The Past is a Foreign Country

   THE PAST IS A FOREIGN COUNTRY by Aileen Cleave

Just the other day, scrolling through the many notifications thrown up by the algorithms I apparently generate, my attention was caught by a headline from The Telegraph “Baby boomers are the luckiest generation in history”.  I couldn’t read the article because I don’t subscribe to the Telegraph and it was behind a paywall, but it struck a cord with me and and after careful reflection, I agreed with the sentiment 100%.

A baby boomer myself from the late 1940s, I  consider myself incredibly lucky to have retired to this very special part of  Spain, the Almanzora Valley.  As I sit on my terrace this warm, sunny April evening, drinking in the beauty of the Andalucian mountains in front of me,(and a little of the delicious local wine)  my thoughts are drawn back to my childhood and the difference in lifestyle between those early years and these latter years.  When you stand back and look at it dispassionately the difference is incredible.   Indeed, as someone once said “the past is a foreign country”.   How alien to my grandchildren, for example,  would be just one day in the life of a child of the fifties.

Woken by our mother calling from the foot of the stairs that the fire was lit and it was safe to emerge from the warmth of our beds,  we  would do so slowly, reluctantly,  and stare, shivering, out at an icy winter landscape.  The bedroom windows would be adorned with sparkling, magical images etched by Jack Frost.  On the coldest days I recall the briefest visits to the bathroom to wash my hands and face and clean my teeth before bundling all my clothes together and running downstairs to the comfort  and relative warmth of the sitting room and a blazing coal fire.  On those coldest days we were allowed to eat our porridge on our laps in front of the fire.  The words “in front of the fire” still bring a warm glow to me.

And so to school!  No 4 x 4 chariot awaited me.  With coat and muffler, hat and gloves I would set off to brave the icy winds and pavements of that North East town.  If it was raining, the rain fell horizontally and umbrellas were useless in such winds.  I walked the half hour trip unescorted from about the age of 8, meeting school friends young and old en route.

The pace of change continues to accelerate throughout my teens and into my twenties when the most liberating thing ever to happen to women, including getting the vote, becomes readily available, albeit by prescription.  I mean of course The Pill.  For the first time in history (and here this is not just a newspaper headline) women have control over their own bodies.   

In the late sixties and in the  seventies, the consumer society really takes off.  All the things our parents never knew they needed are now readily available, and with a new form of payment, hire purchase.  And so begins the age of credit.  In the eighties the banks take this to a new level, access to the “never never” being   readily available to one and all, including mortgages which further  fuels  the property price inflation started in the seventies.  It’s now the nineties, and the internet has been around at a low level for some 7 or 8 years and Jeff Besos starts selling books on line fr9m his garage, heralding the birth of Amazon.    In  1990, Tim Berber-Lee invents the World Wide Web and with the best of intentions, donates it  to the world.  Wow!  How has that affected society?  Where to start.  Now it’s not just our parents generation being left behind, but us too, pedalling like made to keep abreast of social and technological changes.

It’s now not just a new decade of the noughties, but a new century, a new millennium, a Brave New World.

Or is it?  Is something rather sinister creeping  in under  the guise of social media.   We are  now half way through Los Años Vientes, the twenties, in this new century and disturbing  norms are appearing, possibly helped along by the unprecedented actions of our governments during the course of the last decade’s  pandemic of COVID 19.  What we thought was science fiction, artificial intelligence, is now mainstream.

So how does all of  this make our generation , born just after the most terrifying and all-encompassing war the world has ever seen, how, given what lay ahead of us, are we the luckiest generation?  Well, and this is just my opinion,  I feel that  we inherited an overwhelming feeling of optimism amidst a time of privation, and rationing.  A feeling that together with fellow nations we were able to overcome pure evil and emerge free and eventually  strong again.  We have witnessed, indeed experienced,  all of the foregoing and are now able to retire, simply because time has been kind to us , with a reasonable pension and a world open to us, until Brexit, to live, work and enjoy.

My parents would have been open-mouthed to see the life style we enjoy here in Andalucia.  For them two weeks enjoying the cities of Italy would have been the high life.  They would have been amazed at the villas, and, my goodness, the private pools!

I say all of this for one reason only, that we (or rather I) fully appreciate our good fortune, especially as storm clouds appear to be amassing again on Europe’s borders and in the Middle East.  Let’s make sure that our children and our grandchildren understand the great gift given to them by their  great grandparents.  It’s difficult when times are hard, as they are for many at the moment, to remember how precious is our gift of freedom.  In our democracies governments can be changed when the economy suffers, in a dictatorship that option isn’t there. 

I think it’s a wonderful world, just not perfect, and I’m sure the two generations we have raised will rise to the challenge with all the optimism of hope in tomorrow.