A Shoddy Potted History of the Late 20th Century, Or How I grew up not loving Cereal.
So, on the eve of my 21st wedding anniversary, and two weeks away from our eldest leaving home to start his University education a three-and-a-half-hour drive away, I got to thinking about life – as you do.
It started when I saw an advert for a well known UK company who you hire electrical equipment and furniture from at a horrendous rate of interest – that had me reminiscing about my parents renting our television set when I was a child from either Radio Rentals or Granada – I really don’t remember which one and it reminded me how circular life can be, that the vagaries of world economics has now brought us back to this happening again in the 21st century; decades after it went out of style for the previous generation (my own childhood was in the 1970’s: I know, a long time ago).
The similarity of the format made my butterfly brain jump to thinking about what is not so similar and what I and my generation have experienced that will not occur in my children’s lifetime and suddenly there are a multitude of memories and experiences that are waving back at me from my past and jostling to be noted as “once in a lifetime” experiences never to be repeated……….
Let’s start with the Radio Rentals thing……I vividly remember two aspects of this from a time when I was all of five years old. To start with, I can clearly remember when my family got our first colour TV set. Yes, colour instead of black and white. Seems bizarre now that that was even a thing but the advance in technology was a significant one, it had been around for several years prior to our family foray into the modern world, but we were a working class family and lived to our means which meant catching up with the rest of civilisation when we could afford it ( and even then it was only by renting the TV for a weekly fee and if that wasn’t paid you knew someone would be round to remove it toot-sweet).
My memory of excitedly hopping up and down impatiently around the living room waiting for the “Radio Rentals Man” to unpack, connect and tune in the TV is still vivid in my adult psyche. A change my children will never experience. The second aspect of this event left imprinted a different type of memory altogether. I can still feel the primal need to hide behind the sofa in that same living room not too many days or weeks after basking in the CRT glow of the new colour picture as I cowered away from the evil incarnate of the Cybermen on an episode of Doctor Who.
In the technologically marvellous age my children have access to, I cannot recall this ever happening to them (other than an incident involving my eldest’s insistence he was sufficiently mature enough to watch a Predator movie until approximately 5 minutes into the said movie, at which point he announced his reluctance to pursue his choice any further and respectfully asked us to turn it off…….beheadings have a habit of doing that to a young fellow as I will attest to a similar reaction to “Gawain & The Green Knight” at the cinema).
The nearest my offspring got to their own version of this technological improvement was probably the change from standard to High definition broadcast media. A change they inevitably greeted with the rousing cry of “I don’t see much difference really”. Cue deflated-ness from incumbent parent.
So, what other life changing events do I get to stamp on my generational passport and claim as my own? Well let me tell you oh sceptical reader, there are many! How about the introduction and rise of the mobile phone? Indeed, where would we be without our smart phones now. No-one would know how to fill their days without them but guess what? Only happened in my lifetime! I still remember watching Danny Glover wielding a mobile phone in the movie “Lethal Weapon” with a battery the size of a suitcase and thinking it was the coolest Gadget ever invented! How times have changed. Gone are the days now of communicating your intensions a week in advance – i.e. at the end of a night out, signing off from your mates with a cheery “see you at The Newmarket Bar next Friday at 7pm….” then turning up and low and behold, there they are as expected. No contact in between. No texts, no WhatsApp’s, no Facebook posts or Instagram……..
Which leads nicely on to the next one. The internet. So much a part of our daily lives now. Anything you need to know? Ask Google or Wikipedia. Need to buy something, make something, cook something, find something, store something, track something, get somewhere, talk to someone…….. you got it, use the internet. But guess what? I saw the rise of this behemoth in my lifetime. From dial up noise to ultra-high-speed fibre broadband internet. The world has seen a massive shift in connectivity. My first internet experiences were ones that would make my children’s generation die of boredom. Waiting 5 minutes for a background picture to load before clicking a button to inevitably having to wait another 5 minutes for the next screen to load. With the attention span of my teenagers, they would just give up, god knows how we didn’t – but somehow it was still exciting.
I can remember being fascinated by N.A.S.A. as a child. The lure of outer space fed my imagination and coloured my reading choices with outlandish tales by Ray Bradbury and John Wyndham. I collected a ridiculous amount of cut out tokens from cereal packets in order to send away and receive a set of N.A.S.A. slides (yes, slides!) from a promotion advertised on the side of a box of a healthy type of breakfast cereal. I never ate breakfast growing up and that was a chore in itself, spending months eating Shredded Wheat in order to garner enough tokens for the set. My mother must have despaired when she realised why I was stolidly munching my way through this stuff just to get the tokens, she never complained though. Once I had gathered enough of them, sent them away and waited impatiently for my prize to arrive the fun began. If you have never had the pleasure of a slide show, you had to sit fumbling in a dark room after spending hours loading the slides into holders, making sure they were the right way round, setting up the screen and the projector and clicking a wired remote button to change the image…..you get the picture(literally). My mother, father and two sisters were forced to sit through this experience with me and I doubt they had even the slightest interest in any of it.
Now? Just google it – but the point is my children haven’t had the wonder of space exploration in their everyday lives the way I did. Yes, there has been the I.S.S. & the Mars rover but has it played a part in shaping their minds? I’m not sure it has impacted or influenced them the way the Apollo missions and subsequently the Space Shuttle gripped my malleable young personage. I also think part of this is down to the information saturation that the internet provides now. As a youth, News TV and print media was far less profligate and the information you absorbed had a much more direct impact on you – short it probably felt more powerful or “real”.
What else? I hear you roar. Ok, maybe not but no, I’m not done yet. I am lucky enough to have been part of the generation that saw the genesis and evolution of the home computer. Ridiculous as it sounds to say it but where would be without them now? When I was a child, a computer needed a room the size of a modern flat to contain all of its wires, transistors, magnetic tapes and flashing lights – and now, a smart phone has more computing power than we needed to send a man to the moon only a few short years ago. How incredible an advance is that? Yet we take it for granted, our every day lives affected or infected with multiple computers on every level and we barely even notice. Even our appliances can contain an “artificial” intelligence. Your fridge can talk to you? Your car can tell when you deviate from your lane? Your phone knows exactly where in the world you are? How far we have come to have these wonders as the norm and yet go unremarked! Stop and really think about it for a minute and I promise you will be hard pressed not to either smile or shake your head in wonder.
While I know that there are many other examples of advancements I could reference, the ones I have sighted are the ones that feel the most visceral to me at the moment. I am sure if my life path had been different these examples would have been radically altered but I am a product of my mind and my environment and as I am very fond of saying, it is what it is.
I feel sorry for my sons in the sense that some of the wonder has been taken from them by default due to the fact that the world is a much more interconnected and therefore smaller place than the one that I grew up in. The flip side of this is that they have so much more access to both the world and the wealth of knowledge it possesses at their fingertips, if they desire to use it. It has many, many advantages but maybe not so much of a sense of wonder and discovery as I had, as well as possibly too much of a sense of entitlement and an expectation that change and advance are our right and inevitable. A little dark, I know but life can be dark too right?
I can confidently say that if I make it to a ripe old age and have the benefit of being cared for in whatever passes for elderly comfort in the future, in any moments of clarity given to me in my final months, I will be able to eschew the recently departed and wonderfully unique Rutger Hauer by quoting his famous “tears in the rain” speech ad infinitum at anyone unfortunate enough to come into earshot of me, loudly pronouncing “I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe….” How fortunate I have been to have witnessed this particular moment in time and space.
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a foray back into writing 