Kids these days have it easy...don’t they?

With Christmas approaching, my Christmas tree is up and dropping needles everywhere, all my shopping is done, my Christmas cards are written and sent, my house is looking festive, stockings are up, I have carols on in the car, sing carols to the kids at bed time and generally have gone carols-crazy, and all the presents are wrapped. So inevitably my thoughts turn to Christmasses past, and how different it was for us back then. My kids can consider themselves to be fortunate – they have a stable home (stable as in constant, rather than stable in the context of where Jesus was born, obviously…because that might not be considered to be “fortunate”, as such, in this era of triple-glazed, centrally-heated domestic luxury), a loving family, a comfortable income, and parents who go OTT at Christmas time even though they have spoken sternly to each other about this year NOT buying the children quite such a pile of presents. And then they each go off and buy the children a huge pile of presents.

Now then, my 8 year old self might have thought that my 8 year old son has it easy. But does he actually? As life moves on, society evolves, and all that happens is that children gain a whole new set of anxieties which I as a child never had to concern myself about.

·         Internet grooming. In our youth, the people one associated with one could either physically see, or actually hear through the medium of the telephone. We didn’t have these worries about weird 50 year old men posing as 8 year old boys in order strike up a friendship, and consequently we didn’t have to suffer the hypothetical ignominy of our mothers reading us the riot act every time we dared to set a virtual foot on the internet, rigorously vetting our friends list and loading net nanny on to our laptops so that every time we innocently googled the word “cock” we got a virtual slap on the wrist.

·         Sometimes less is more. Kids have so much these days that they find it hard to place a value on their stuff. If it’s broken, by and large they get a new one. We are no longer a “make-do-and-mend” society. When we were kids, if you needed it for school, you sometimes got it (or in my case you got your big sister’s one with the relevant, highly visible, often very embarrassing alterations made). If you didn’t actually need it, you waited until Christmas. Life was so simple.

·         At Christmas, we got one present from our parents, a stocking filled with small toys and a Satsuma. Sometimes we got something from a non-defective godparent or grandparent. Nowadays, children must experience a certain level of rising panic (although clearly they would never be able to identify it as such) when faced with the sheer volume of presents piled up under the tree. Or maybe they don’t care, and they just rip all the wrapping off without a second thought, and it’s just me who experiences rising panic at the number of thank you letters I’m going to have to persuade them to write.

·         Technology. We had pen and paper, and one of those phones with a dial which, if you dropped it, broke your toe rather than itself. They have (separate) remote controls for the TV, the stereo, the set top box, the DVD player and sometimes even the garage door. They have to understand how to work mobiles, androids, laptops, PCs, tablets, iPhones and iPods. If the TV didn’t work when I was a child, you held the aerial up and walked slowly around the room, leaping up and down and cursing occasionally like some sort of ballet dancer with Tourette’s, until the snowstorm on the screen receded and you could see the picture again. If the TV doesn’t work nowadays, they need to work out if it’s the TV, the aerial, the set top box or the broadband connection, switch everything off and back on again, and then get a man in to fix it.

Perhaps modern technology and modern living has actually made our kids’ lives more complicated. Mind you, on the plus side at least in the age of Google we don’t have door-to-door Encyclopaedia Britannica salesmen pestering us any more.

The times they are a ‘changing

Gosh, doesn’t life move on quickly! Most days I feel like I’m still in my twenties, and it’s only when I am struggling to fend off a 3 day hangover that I realise I can’t keep up with my inner twenty-something self any more. That, and the plain fact that if I ran once up a lacrosse pitch these days I’d probably need to be hospitalised.

