This summer’s must have item probably lives in your loft

Along with the fashions of the 1990s, Nineties tech is making a comeback. Time to dust off the cardboard boxes

Unpacking after a house move is a strange exercise in social archaeology. Emerging from their boxes, as bewildering as the grave goods of some ancient burial site, once familiar possessions offer disconcerting insights into the recent past.
Sifting through the eras, the question that comes to mind is, “Why did I keep that?” A baby mobile with a quintet of stuffed animals, solemnly rotating to a tinkly rendition of Pachelbel’s Canon? A collection of my grandmother’s lace-edged tray-cloths? Or the latest prize from my cardboard sepulchres: a point-and-shoot camera and a dozen rolls of undeveloped film.
I haven’t used an analogue camera since the late Nineties when my son was small, so moments of his childhood must be captured on these films. But the technology has surely been obsolete for decades. There is, I imagine, no further use for the old point-and-shoot.
But along with the fashions of the 1990s, Nineties tech is making a comeback. Some 130 years after Gilbert and Sullivan’s last Savoy opera, Utopia Limited, satirised George Eastman’s slogan for Kodak’s first point-and-shoot camera – “You Press the Button, We Do the Rest” – celebrities are embracing the humble analogue camera. The American soccer star Megan Rapinoe was seen wielding one at the Paris Olympics. The “proto-influencer” Alexa Chung posted an Instagram image of herself holding another, captioned “Just another Millennial with a dependency on Snappy Snaps”. All it needs is Madonna to join in for its fleeting moment of coolness to wither.
Of the reasons cited for the newfound popularity of analogue cameras, “coolness” comes high on the list. Across Europe, music festivals are introducing no-phone policies, encouraging audiences to experience the moment directly, rather than watching a livestream on their phones.
In the southern German city of Konstanz this May, the indie-pop band Juli demanded that the audience stop filming their 2004 hit Perfekte Welle – a song about living in the moment. In the same month, the tenor Ian Bostridge paused his performance of Britten’s Les Illuminations with the CBSO to ask the audience to stop filming on their phones – whose illuminations, though sanctioned (unknown to Bostridge) by the CBSO management, were proving intolerably distracting.
Nothing is more perishable than coolness, so if the resurgence of analogue cameras relied solely on fashion, its decline would be inevitable. But there is a poignant aesthetic about physical photos. Before my move, I used to frequent a south London auction house specialising in house clearances. Among the commodes and broken violins, albums of family photographs would often turn up – infinitely touching in their faded records of long-dead dogs and well tended dahlias.
Looking back over my own albums of analogue photos, the sensations of past decades come rushing back. By contrast, my later phone images seem fragile: seldom looked at, easily deleted and strangely devoid of emotional charge.
That insufferable slogan, “making memories”, has been responsible for a swarm of ills, from unsustainable tourism to numerous deaths of badly-equipped people in pursuit of dramatic social media images. So Gen A’s newfound enthusiasm for the deferred gratification of waiting for their analogue photos to return from the developer: incompetently cropped, out of focus, touchingly imperfect, is oddly admirable – for as long as it lasts.
Auf Wiedersehen, German? 
“Don’t Let’s Be Beastly To The Germans”, sang Noel Coward in 1943, earning a BBC ban for his satirical ditty. These days our engagement with Germany and its culture has all but vanished from our educational curriculums. There were just over 2,000 A-level candidates in German this year, a decline of more than 50% over the past decade.
And while it is noticeable that footballers joining UK clubs from abroad invariably speak serviceable English, the reverse is often true. Last year, trying to protest a penalty against his new club, Bayern Munich, the England striker Harry Kane suddenly “remembered that he couldn’t speak German”.
A joint initiative by the British-based Goethe Institute and the Department of Education aims to encourage the learning of German in primary and secondary schools. The Alleinstellungsmerkmal, or unique selling point of competence in a foreign language, effortlessly mastered by our incoming footballers, is a long-overdue rebalancing of the cultural and economic value of fluency in other languages.