Actually, those phrases make me sick. 'In my day...' 'Nowadays....'
Usually bandied about by whiny grumpy old gits. Unfortuantely, many of my peers take that line and I always take umbrage and disagree with them.
Just the other some lady in the supermarket behind me started grumbling the supermarket cashier was taking a long time, moaning about the queue and stuff, she appeared to be addressing me. I looked at her and said 'It's not so bad, he's doing his best and he's busy. Things could be a lot worse you know' and gave her a smile. She didn't know what to say and I heard stifled sniggers from the rest of the queue. Life's too short to be constantly moaning.
So that's where I'm coming from.
It's easy to remember your childhood, teens & twenties with misty eyed nostalgia but were things really so different then? Rush mentioned the eighties, I was just entering my 30's then so I could have, had I a mind too, have lamented the sixties and lambasted the eighties. But I didn't.
Of course things seemed better then, no responsibilities, constant discoveries and learning and no aches and pains. With age comes a yearning for the past but it's gone, look to now.
I don't think the kids now are much different to how they were in my childhood, there's always a bad element, be it 1880 or 2006. Did folks raised in the 30's berate the fifties? probably. It goes on.
I do lament the lifting of corporal punishment in schools and a police officer not being able to give you a slap. The police used their common sense then, a quick slap and a scare was often a better way to get a youngster on the straight and narrow than being held in a cell, a social worker's report and a court appearance for something petty.
And I suppose it's true in days gone by imagination was used a lot more, kids seemed to spend more time playing outdoors, I can remember in school holidays being out all day and only coming home when it got dark.
Also true that kids are mollycoddled too much these days, scrubbed too clean and protected from a lot that is natural. Why we got so many allergies now? Rolling about in mud and falling in the quaggy now and again helped build a good immune system.
But, apart from those few things, I do believe that basically most human spirit is good, and if you do take a close and unbiased look, you'll see that where it comes to people's nature, not a lot has changed.
And I don't miss Hindley, Brady, whooping cough, tuberculosis, polio and smoke filled cinemas and buses at all.
