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alphapplepie · 7 years

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Prince of Tennis Addiction

WARNING: VERY LONG, a whole BIOGRAPHY, written this so when the time comes that I am no longer in this world I want it to be in my EULOGY or something XD.

Well since this is a blog about Prince of Tennis, or specifically Atobe Keigo, let me share to you this 22 years old lady’s memory with this masterpiece. Sadly we moved to Canada so most of the supposed to be evidence are left in the Philippines, but If I could find some I would gladly share it.

Prince of Tennis was aired in the Philippines at around late 2005 or early 2006 at QTV channel 11, since it was a new TV station and its sister company, GMA, has been our channel since I was born and they have the slogan that they will focus on NEWS rather than dramas and stuff my dad obviously supported this channel. And by late 2005 a commercial about Prince of Tennis is released, and I believe it is one of the channels’ first anime and the time slot if I recall right is around 4pm ish? Just after school. I am still 10 years old by that time I believe, and is currently at 6th grade (Grade 6 in the Philippines).

So here is kinda a drama thing part on my side, that time we had a family problem so we abruptly moved to a new place, sadly that was like the final semester for me in the 6th grade and I was suddenly forced to leave my friends/companions since 1st grade and interact with whole new people in my last 3-4 months in grade school (elementary in the Philippines). It was a living nightmare, I left my best friends and crush (excuse me it was a 3 year unrequited love haha) without even being able to say Goodbye. I can’t disclose why, it is really private, but It was like one night we were woken up all things are packed and we are told by my parents to go. That time I didn’t know why exactly yet, but I kinda have a hunch. We rode our owner (a jeep styled vehicle) and we drove far south (we lived far north, Bulacan for those who knows) and stayed with my grandpa at Cavite. Well this was a whole hullabaloo, but I swear this part had a great huge impact why this show grew so close to me.

And then I couldn’t transfer right away because papers and such needs to be processed, where we moved is really province like. We are surrounded by trees and such, and it was a small yet comfortable house. I am not too inclined with internet and computers yet at that time, I just visited a computer shop 1 or 2 times? to see my crush :D. We had a computer class before but it is all about MS word, excel, etc. So where I am getting at is that my only means of watching anime is the TV. Oh the glorious Television that doesn’t have a Cable, meaning we can only watch local channels.. so the ever popular anime channel like HERO and ANIMAX is out of reach. So while I was stuck at home I often browse the TV and one day I came across that PRINCE OF TENNIS COMMERCIAL. I have always been an anime fan since I was a kid, I don’t buy merch and anything because we are relatively just a normal family, no excess money or such but we are living comfortably with a small family-owned store that we left when we moved. So the commercial just mainly shows Ryoma, like meet the Prince of Tennis kind of thing. And for a 2000 anime, RYOMA was like HOT DANG !!!!!! So I looked so forward to it, drooling hyped every time the commercial is shown (I was basically waiting for it to be shown in the TV that I kinda memorized the sequence and time and change channels to QTV when I know they will show it), and have been eagerly waiting for it to be broadcasted.

I don’t remember if it was being broadcasted by the time I started my new school life or not, but as I knew it was really awkward at start. I really don’t fancy the idea of moving so I was really quiet and even if it is just a 4-5 hour drive from my previous home the way everybody acts and the tones in their voices is all new to a 10 years old me. I kinda felt to be just a shut in, thinking that I just need to be with them for 3-4 month, not too long.. don’t need any friends. When I get home I started watching Prince of Tennis, so first episodes is about the HOT small kid playing tennis who is often underestimated, I got hooked in this cocky little brat for the first few episodes. Then a tall guy showed up, then a scary snake like character (I really didn’t like Kaidoh at first, but NOW i LOVE him). It was a chill episode until...until....until... THE SENPAI’S SHOWED UP. GOD DANG those HOT LITTLE POTATOES BAKED WELL DONE. I SQUEALED. Let us all be honest here, FUJI will be the first guy who will catch your eyes !!!!!!!! but as I continue to watch I slowly liked EIJI. I don’t normally like over clingy, childish and noisy guys but Eiji is precious.

One day I went to school and saw a group of girls talking i kinda peeked and saw they are holding a sticker set of PRINCE OF TENNIS *Eyes Sparkled* and I guess their radar felt a fangirl next to them and I joined their conversation. I am kinda sad I think i lost that sticker but I swear it was with me until college, but eiji didn’t have a solo sticker but I got to get one from her.

UPDATE: F*ck I still have it I am literally CRYING guys, i bought it all the way here in Canada it was in my wallet, 12 years, this is literally my treasure now.

It looks icky and old, but it is with me for a whole 12 years T_T. It was kinda a proof of friendship or sort, it is also my first prince of tennis item.