And so it is in drastic times like these (in other words, whilst grappling with the afore-mentioned hangover) that I start mulling over my younger days, and comparing them to my children’s lives, and laughing at their incredulity when they try to imagine how it must have felt to be as "deprived" as we all were when we were small, even though we didn’t realise it at the time. Here are some things our children will never have to worry about…

1.      How to use a typewriter. One that doesn’t enable you to correct your errors with the simple use of the back space key. One that doesn’t make lofty suggestions regarding your grammar. One that doesn’t change, without so much as a by your leave, your spelling (which is particularly annoying if you have it set to English US and it insists on spelling the word “aluminium” WRONGLY by randomly omitting a letter). One that doesn’t type your words on a curious downwards slant because you haven’t fed the paper in properly. Remember the advent of the electric typewriter which had a back space key and could actually scrape the offending letter off the page? That was revolutionary. Our children will probably never see one, except in a museum. And again, their first question will almost certainly be “why?”

2.      How to use a phone box (well, except in dire emergencies when they have soaked their mobile phone in a puddle and no one else around them has one) - along with what to do if you have no change, how to swallow your pride and do a reverse charge call and talk your parents, via the operator, into accepting those charges when you know they’ll nag you for weeks about always carrying a 10p piece in your pocket for just these emergencies, and how to look up a number in the Yellow Pages. Our children will always just fire up their iPhones… Let’s face it, if they ever do see a phone box, they ask what it is and what it is for, and the very next question they ask is always, ALWAYS, “why?” You know it.

3.      How to use carbon copy paper. I mean, do they even sell that stuff any more?

4.      How to load a camera up with film, and consequently how to line up your shot properly the first time so that you don’t end up with 24 blurry shots of the top of your subject’s head (or in my father’s case, with every single one of the 24 shots involving a telephone pole or electricity wires, in varying degrees of obtrusiveness, even the inside ones). Our children will only ever have to worry about whether or not they have remembered to clear the camera’s memory card or charge up its battery.

5.      How to record tunes off the Radio 1 top 40 chart show using only a radio, a cassette recorder and a blank tape (or, in a pinch, you have been known to use a non-blank and no longer trendy cassette and sellotape over the wee hole). If you were really lucky, you had a radio AND cassette recorder in the same device, thus eliminating background noise, but most of us had to be REALLY quiet whilst a song was recording, and REALLY fast to switch the recorder on and off, because Simon Bates was an annoying twat who always talked over the beginning and end of every song (possibly because those chaps at Radio 1 were wise to the teenage population recording stuff off the radio thus contravening all manner of copyright laws rather than actually buying it in the shops).

6.      How to load up Jumping Jacks on to a ZX Spectrum computer using a cassette. Most of the words in that sentence will in fact be completely alien to anyone under the age of 30.

7.      What a cassette actually does. Children have mostly never seen one, and if they have, they have absolutely no idea what it’s for. They will certainly never appreciate the vital link between a cassette and a pencil.

8.      How to get completely dressed whilst still cocooned safely within the warmth of your bedcovers because the alternative (ie stepping out into an internal environment which does not involve any form of central heating and thus is as cold as it is outside, in fact ice has formed overnight on the inside of the windows) is too dreadful to contemplate.

Next week: the stuff we never had to worry about but our children face all the time…

Sod’s Law For Optimists

Sod’s Law is a good thing. It means that we all maintain a healthy perspective on life. So when we make the mistake of blithely assuming all our traffic lights will turn to green, suddenly Sod dishes up a swift hefty dose of realism. It stops us becoming too complacent and blasé.

Here are some of the more obvious examples of the law of Sod, and their corollaries.

1)      No switch of domestic energy supplier ever happens “without a hitch”. I may have touched on this before. I am the Queen of Switching, so believe me, I know. Every energy supplier will tell you that it is not possible for you to purchase the same electricity from 2 different suppliers at the same time and be charged twice for it. Of course it’s possible. All it takes is for a not-particularly-monumental computer screw-up with dates and times, and Bob’s your uncle. It’s not like they’re selling individually bar-coded widgets, let’s face it.

·         Corollary: The process will NEVER fail in your favour. Ever.

