Grandma River is really old. She is so old that she forgets to clean the mushrooms from her ears and listen for raiders, so I have to go with her when she goes foraging. 'Ernie' they say. 'Look after your Grandma. She knows stuff.' I don't mind. I like learning about wild foods and medicines. We don't have a choice really. It's not as if we can go to a supermarket. Sometimes I go to the one in the old town, it's faded lettering covered in lichen and old graffiti, and steal in through the broken windows. I wonder what it would have been like to buy chocolate or tinned beans. I nearly had chocolate once. It was a tiny piece, dark and wrapped in silver foil. Grandma River had found it in an old coat. She allowed me a sniff before snatching it from me and gobbling it up. When I told my Dad he laughed. 'Grandma River misses dark chocolate the most' he said. 'More than anything.'

It's hard to miss things you don't know about and have never experienced. The old people remember and talk about it over large clay cups of honey mead. The conversation goes like this, every time.

'Do you remember when...'
'Oh boy, do I...'

When they fall asleep drooling honey mead onto their frayed and dirty coats, it's my job to put blankets on them. The old people are like libraries and you have to stop them from dying. In the old days, they said, no one really cared about that. They didn't miss being uncared for, that's for sure. There were many things they didn't mind leaving in the past. Dentistry, for one. Grandma River hated dentists. She did love, however, smearing her teeth with charcoal and grinning at me with a blackened smile, that is, a fairly toothless one as she only had six left. 'Reckon I might put this one on Instagram' she would cackle. I had no idea what that was, only that no one missed it, and no one had to worry about what they looked like so much anymore.

Grandpa River missed aeroplanes and boats going to a faraway place he called the motherland. It was also called England, but that no longer existed as far as anyone could tell. It disappeared under the sea. 'Colonising Atlantis' Grandpa would guffaw. I had no idea what he meant. When I asked, all Mum said was that it was impossible to colonise what no longer existed. 'There's not much to be colonised', she said, plucking tiny wild yams from the paddock. 'We're all to busy just trying to survive'.

'And that fucking fop haired Boris is probably impregnating some Atlantian secretary', Grandpa would say.

Grandpa loved tinkering with steam engines. Grandma always said the end of the world was a dream come true for her husband, because it legitimized his passion for old trains. He helped get the steam line running from East to West again in the 2040s, but retired when a chunk of metal flew off and hit him in the side of the head. He spends his time fixing old diesel engines, but I never understand why as there's no diesel to run them anymore. 'Keeps him off the streets', Grandma would joke, because apparently she had been saying that for their 65 years of married life. As I said, they were really old. Old enough to grow mushrooms from their ears.

Chocolate and diesel. Who knew that the old world would not be missed that much, except for two things I didn't have a taste for at all.

This is in response to @galenkp's WE project. This week I chose to write about things we might be nostalgic about in 50 years time, but chose to write in a creative way. I hope you enjoyed it. I'm just plucking a few mushrooms from my ears and I'll be off to read your responses over the next few days. It's always a good laugh. Happy Weekend! Oh, and the collage is mostly my own, except for a stolen steam engine and some randoms round a fire from Unsplash.