And by then I had a set of friends. Namely, Jessa Fe, Jeanette and Jenelyn who are the Ryoma Squad. Captain (Maris) well obviously we know whose squad she is but the funny thing until now I still call her captain instead of her name. And my best friend and 100% Rival, Ana who as “rival” indicates is on the Eiji squad. We bicker everyday on who owns the potatoe. Then with friends who loves the same show I do and with the everyday topic about them I also slowly fell in the dept, in love with this show who have given me happiness and friends in that short period of 3-4 months.

The TV show only finished until the Hyotei Arc I believe, so I decided to buy a DVD of it to be able to watch the whole show, until RIKKAI DAI only because the nationals are still not available by that time I believe. And by that time my main hoe is EIJI and I really didn’t like Atobe at first he was a bastard, he was a flirt with the annoying Ann and he was too arrogant.

I started buying 20 PHP (around 50c usd?) stickers, sadly those for sure I left in my box in the Philippines, although I still have them but I couldn’t bring them.. maybe when I go back in the Philippines i will get them and bring them along with me. And i got addicted on doing FAN FICTIONS, i don’t have it too because it was too thick i left it in the box in the Philippines too along with everything :’( I should have bought it instead of my ex’s memories and stuff. Dang. I will search my FB later to see if I posted pictures of it or something. Sobs. It was handwritten and it was like a 5 notebook sewn together, and then it had 2 other notebooks all about it.

Basically that fan fiction is about US, and other girls and the Prince of Tennis Characters. The story goes as me, whose name I changed as Narusime Atobe, yeah by that time I still just “like” atobe~sama and since he is rich the perfect scenario is to be the protagonist as atobe’s sister. It started at October 03 where supposedly the next day is Atobe’s birthday but he didn’t feel like celebrating it because his family is nowhere near him until he received a call from his sister telling that she was finally allowed to go home and stay with him in Japan, which overjoyed Atobe. So to celebrate both his birthday and his sisters homecoming he decided to throw an extravagant birthday party (within a freaking day) and the scene goes as where he visited each school to invite them. While I arrived in the airport and suddenly saw a cat in the Narita airport and played with it because it was all alone when a small brat came and get the cat and thanks shyly. He introduce himself as Echizen as he go. And then I remembered that was the name of the guy who defeated my onii-sama so I decided to look around Japan because there is still too much time and I want to buy the best gift for my onii-sama. As I am walking with my tennis bag a guy with red hair suddenly bumped to me and I fell, he helped me stand but he was in a hurry so he said thank you and grabbed MY things and run. Shocked, I checked his bag and saw it says SEIGAKU, so I decided to visit their school to get my things and meet ECHIZEN. I believe along the way i had fated meeting with gakuto, marui and kamio. Yah it was a RED HEAD HAREM for me THANK YOU. Well yadda yadda. Onii-sama had her own romance too with a flower shop poor girl who is in hyotei through scholarship. It was a sexy love story. She is annoyed on how arrogant atobe is but due to a lot of circumstances love blossomed. Every single prince of Tennis guys had their own girls <3 my personal favorite is Mizuki’s and Akutsu’s love story. Mizuki’s is RATED 18+ while Akutsu is a sweet little one. Oh and my friends have their own respective role too. Like 3 girls for Ryoma. Ana is my rival, so i portrayed her as my cousin who looks a little similar to me where my harem mistaken her to be me. And she liked Eiji. Tezuka and Captain Maris are strong and steady and they have a sweet sexy relationship. So yea, when I was 11 years old by that time I’ve been doing this scenes even if I am still a virgin girl who never had a relationship :D . There was no smut or anything, just a suggestive one. I swear I am retrieving that book when I go to vacation in the Philippines.

While still doing the fanfiction I eventually entered middle school (we call it high school in the Philippines). I didn’t go to the same school of my friends because they went to a school that requires you to convert to a different religion. We are not a strong catholic believer, but my parents didn’t like the idea of changing religions just to join that school so I went to a different one. Sadly, the start of my high school life wasn’t that fun. My classmates are aware of the show, but they are not hyped or anything about it maybe also because we have the mindset that entering this stage of life means that we need to be more matured, children often wants to seek new things like drinking, playing hooky and dating. Sadly that didn’t apply to me. In the bright side my elementary friends houses are just next to mine so I visit them when I have free time and go fan girl with them, although that slowly changed too because they got too busy in school work and since they all went at the same school often I couldn’t ride along with their conversations about different people so I slowly felt isolated again. That time instead of those I got addicted on going to Computer Shops and stay online. Our home doesn’t have a computer or internet so I visited computer shops daily and that is where a new stage of my life involving prince of tennis started.

