After the ruin of two world wars, the Western European world decided to rebuild quickly rather than meticulously, and as a result it was obvious to those who had survived that the new world lacked the charm of its forebear.

Living in a “new town” built in the 1960s, the lack of history is obvious. The cultural icons are merely imported: a statue of Jane Austen adorns our town square, but she never lived here. There are no buildings nearing a hundred years old, and the lack of longstanding trades and novelty shops has led to it succumbing to Turkish barbershop money-laundering schemes and vape shops, among restaurants that come and go.

Despite only seeing it in photographs, the Japanese are the only people on Earth who seem to care about reminding me of my country’s former glory. Howl’s Moving Castle is a film set in an idealised Western European county stacked with lavish architecture, whose skies are scattered with marvellous flying machines. The chimneys smoke with delight and the folk are always dressed in their Sunday best. How odd, I find, that such fascination with the past — and the past of my own culture — had to be made thousands of miles away from me, composed by people in a language I don’t speak, and transferred to me by binary means on a disc format they pioneered.

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