The milestone preservation society
Not only a magnificent exemplar of preservation because of its "unique collection of over 2000 photographs of milestones taken by the late Ken Diamond during his travels in the UK", but also because milestones - sessile, inaccurate and often identical to pointless random rocks - are such a splendidly improbable thing to preserve.

* The fair organ preservation society
Terrible music, terrible sound, a redolence of nausea and fear of the rough boys who would beat you up behind the waltzer to the sound of the mechanical drum, and nick your candyfloss ... ah, happy days brought back to life.

* The parrot preservation society
We don't need to know any more. In fact we would rather not. The fact that there is an organisation which preserves parrots is enough for us

* The software preservation society
But we remember when software was new! And now you're saying it's old? Thank goodness someone is preserving it. The society's website reports its success in preserving old Sinclair Spectrum games which can be played on a modern PC. Three cheers for softpres.org.

- INDEPENDENT