I got addicted in watching youtube videos dedicated to Prince of Tennis and then I came across FORUMS and joined them. That is where I met several online friends who LOVED prince of tennis as much as I do. And I feel at home again. I got people who understands me and it was fun. Daily i would converse with them and since i love making fan fiction i got involved in RP-ing. I just had a small group of friends. And the site we joined is a very big community so sometimes we couldn’t just be ourselves because we need to follow rules and such. That is when I decided to make my own FORUM. The site is still up nowadays, I am planning tor revive it but as of now it is at a stale state you can visit it if you like here are the links:

http://tenipuri02.proboards.com/

This one is a site dedicated to Prince of Tennis. It is just a general one, I made it first and it was pretty chill but it involved more discussions rather than RP. I am not planning on reviving this site but I do plan on reviving the next one.

http://tenipurirpsite.proboards.com/

This site is called “Atobe’s Island” It is our main RP site and we had fun even if it just lasted around 2 years i had the best online friends there.

These forums are very small, the members are too little but they are just my close online friends whom lived around the world. It was the best way to connect with them. And this years was simply one of the most memorable years for me. I made a best friend name Valeria. She liked Fuji, while me on that time loved Atobe. I will talk more about how I gradually loved the characters i love at a different post because this will turn out to be a book rather than a long novel. So valeria is from hondouras, and she was very dear to me. I lied to her though, since we are RP-ing 18+ stuff, I kinda lied about my age and appearance. I am sorry. I was just 12 year old that time and I want to join the circle so I lied and say I was 20 something... Sorry Valeria. She was the sweetest girl ever. She sent me a package from Hondouras. It was a personalized letter and an art of Atobe whom she painted. I left Atobe’s painting in the Philippines too because it is too big but I believe I bought the letter. Let me look at my things later and take a picture of it and search my Facebook for it. Then post it.

UPDATE: Sadly I can’t seem to find it I will try finding my whole facebook again when I get the time. HUHUHU

Yet all things must come to an end, my grandma have a home at the city and my relatives who previously lived there will move so we are told to just stay there because somebody needs to take care of the house. My mom by that time is also going to school for the Caregiver course, and to be able to go here to Canada. Eventually we moved, and that time I wasn’t able to go at computer shops and got too busy at the school. City life and people are different and fast paced so you need to follow them or you will be left behind. And by that time I was 2nd year(8th grade) at Moonwalk, I met my 1st relationship, it was an 8 year relationship, we just broke up recently when I migrated here at Canada last year. Since then I have always serious with study, and not to brag but I am always top in my class and around top 5 in the whole school, but I could still watch anime because that is the only two major things i need to balance aside from friends and family. Yet being in a relationship, the balance got disrupted. My relationship was ok, because that person also likes anime. They watched prince of tennis too but wasn’t that hyped about it. They liked Detective conan though, that is how I got close to them and eventually start a relationship. I don’t know if they hated Atobe from the start or just hated him because I really loved Atobe too much and just go talking about him for hours. They said atobe is arrogant and a loser, who lose from Ryoma, he was a villain who destroyed Tezuka’s shoulder. Of course I defended Atobe but I will do it in another post because there are too many people who says the same. Yet, I slowly mellowed down on prince of tennis and explored different anime’s with them. Although Atobe is my no.1 hoe that time, my relationship became my first priority and atobe was kinda tossed aside and i slowly left the fangirl mode and just became a normal otaku who loves anime so I wasn’t active anymore with the forum and neglected it. I got friends who have different interest. I was still out of place but that time what runs on my mind is to the same as the norm or else I will be alone. I still have my comfort zone with my boyfriend who loves anime, so when we are out chilling we watch anime and stuff. I wasn’t particularly so happy, but wasn’t sad either. Entering my 4th year of high school (10th grade) I got more involved with school works because by that time the k+12 system isn’t applied yet so college is next. I still like anime, but I can’t find people who shares the same passion as I do. I still watch and play JRPGames but not with a group of people.

I entered college and took Psychology. That is the time of my life where I realize that individuality, uniqueness and having your own passion is beautiful. It doesn’t matter if you can’t find people who share the same interest as you, you can just find people who will like you even if you share different interest. That is how i found a group of various individuals who are still my friends nowadays to this very moment even if 2 of us migrated and most of them are working already we still chat at our group chat every single day. I realize that I don’t need to be the same as the norm, I expressed myself more as an OTAKU, an ANIME lover. I didn’t mind wearing headphone I bought from COMIC ALLEY (an official anime merch store in the philippines), or wearing ID laces of my baes. I listen to anime music going to school and home. I watch anime during break time. I got senpai’s (higher year people with the same course) who loves anime, i sometimes join the conversation and take picture with them when they do cosplay. As much as I would love to cosplay and join CONVENTION I am too poor. And if there is one thing my group of friends share in common in the like for a chill drink out. At holidays I spend time with my ex and we made friends with the owners of the computer shops we often play at or hang out of. I often drink with their wives too because I can be awkward at first but I know how to keep a conversation going. And while creating this blog and searching for some stuff I remembered a Christmas gift given to me last 2015 by the computer shop owner, they knew i love Prince of Tennis and I just saw it again now and I only got to open it today

It was a postcard thingy .. no Atobe Sadly.

