There are lots of books and articles with titles along the lines of 101 things to do (implicitly, before you die) - places to visit, music to listen to, movies to see. My personal take on that theme is a little different. There are lots of things that were once taken for granted, but now you can't do them any more. There are spectacular ones, like flying on Concorde. Then there are smaller, more personal ones, like riding on a trolleybus in London.
I doubt that I'll ever manage to come up with 101 of these things, especially since I'm only including ones that I've done - or sometimes just nearly done - myself. But I'll keep adding to this list as I think of them.
- Flying on Concorde (but I haven't written that one yet)
- Visiting East Berlin and East Germany
- Using a Telex machine
- Using the best of all mechanical calculators, the Olivetti Divisumma
- Travelling on Paris's living railway fossil, the Ligne d'Auteuil
- A traditional holiday at the English seaside
- Crossing the English Channel on the hovercraft
Some of these you can still do - but in an un-authentic, re-created way. For example, you can most certainly ride on a train hauled by a steam locomotive. But it will be on a preserved railway somewhere, just a few miles there-and-back, done for its own sake. It is nothing like an eagerly-awaited trip for a summer holiday, or a here-we-go-again business trip.
"A traditional pastime is to be distinguished from a mere revival in no more striking feature than in this, that while in the revival all is excitement and fervour, the survival is carried on with a stolidity and absence of stir which sets one wondering why a thing that is done so perfunctorily should be kept up at all. Like Balaam and other unwilling prophets, the agents seem moved by an inner compulsion to say and do their allotted parts whether they will or no. This unweeting manner of performance is the true ring by which, in this refurbishing age, a fossilized survival may be known from a spurious reproduction."
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