Hi Friends,
I thought that the following article was rather interesting, just thought I'd share it with you all.
(Mirror newspaper is a prominemt national newspaper here in the UK)
http://www.mirror.co.uk/mailbox/mailbox/page.cfm?objectid=11797388&method=full
WE NEVER HAD IT THAT GOOD
LET me tell you about the past everyone has been banging on about lately, the 30s, 40s and 50s. Yes, and the beloved 60s, too. The golden age. I remember some of it.Everything stank. The pollution and smell from industry, petrol fumes, cigarette smoke and rubbish blowing about in the streets was more disgusting than anything today. Even people ponged a bit. More than one bath a week was considered over-fussy.Nuclear obliteration at any moment was a distinct possibility.Nurses were beautifully turned out, but people still died of infectious diseases that a starched uniform couldn't cure. It's true that you didn't have to wait for a hip operation. There were virtually no NHS replacement hips.Teachers were dedicated, but most were interested only in clever children. The rest were ignored.Food was repulsive and eating it something embarrassing you did in private.Women endured foul, brutal marriages because they could do nothing about it. There was terrible violence behind the net curtains. Houses were cold and dark.If there is one thing I shall be keeping my CCTV eye on as we get to know one another in this column, it is our soppy nostalgia for golden ages we never actually experienced.The myth that the Blitz was a good time.The fiction that the 50s, when everyone knew how to use an apostrophe, had anything else to commend it as a decade.THE naive belief that punk rock was a political reaction to Margaret Thatcher rather than a merry noise.Let me tell you some more about the past, the stuff that everyone mysteriously forgets.Traffic was much worse than today in cities and on holiday routes. And you could drive a car as drunk as you like and not be touched by law or guilty conscience. The 19th hole, gent-in-a-Jag logic back then was that there's nothing worse than having a smash when you're sober.If you had an accident, which was far more likely than today even though there were fewer cars, you and everyone else died, because car manufacturers refused to spend money on safety features. Aeroplanes also came down constantly, although nobody worried much, because only the rich could afford to fly. Most people couldn't make a phone call without going into a box in the street that doubled as a urinal. And the phones rarely worked because people smashed them up for fun. Not surprising, maybe, because the alternative entertainment, television, was mostly dreadful.Oh, and as for crime, trust me, the streets weren't as safe as they say. Razor gangs attacked innocent passers-by with blades for no reason. The police patrolled in groups in dangerous areas. You couldn't go to the seaside on Bank Holidays because of ferocious running battles between gangs.Respectable people were racist and all the other -ists. It never occurred to them that unthinking, hand-me-down hatred was wrong.Superficial manners were observed, of course, but on the sly, people were just as rude and nasty as they sometimes are now. It was a different kind of rudeness, more snootiness than snarling. But rudeness it was.There was simply far less value to human life.MY dad knew a fellow lorry driver in the war who, backing up in his Bedford, ran over and killed a boy of eight.The kid's father arrived at the scene of the accident. The lorry driver took off his cloth cap and apologised humbly."Don't worry about it," said the father, with impeccable old-world manners. "He was only a little bastard."Incredible, I know, but my dad told the story more than once and in such detail that I sometimes wondered if it was really a friend of his. Or something he needed to talk about.The past.The days when so much was rotten, but at least railway timetables were worth the paper they were printed on.Last Tuesday at Windsor, a year or two late owing to an elderly royal person on the line, we finally clattered across the points at Millennium Junction and are speeding towards 21st Century Central.We should not forget the past altogether now that we're living in the future. But let's stop revering it so. Let's give up the useless, trainspotterish, British habit of glorying in old timetables.In this country, for some damned reason, we've shown no passion for the future since the Victorian age, which was less stuffy and more forward-thinking than we acknowledge.The thing is, you see, and they knew it then, the future is almost bound to be better than the past.It always has been.
REPLY LETTER TO THE ABOVE
Grim fairy tale of the 'golden' past
Apr 18 2002
£25 LETTER OF THE DAY
CASSANDRA is quite right to debunk the "golden age" of the past (Daily Mirror, April 16).To this amnesia over our rather nasty past we can add two world wars and a hundred other wars, the Wall Street Crash, the Depression, British imperialism, apartheid and the rigid colour and class system the world over.We also had Hitler, Pol Pot, Mao Tse-tung and Stalin. In the good old days in this country - which were not so long ago - we put unmarried mothers in mental institutions and sent orphans to colonies as cheap child labour, landladies put signs up saying "No Irish, no dogs or Negroes" and children were too scared to report sex abuse.We tend to remember the good, conveniently forgetting the bad, and view the future with fear. Hence it all happens again and again. We do not learn from our mistakes because we bury them in a "golden age" of supposed hot summers and caring folk.Sara StarkeyTonbridge, Kent
Sorry all you worrying JW's.........
Latte