We often play League, watch anime together and stuff. It was fun but at near the end of my college life I encountered another turning point in my life.

Our visa has been approved and we are migrating here in Canada. We were expecting it for a long time now but then of course when it is actually happening you can’t just seem to be ready. I left most of my anime posters and such in the Phil because my luggage was composed of all the teddy bears from my ex (i deeply regret huhuhu) . Living here in Canada is entirely different once again, because people doesn’t share the same nationality as you more often than not engaging to conversations is hard although Canadians are entirely nice. As of now I still don’t have a group of friends next to me who likes Anime as much as I do, but the internet is actually enough for now. I also got a Job, and even if the pay isn’t too great I got to have an extra money so I was able to buy all the things i want and can afford on ebay. The very first item I bought on ebay is this::

hehe of course an Atobe Dakimakura to keep me accompany at night.

For the 1st year at canada I bought several cosplay stuff. So basically I am living the life I have always wanted. I participated at the Anime North convention. This time I love Atobe, but Prince of Tennis is kinda not that no.1 in my heart because of the new animes such as Haikyuu, Attack on Titan and many much more.

Out of a whim last June or July I decided that I kinda want to watch Prince of Tennis from the start till the end once again, I am not skipping any episodes even if I hate Ryoma (yes I hate Ryoma since early the start, I think I just liked that cocky kid when I watched the commercial where him speaking is just minimal, I’ll explain in at another post).

This post is when I started watching again.

And of course after all is said and done, I realized once again that this show is just too precious, there is nothing like it. I was trapped from the start, along with all the great memories this. And once again from just a simple otaku I became a bona fide fangirl of my hoes, baes and potatoes. I stumbled here in Tumblr while looking for Tenipuri products to add in my collection. As of now these:

It’s kinda sad that I got addicted with it again a little late in the game, I know it is still ongoing and very much alive in the eastern part of the world. Yet the tenipuri fever here in the western part is not as fiery as how it is supposed to be. At anime north the only “Atobe” item I could get is this little key chain.

I am glad though that there are still pages here in tumblr that still loves prince of tennis. I also found a reliable merchant where I can order the Tenipuri goods. I just got the cash now so there are a lot of merch I missed, but slowly I will gather all of them. I also plan on going in Japan in the future and hunt all these products myself. If only I had the money and the resources before, then maybe I could have a lot more in cheaper price T_T . Yet I am glad that the fandom is still alive, it always brighten my day to see people still loving prince of tennis. It keeps me alive. It keeps me happy. I wish someday I get to meet all these people who shares the same interest with me. This show is one of the things that defines me, I won’t be Alpha without Prince of Tennis. I just love it.

More than giving the details on why I love Prince of Tennis, I discussed on HOW i came to love it. It was part of almost every turning point of my life since it started. I am forever grateful of this show. It makes me smile, laugh, sad.. all in all experience different emotions while watching it. I am very thankful of konomi sensei as well. I will always love and support it until the day I am no longer breathing. In the future please put all of my Prince of Tennis goods in my casket/coffin especially the Atobe Figurines XD. This went longer than expected but this is literally my life. Nothing will ever change the influence this show have in my life and I believe no Anime will ever be as meaningful as this show. I also am starting to do little fan arts nowadays, I am not so inclined with art and I just got the inspiration to do it when I watched Prince of Tennis again, look forward to more Prince of Tennis/Atobe Updates in this blog.

Thank you very much on reading this blog (if you actually read till the end). I might update it soon when i get the other images of my childhood with Prince of Tennis HAHA, Lets continue to support this show forever.

#prince of tennis #tenipuri #whyiloveprinceoftennis #story of my life #テニスの王子様 #新テニスの王子様 #makeaeulogyoutothiswhenidie #new prince of tennis

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amazingviralinfo · 7 years

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It is on posters, mugs, tea towels and in headlines. Harking back to a blitz spirit and an age of public service, Keep Calm and Carry On has become ubiquitous. How did a cosy, middle-class joke assume darker connotations?

