Nostalgia Quote by Andy Taylor

Nostalgia does a lot of heavy lifting here, but it’s not the soft-focus kind. Andy Taylor’s “Those were the days” opens like a fond postcard, then immediately undercuts itself with a wink: “It’s an English thing.” That phrase is doing double duty - both a badge of belonging and a sly dodge of responsibility. If everyone does it, no one has to explain why.

The comic engine is the specificity. 6 pm isn’t “later” or “after work”; it’s a ceremonial hour, a cultural alarm clock. By framing drinking as schedule-bound, Taylor turns appetite into ritual, the pub into an institution as reliable as the evening news. The line “you have to go and have a drink” is especially telling: pleasure recast as obligation. The subtext isn’t just camaraderie; it’s compulsion made socially legible.

Then comes the best twist: “We used to stick to that religiously.” The joke lands because it flips moral language onto a habit that’s often treated as harmless tradition until it isn’t. “Religiously” signals devotion, routine, and a kind of unquestioned faith - in mateship, in escapism, in the idea that a pint at dusk keeps adulthood manageable.

Context matters because this is how a certain British masculinity often narrates itself: self-deprecating, lightly ironic, insisting it’s all normal even while hinting at excess. It works because it’s funny and affectionate, and because you can hear the defense mechanism clicking under the laughter.