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…
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