To get some sense of just what a monster it has become, try counting the number of times in a week you see some permutation of the Keep Calm and Carry On poster. In the last few days Ive seen it twice as a poster advertising a pubs New Years Eve party, several times in souvenir shops, in a photograph accompanying a Guardian article on the imminent doctors strike (Keep Calm and Save the NHS) and as the subject of too many internet memes to count. Some were related to the floods a flagrantly opportunistic Liberal Democrat poster, with Keep Calm and Survive Floods, and the somewhat more mordant Keep Calm and Make a Photo of Floods. Then there were those related to Islamic State: Keep Calm and Fight Isis on the standard red background with the crown above; and Keep Calm and Support Isis on a black background, with the crown replaced by the Isis logo. Around eight years after it started to appear, it has become quite possibly the most successful meme in history. And, unlike most memes, it has been astonishingly enduring, a canvas on to which practically anything can be projected while retaining a sense of ironic reassurance. It is the ruling emblem of an era that is increasingly defined by austerity nostalgia.

I can pinpoint the precise moment at which I realised that what had seemed a typically, somewhat insufferably, English phenomenon had gone completely and inescapably global. I was going into the flagship Warsaw branch of the Polish department store Empik and there, just past the revolving doors, was a collection of notebooks, mouse pads, diaries and the like, featuring a familiar English sans serif font, white on red, topped with the crown, in English:

KEEP CALM

AND

CARRY ON

It felt like confirmation that the image had entered the pantheon of truly global design icons. As an image, it was now up there alongside Rosie the Riveter, the muscular female munitions worker in the US second world war propaganda image; as easily identifiable as the headscarved Lily Brik bellowing BOOKS! on Rodchenkos famous poster. As a logo, it was nearly as recognisable as Coca-Cola or Apple. How had this happened? What was it that made the image so popular? How did it manage to grow from a minor English middle-class cult object into an international brand, and what exactly was meant by carry on? My assumption had been that the combination of message and design were inextricably tied up with a plethora of English obsessions, from the blitz spirit, through to the cults of the BBC, the NHS and the 1945 postwar consensus. Also contained in this bundle of signifiers was the enduring pretension of an extremely rich (if shoddy and dilapidated) country, the sadomasochistic Toryism imposed by the coalition government of 201015, and its presentation of austerity in a manner so brutal and moralistic that it almost seemed to luxuriate in its own parsimony. Some or none of these thoughts may have been in the heads of the customers at Empik buying their printed tea towels, or they may have just thought it was funny. However, few images of the last decade are quite so riddled with ideology, and few historical documents are quite so spectacularly false.

Imperial War Museum handout of a Dig for Victory poster by Mary Tunbridge. Photograph: Mary Tunbridge/PA

The Keep Calm and Carry On poster was not mass-produced until 2008. It is a historical object of a very peculiar sort. By 2009, when it had first become hugely popular, it seemed to respond to a particularly English malaise connected directly with the way Britain reacted to the credit crunch and the banking crash. From this moment of crisis, it tapped into an already established narrative about Britains finest hour the aerial Battle of Britain in 1940-41 when it was the only country left fighting the Third Reich. This was a moment of entirely indisputable and apparently uncomplicated national heroism, one that Britain has clung to through thick and thin. Even during the height of the boom, as the critical theorist Paul Gilroy flags up in his 2004 book, After Empire, the blitz and the victory were frequently invoked, made necessary by the need to get back to the place or moment before the country lost its moral and cultural bearings. The years 1940 and 1945 were obsessive repetitions, anxious and melancholic, morbid fetishes, clung to as a means of not thinking about other aspects of recent British history most obviously, its empire. This has only intensified since the financial crisis began.

The blitz spirit has been exploited by politicians largely since 1979. When Thatcherites and Blairites spoke of hard choices and muddling through, they often evoked the memories of 1941. It served to legitimate regimes that constantly argued that, despite appearances to the contrary, resources were scarce and there wasnt enough money to go around; the most persuasive way of explaining why someone (else) was inevitably going to suffer. Ironically, however, this rhetoric of sacrifice was often combined with a demand that consumers enrich themselves buy their house, get a new car, make something of themselves, aspire. Thus, by 200708, when the no return to boom and bust promised by Gordon Brown appeared to be abortive (despite the success of his very 1940s alternative of nationalising the banks and thus saving capitalism), the image started to become popular. It is worth noting that shortly after this point, a brief series of protests were being policed in increasingly ferocious ways. The authorities were allowed to make use of the apparatus of security and surveillance, and the proliferation of prevention of terrorism laws set up under the New Labour governments of 19972010, to combat any sign of dissent. In this context the poster became ever more ubiquitous, and, peculiarly, after 2011, it began to be used in what few protests remained, in an only mildly subverted form.

The Keep Calm and Carry On poster seemed to embody all the contradictions produced by a consumption economy attempting to adapt itself to thrift, and to normalise surveillance and security through an ironic, depoliticised aesthetic. Out of apparently nowhere, this image combining bare, faintly modernist typography with the consoling logo of the crown and a similarly reassuring message spread everywhere. I first noticed its ubiquity in the winter of 2009, when the poster appeared in dozens of windows in affluent London districts such as Blackheath during the prolonged snowy period and the attendant breakdown of National Rail; the implied message about hardiness in the face of adversity and the blitz spirit looked rather absurd in the context of a dusting of snow crippling the railway system. The poster seemed to exemplify a design phenomenon that had slowly crept up on us to the point where it became unavoidable. It is best described as austerity nostalgia. This aesthetic took the form of a yearning for the kind of public modernism that, rightly or wrongly, was seen to have characterised the period from the 1930s to the early 1970s; it could just as easily exemplify a more straightforwardly conservative longing for security and stability in hard times.

