When do we decide to stop remembering?

Stuart Maconie mentioned in passing that it was 43 years since Elvis Presley died, on his BBC6Music programme this morning. Even so, and despite having played several other songs from the '60s and '70s in the half hour or so that I listened to, he didn't play any of Elvis Presley's music. Sometime in the '80s I went through a big Elvis Presley phase (I've also had a bit of an Elvis Costello phase, but that came later) so his death did cross my mind this week, but it seems I'd misremembered the date as the 13th so I was surprised on Thursday when nobody mentioned it on BBC6Music. They still make a big thing about David Bowie's death each year, but the years that have passed since then are still in single digits and besides, they were always in thrall to Bowie so that makes sense.

In the '80s when Radio 1 was basically the only choice if you wanted to avoid adverts, I remember them making a big thing about Elvis Presley's death, and the anniversary of his birth for that matter. Likewise the deaths of Jimi Hendrix, John Lennon, Jim Morrison but not Buddy Holly as far as I recall. At the time, all of these events seemed equally ancient to me - Elvis Presley died the year before I was born, and I hadn't yet figured out who John Lennon was by the time he was shot - but looking back I wonder if my Elvis phase (Presley not Costello) coincided with the tenth anniversary of his death. Now that I'm in my forties, ten years sounds like no time at all. No wonder the DJs were still marking the date.

Also this week was the 75th anniversary of VJ Day. Because I live in an area with high COVID-19 infection rates and stricter rules than the national set, I got an email from the council reminding me not to throw or attend a street party for the occasion and suggesting I could put up some bunting instead. Leaving aside the fact that it would seem in bad taste given the Japanese lady who ran the village post office till she retired a few years ago lives round the corner, it made me wonder how long these commemorations will go on.

In the summer of 1987, when I was eight and three-quarters and possibly getting into Elvis Presley's phenomenal rock n' roll thanks to Radio 1, it was 42 years since the second world war ended and nearly 69 years since the first world war ended. We had the minute's silence on Armistice Day, as we still do, but it was already about wars plural, not just 1914-18. I don't remember - though bear in mind memory is a faulty thing at best - any particular commemoration for world war one in my lifetime until the centenary. There was a 50th anniversary of the end of world war two, however, and we seem to have marked it every five years since then.

Great uncle Hubert's WW1 medal

In November 2018, when the country was marking the centenary of that initial Armistice Day, my dad told me it had really hit him that week how recent the first world war was when he was a kid. Here were we, recently celebrating fifty years of Sergeant Pepper, an album that was released while my dad was at university, and yet when he went to university it was less than fifty years since his grandad had been fighting in the first world war. It was old hat though, my dad said, it was all about world war two by then.

When I mused to OneMonkey earlier about this 75th anniversary of VJ Day he said there are still people living who were caught up in it. That's true, there are people who fought, had military support roles, were land girls, worked in munitions factories. My parents and OneMonkey's were born in a scatter of years just before and just after summer 1945 and had fathers and/or uncles who fought. But the same could have been said about the first world war when we were children so is it, as my dad suggested, about displacement by the next thing?

A quick look through the online nineteenth century newspaper archive my library card gets me access to reveals no great British commemoration of the Battle of Waterloo on its 50th anniversary in June 1865 (there was a festival for 1,200 veterans in Holland, I believe). There were veterans still living, not least one of OneMonkey's Westmorland ancestors, and yet all I can find is a passing reference to 'the jubilee of Waterloo' in a political canvassing speech, and another reference as a rhetorical flourish in an article about the American civil war. There had been wars and revolutions aplenty in the meantime. Perhaps they'd knocked Waterloo from its pedestal in the national psyche, or perhaps there were simply too many things to commemorate - like the old excuse for a drink, 'toasting the siege of Gibraltar' (the joke being that there's been so many, it's bound to be the anniversary of one or the other of them).

So maybe by the time I was a child, Buddy Holly had been knocked off the top spot by the more recent untimely rock deaths - god knows there have been enough of them - and Elvis Presley's been surpassed in turn by the likes of Kurt Cobain and Amy Winehouse. You can't dedicate an hour of radio to all of them, you'd never play any new music, but it doesn't stop the fans remembering, the people who it means something to. We all have our personal anniversaries, whether weddings, deaths, or in my case a relative's failed suicide attempt (21 extra years of them, this summer - hurrah!) but we don't expect anyone else to remember or note their passing. I sincerely hope we never have another global war to knock world war two off the top spot, but I wonder when as a nation we'll feel able to let the anniversary fade away as we have with its predecessors.