2)      Money can be removed from your bank account in a few seconds, whether or not you actually owe it. If it turns out you didn’t owe it, money cannot be repaid into your account in anything less than a fortnight.

·         Corollary: Unless of course you happen to either personally know the Managing Director of whichever company it is that owes you money, or are persistent enough on your way up the escalation chain to get his / her direct phone number or email address. At this point magical things will happen (or alternatively the company will do exactly what you do to pay someone electronically in a few seconds, and pay you electronically in a few seconds) and – KAZAM! - all will be rectified. It will always have been your fault, and the repayment will always be given as a “gesture of goodwill”, with the repayer adopting a slightly injured air, as if you, the repayee, have somehow made it all personal (and there was no need for that).

3)      Whenever any business entity uses the words “as a gesture of goodwill”, goodwill is in fact the very last emotion they are actually feeling towards you. It’s the corporate equivalent of starting a sentence with the words “No disrespect to you, but…” which basically means that the second half of the sentence will contain some serious disrespect.

4)      The day after you have bought something really expensive, which you have been researching for months and have even taken out a Which? subscription in order to do the job properly, you will see the exact same item cheaper somewhere else. It will almost certainly pop into your email inbox as a Groupon deal offering the item at less than half price.

·         Corollary: There is absolutely no point in paying for a Which? subscription or indeed wasting any time shopping around. Impulse buying! That’s the ticket.

5)      When it snows, your snow shovel, snow boots and the bag of salt and grit (which you stashed carefully in a handy place so you wouldn’t be caught out like last year’s fiasco) will be nowhere to be seen. (In your defence, last year it snowed on St Andrew’s Night which is one of your really big drinking nights of the year, and after you had laughed until your ribs hurt at Engineer slipping and falling face first into 2 feet of new snow like some sort of pissed up, dishevelled snow angel, you really couldn’t be expected to be anything less than a bit stuck the next day, operating as you were under such monumental hangover conditions, with the added affliction of sore ribs too).

·         Corollary: It will always snow when it is least convenient for it to do so, and when you are least prepared for it.

6)      It will never snow when you really want it to, ie when you are completely prepared and you really want your flight to be cancelled because you would rather dance barefoot in the snow than have to rise out of your lovely warm bed before the birds are up in order to catch the first flight to London for a business meeting.

·         Corollary: Whenever your flight is cancelled, it will only ever be cancelled 3 hours after they optimistically roll the plane out on to the runway hoping that the anti-freeze which they keep pumping over the engines will actually melt the ice that is encrusting them and they won’t refreeze 75 seconds after each application, or that Air Traffic Control will select a window within that frost-free 75 seconds in which to allow the plane to take off. It never works. You will not be fed. You will not be allowed to use the loo. You will not get a cup of tea. And you will eventually be off-loaded from the plane. At which point, it will be too late to go home and get back into your bed. You will be offered a full refund by the airline, but of course it will only be “as a gesture of goodwill”, since bad weather is an Act of God.

·         Second corollary: If you spend time and expense preparing for snow, it will not snow.   

7)      It is completely acceptable for businesses to blame God. Can you imagine how fast you would be fired if you told your boss that you were sorry but the circumstances of you punching the Managing Director in the nose were completely out of your control, God made you do it, and thus you cannot be held responsible for your actions - it was all to do with how God makes your body respond to someone being an annoying twat? Businesses use this excuse all the time, although granted theirs is usually a financially-oriented punch in the nose rather than actual physical violence. “I am sorry, but money for your cancelled train journey cannot be refunded because the earthquake that ripped all the rails out of the ground was not our fault - it was an Act of God.”. Similarly, you will find you are uninsured and uninsurable for these losses.

Life isn’t fair. So Sod it, let's all seek revenge by mailing junk mail back to the mailer and putting cold calling businesses on hold for an hour. That will at least provide a few moments of quiet, satisfied amusement.