Unlike many forms of nostalgia, the memory invoked by the Keep Calm and Carry On poster is not based on lived experience. Most of those who have bought this poster, or worn the various bags, T-shirts and other memorabilia based on it, were probably born in the 1970s or 1980s. They have no memory whatsoever of the kind of benevolent statism the slogan purports to exemplify. In that sense, the poster is an example of the phenomenon given a capsule definition by Douglas Coupland in 1991: legislated nostalgia, that is, to force a body of people to have memories they do not actually possess. However, there is more to it than that. No one who was around at the time, unless they had worked at the department of the Ministry of Information, for which the poster was designed, would have seen it. In fact, before 2008, few had ever seen the words Keep Calm and Carry On displayed in a public place.

The poster was designed in 1939, but its official website, which sells a variety of Keep Calm and Carry On merchandise, states that it never became an official propaganda poster; rather, a handful were printed on a test basis. The specific purpose of the poster was to stiffen resolve in the event of a Nazi invasion, and it was one in a set of three. The two others, which followed the same design principles, were:

YOUR COURAGE YOUR CHEERFULNESS YOUR RESOLUTION WILL BRING US VICTORY

and:

FREEDOM IS IN PERIL DEFEND IT WITH ALL YOUR MIGHT

Both of these were printed up, and YOUR COURAGE was widely displayed during the blitz, given that the feared invasion did not take place after the German defeat in the Battle of Britain. You can see one on a billboard in the background of the last scene of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburgers 1943 film, The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, when the ageing, reactionary but charming soldier finds his house in Belgravia bombed. Of the three proposals, KEEP CALM AND CARRY ON was discarded after the test printing. Possibly, this was because it was considered less appropriate to the conditions of the blitz than to the mass panic expected in the event of a German ground invasion. The other posters were heavily criticised. The social research project Mass Observation recorded many furious reactions to the patronising tone of YOUR COURAGE and its implied distinction between YOU, the common person, and US, the state to be defended. Anthony Burgess later claimed it was rage at posters like this that helped Labour win such an enormous landslide in the 1945 election. We can be fairly sure that if KEEP CALM AND CARRY ON had been mass-produced, it would have infuriated those who were being implored to be calm. Wrenched out of this context and exhumed in the 21st century, however, the poster appears to flatter, rather than hector, the public it is aimed at.

One of the few test printings of the poster was found in a consignment of secondhand books bought at auction by Barter Books in Alnwick, Northumberland, which then created the first reproductions. First sold in London by the shop at the Victoria and Albert Museum, it became a middlebrow staple when the recession, initially merely the slightly euphemistic credit crunch, hit. Through this poster, the way to display ones commitment to the new austerity regime was to buy more consumer goods, albeit with a less garish aesthetic than was customary during the boom. This was similar to the Keep calm and carry on shopping commanded by George W Bush both after September 11 and when the sub-prime crisis hit America. The wartime use of this rhetoric escalated during the economic turmoil in the UK; witness the slogan of the 2010-15 coalition government, Were all in this together. The power of Keep Calm and Carry On comes from a yearning for an actual or imaginary English patrician attitude of stiff upper lips and muddling through. This is, however, something that largely survives only in the popular imagination, in a country devoted to services and consumption, where elections are decided on the basis of house-price value, and given to sudden, mawkish outpourings of sentiment. The poster isnt just a case of the return of the repressed, it is rather the return of repression itself. It is a nostalgia for the state of being repressed solid, stoic, public spirited, as opposed to the depoliticised, hysterical and privatised reality of Britain over the last 30 years.

At the same time as it evokes a sense of loss over the decline of an idea of Britain and the British, it is both reassuring and flattering, implying a virtuous (if highly self-aware) consumer stoicism. Of course, in the end, it is a bit of a joke: you dont really think your pay cut or your childrens inability to buy a house, or the fact that someone somewhere else has been made homeless because of the bedroom tax, or lost their benefit, or worked on a zero-hours contract, is really comparable to life during the blitz but its all a bit of fun, isnt it?

Unlike many forms of nostalgia, the memory invoked by the Keep Calm and Carry On poster is not based on lived experience.

