Hooray for the good old days!
Hooray for the good old days!
I was sent away to boarding school at 7. My parents thought this a good idea. I think there was a lot of lead in petrol in those days.
Some of the great things of the past are venerated and held up as paragons of virtue, and signals of a better time. I recently heard a friend’s daughter say something I found a little disturbing. She was lamenting ‘the good old days’. I should point out that this was coming from a 20 year-old, who resented having to wear a mask. She was, of course, talking about what we used to describe as ‘normal’ life, pre-covid. She spoke with a soft air of reminiscence that reminded me how quickly we forget about some of the things that the past delivered, and that today we question more closely.
Admittedly some do long for the good old days of vinyl records, Bill Cosby on prime-time television and carefully administered suppression of democratically elected governments in central and south America. However, sometimes the lens of reminiscence paints an inaccurate picture of the past.
As an eight year old I remember a sense of nervous apprehension as the line in which I stood edged closer to the nurse at the head of the queue. This was the drill during the periodic vaccinations we had. Three hundred uniformed sticky schoolboys waited anxiously to see which of us would make a break for the playing fields to escape the dreadful fate that awaited us at the head of the line. The doors out of the dinning hall were well guarded. At my particular very expensive institution of learning it was considered prudent that the nurse change the needle used in the vaccination every tenth vaccine that was administered. We would all hope not to be number nine, in the cycle, knowing that by then the needle bore a closer resemblance to a snooker cue being pushed into our upper arm than a surgical syringe. Ah, the joys of growing up.
However, it was preferable to polio, which some of our parents had (if they were lucky) lived through. So, when my friend’s daughter recently talked with a delightful naivete about wishing things were how they once were, I listened with degree of skepticism. When she went on to describe herself as an anti-vaxxer I left the room. To be fair, this was the young adult who had once been the child that ran with scissors, licked the frozen lamppost to see if it really was true — and it was… and experimented with pushing things into an electrical outlet. I suppose today we would describe that as a ‘hands-on’ learning technique.
Enthusiasts for the age of steam probably don’t consider the fact that the coal that fired those mighty engines of the past continues to contribute to the global warming of the present. This mess is going to take a while to clean up. When my brother recently lamented the virtual disappearance of a manual option on some cars available today, he justified it by saying that you can bump start a manual vehicle very easily. Of course, during the sixties and seventies one needed to bump start vehicles routinely because they were so massively unreliable. These days electrical systems and battery technology are such that we rarely have to be concerned about such issues. Bemoaning the fact that there’s no exhaust pipe to attach a hosepipe to, in the case of electric vehicles, I was reminded to check in with his therapist.
I often find myself reminding my clients that the past serves one purpose. To get us to the present. If we survive it, we get here. That’s all there is, and it’s all there’s ever been. That is something that’s unlikely to change, at least in my lifetime.
Have a great week. If you or someone you know needs a little help I am seeing clients at 1892 West Broadway. Point them in my direction or give me a call at 778 919 0197.
Rob Hadley
