Health nuts are going to feel stupid someday, lying in hospitals dying of nothing.

‘No pleasure is worth giving up for the sake of two more years in a geriatric home in Weston-super-Mare’.   I have quoted this before, but it is one of my favourites from Kingsley Amies.   Life is pretty random – many of my healthiest friends have died young and yet some of the reprobates are still will us, smoking, drinking, overweight and taking little exercise.   And just apropos of nothing, another good quote from Kingsley Amies is  ‘If you can’t annoy somebody, there’s little point in writing’,

My intention had been to write about what is better about modern life, but I keep getting sidetracked when I read, hear or see things that make me pause for thought.   For instance, this morning I read in the newspaper that a senior female staff member at the BBC showed a junior female staff member a dick pic and that the junior had burst into tears and been traumatised by this.   I can’t help feeling that she has either recently left a convent, is incredibly wet or wants some enormous sum of money in compensation.   For some reason men appear to think that women find dick pics attractive or arousing whereas, maybe because I’m old and boring, I imagine that most women would just think ‘Eugh, put it away!’.  

However much as there is to complain about in modern life there are good things over and above the confusion it causes to the old and bewildered and sometimes one has to stop and think about how many things have improved enormously.  Communication for example – mobile ‘phones are wonderful.   If you break down in your car at midnight you no longer have to wait on a dark and lonely road hoping that the first driver to stop will be a good Samaritan and not a mad axeman!  

If you have grandchildren in Australia they can still know you through the screen even if you only see them once every couple of years.   My grandparents lived in Scotland and when we made our annual visit to see them they were complete strangers who we talked to for three minutes (some of you will know what I mean!) on Christmas Day.  

Another thing that is better is a more relaxed way of life.   In my family breakfast was at eight, lunch at one, tea at four and dinner at eight and only an emergency would vary that.   And the food was very basic – you would never have found an avocado in our local town.   Garlic was considered an exotic foreign ingredient that no decent English cook would have any truck with and as for things such as hummus or guacamole, no one would have known what you were talking about. There may be some people out there who remember rissoles but for the unenlightened they were our version of a hamburger made with left over meat from the Sunday joint minced, seasoned, made into patties and fried.   Known at my school as Grissoles as we believed they were made from the inedible bits of meat that we had left on our plates the previous day.

The internet is another modern day wonder – of course it can overwhelm us, but there ae so many excellent things about it.   The Encyclopaedia Britannica was an amazing set of books, but they were not only incredibly expensive, but took up a vast amount of space and quickly went out of date.   Search engines on the internet can be carried  around on your ‘phone in your pocket and are up-dated hourly. 

Another good thing is that most of us live much better for longer – although our heirs might not necessarily appreciate that!   Photographs of my grandparents show them as very old people when judging by my age in these photos they can only have been in their 60s!   This must in part be due to medicine – when I was younger people whispered the ‘C’ word (not just the four letter one which was seldom, if ever, even whispered!) but Cancer, because we assumed that if someone got cancer they died and yet today there are millions of people who have had cancer and have continued on with their lives very healthily.   And what about all those new parts – hips, knees, shoulders –  you name it.   And all the amazing procedures they can do on hearts, and then there ae cataracts – or rather no cataracts as you seem to be able to have those done in your lunch hour.     

Cars are much more reliable too – when I was young everyone (apart from the very rich) had an old banger for their first car and it broke down with monotonous regularity.   There was no such thing as an MOT and seat belts didn’t exist – admittedly there was not nearly so much traffic on the roads so we didn’t crash into each other so much, even though we frequently drove after several glasses of wine!

Finally, birth control.   The freedom that women felt once they could regulate the number of children they had and weren’t forced like our grandparents to have dozens of them, many of whom died in infancy.   One of my ancestors had four sons with the same name, so determined was he to have a son who bore his first name that no sooner had a wretched little baby died of scarlet fever than the next one was given the same name.  I’m not unduly superstitious but even I would have felt that it might have been putting a jinx on the poor mites.   

So all in all we don’t really have much to complain about – but when did that ever stop anyone?