The Keep Calm and Carry On poster is only the tip of an iceberg of austerity nostalgia. Although early examples of the mood can be seen as a reaction to the threat of terrorism and the allegedly attendant blitz spirit, it has become an increasingly prevalent response to the uncertainties of economic collapse. Interestingly, one of the first areas in which this happened was the consumption of food, an activity closely connected with the immediate satisfaction of desires. Along with the blitz came rationing, which was not fully abolished until the mid-1950s. Accounts of this vary; its egalitarianism meant that while the middle classes experienced a drastic decline in the quality and quantity of their diet, for many of the poor it was a minor improvement. Either way, it was a grim regime, aided by the emergence of various byproducts and substitutes Spam, corned beef which stuck around in the already famously dismal British diet for some time, before mass immigration gradually made eating in Britain a less awful experience. In the process, entire aspects of British cuisine the sort of thing listed by George Orwell in his essay In Defence of English Cooking such as suet dumplings, Lancashire hotpot, Yorkshire pudding, roast dinners, faggots, spotted dick and toad in the hole began to disappear, at least from the metropoles.

The figure of importance here is the Essex-born multimillionaire chef and Winston Churchill fan, Jamie Oliver. Clearly as decent and sincere a person as youll find on the Sunday Times Rich List, his various crusades for good food, and the manner in which he markets them, are inadvertently telling. After his initial fame as a New Labourera star, a relatively young and Beckham-coiffed celebrity chef, his main concern (aside from a massive chain-restaurant empire that stretches from Greenwich Market in London to the Hotel Moskva in Belgrade) has been to take good food locally sourced, cooked from scratch from being a preserve of the middle classes and bring it to the disadvantaged and socially excluded of inner-city London, ex-industrial towns, mining villages and other places slashed and burned by 30-plus years of Thatcherism. The first version of this was the TV series Jamies School Dinners, in which a camera crew documented him trying to influence the school meals choices of a comprehensive in Kidbrooke, a poor, and recently almost totally demolished, district in south-east London. Notoriously, this crusade was nearly thwarted by mothers bringing their kids fizzy drinks and burgers that they pushed through the fences so that they wouldnt have to suffer that healthy eating muck.

Essex-born multimillionaire chef and Winston Churchill fan, Jamie Oliver

The second phase was the book, TV series and chain of shops branded as the Ministry of Food. The name is taken directly from the wartime ministry charged with managing the rationed food economy of war-torn Britain. Using the assistance of a few public bodies, setting up a charity, pouring in some coalfield regeneration money and some cash of his own, Oliver planned to teach the proletariat to make itself real food with real ingredients. One could argue that he was the latest in a long line of people lecturing the lower orders on their choice of nutrition, part of an immense construction of grotesque neo-Victorian snobbery that has included former Channel 4 shows How Clean Is Your House?, Benefits Street and Immigration Street, exercises in Lets laugh at picturesque prole scum. But Oliver got in there, and got his hands dirty.

However, the story ended in a predictable manner: attempts to build this charitable action into something permanent and institutional foundered on the disinclination of any plausible British government to antagonise the supermarkets and sundry manufacturers who funnel money to the two main political parties. The appeal to a time when things such as food and information were apparently dispensed by a benign paternalist bureaucracy, before consumer choice carried all before it, can only be translated into the infrastructure of charity and PR, where we learn what happens over a few weeks during a TV show and then forget about it. A permanent network of Ministry of Food shops pop-ups that taught cooking skills and had a mostly voluntary staff were set up in the north of England in Bradford, Leeds, Newcastle and Rotherham, though the latter was forced to temporarily close following health and safety concerns in June 2013, reopening in September 2014.

Much more influential than this up by your bootstraps attempt to do a TV/charity version of the welfare state was the ministrys aesthetics. On the cover of the tie-in cookbook, Oliver sits at a table laid with a 1940s utility tablecloth in front of some bleakly cute postwar wallpaper, and MINISTRY OF FOOD is declared in that same derivative of Gill Sans typeface used on the Keep Calm and Carry On poster. This is familiar territory. There is a whole micro-industry of austerity nostalgia aimed straight at the stomach. There is Olivers own chain of Jamies restaurants, where you can order pork scratchings for £4 (they come with a side of English mustard) and enjoy neo-Victorian toilets. Beyond Olivers empire, middle-class operations such as the caterers Peyton and Byrne combine the sort of retro food common across the western world (lots of cupcakes) with elaborate versions of simple English grub including sausage and mash. Some of the interiors of their cafes (such as the one in Heals on Tottenham Court Road in central London) were designed by architects FAT in a pop spin on the faintly lavatorial institutional design common to the surviving fragments of genuine 1940s Britain that can still be found scattered around the UK pie and mash shops in Deptford in south-east London, ice-cream parlours in Worthing in Sussex, Glasgows dingier pubs, all featuring lots of wipe-clean tiles.

Make Do And Mend Photograph: Make Do And Mend

Other versions of this are more luxurious, such as Dinner, where Heston Blumenthal provides typically quirky English food as part of the attractions of One Hyde Park, the most expensive housing development on Earth. Something similar is offered at Canteen, which has branches in Londons Royal Festival Hall, Canary Wharf and after its scorched-earth gentrification courtesy of the Corporation of London and Norman Foster Spitalfields Market. Canteen serves Great British Food, beers, ciders and perrys [that] represent our countrys brewing history and cocktails that are British-led. The interior design is clearly part of the appeal, offering a strange, luxurious version of a works canteen, with benches, trays and sans serif signs that aim to be both modernist and nostalgic. It presents the incongruous spectacle of the very comfortable eating and imagining themselves in the dining hall of a branch of Tyrrell & Green circa 1960. Still more bizarre is Albion, a greengrocer for oligarchs, selling traditional English produce to the denizens of Neo Bankside, the Richard Rogers-designed towers alongside Tate Modern. Built into the ground floor of one of the towers, it sells its unpretentious fruit and veg next to posters advertising flats that start at the knock-down price of £2m.

Closer to reality as lived by most people is a mobile app called the Ration Book. On its website, it gives you a crash course on rationing, when the government made sure that in the face of shortage and blockade the population could still get lifes essentials in the form of the famous book, with its stamps to get X amount of dried egg, flour, pollock and Spam. It is an app that aggregates discounts on various brands via voucher codes for those facing the crunch the people the unfortunate Ed Miliband tried to reach out to as the squeezed middle. The website states: Our team of Ministers broker the best deals with the biggest brands, to give you the best value. Is there any better way of describing the UK in the second decade of the 21st century than as the sort of country that produces apps to simulate state rationing of basic goods, simply to shave a little bit off the price of high street brands?

This food-based austerity nostalgia is one way in which peoples peculiar longing for the 1940s is conveyed; much more can be found in music and design. Walk into the shops at the Royal Festival Hall or the Imperial War Museum in London, and you will find an avalanche of it. Posters from the 1940s, toys and trinkets, none of them later than around 1965, have been resurrected from the dustbin of history and laid out for you to buy, along with austerity cookbooks, the Design series of books on pre-1960s iconic graphic artists such as Abram Games, David Gentleman and Eric Ravilious, plus a whole cornucopia of Keep Calm-related accoutrements. A particularly established example is the use of the 1930s Penguin book covers as a logo for all manner of goods, deliberately calling to mind Penguins mid-century role as a substantially educative publisher. Then there are all those prints of modernist buildings, ready for Londoners to frame and place in their ex-council flats in zone 2 or 3: reduced, stark blow-ups of the outlines of modernist architecture, whether demolished (the Trinity Square car park in Gateshead seen in Get Carter) or protected (Londons National Theatre). The plate-making company, People Will Always Need Plates, has made a name for itself with its towels, mugs, plates and badges emblazoned with various British modernist buildings from the 1930s to the 1960s, elegantly redrawn in a bold, schematic form that sidesteps the often rather shabby reality of the buildings. By recreating the image of the historically untainted building, it manages to precisely reverse the original modernist ethos. If for Adolf Loos and generations of modernist architects ornament was crime, here modernist buildings are made into ornaments. Still, the choice of buildings is politically interesting. Blocks of 1930s collective housing, 1960s council flats, interwar London Underground stations exactly the sort of architectural projects now considered obsolete in favour of retail and property speculation.

Many of the buildings immortalised in these plates have been the subject of direct transfers of assets from the public sector into the private. The reclamation of postwar modernist architecture by the intelligentsia has been a contributory factor in the privatisation of social housing. An early instance of this was the sell-off of Keeling House, Denys Lasduns east London Cluster Block, to a private developer, who promptly marketed the flats to creatives. A series of gentrifications of modernist social housing followed, from the Brunswick Centre in Bloomsbury (turned from a rotting brutalist megastructure into the home of one of the largest branches of Waitrose in London), to Park Hill, an architecturally extraordinary council estate in Sheffield, given away free to the Mancunian developer Urban Splash, whose own favouring of compact flats has long been an example of austerity sold as luxury although after the boom, its privatisation scheme had to be bailed out by millions of pounds in public money. Another favourite on mugs and tea towels is Balfron Tower, a council tower block about to be sold to wealthy investors for its iconic quality. It is here, where the rage for 21st-century austerity chic meets the results of austerity as practised in the 1940s and 1950s, that a mildly creepy fad spills over into much darker territory. In aiding the sell-off of one of the greatest achievements of that era the housing built by a universal welfare state the revival of austerity chic is the literal destruction of the thing it claims to love.

The Ministry of Nostalgia by Owen Hatherley is published by Verso (£14.99). To order a copy for £11.99, go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min. p&p of £1.99.

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