I don’t know exactly when it started but I think I’m becoming an in-my-day person. I don’t actually start sentences with “In my day” but it’s implied. The trigger, I suspect, is having three teenage sons in the age of the smartphone. I gave up on any attempt to manage screen time years ago. All I can do now is try to explain how much more fun life was before smartphones. (In my day) I climbed trees and built camps and ran, Theresa May-style, through fields of wheat, I tell them. But they’re not listening. They’ve got the entirety of the internet to distract them from my sermon.
Nostalgia is not a helpful state in which to wallow. It’s not just an impotent parenting tool. It’s a fast track to becoming a miserable old codger. I don’t want to become a miserable old codger. Not yet, anyway. So let’s dispense with the rose-tinted glasses. In my day, not everything was better.
Bicycles
My first bike was made of iron girders and cement. It was so heavy, it was easier to walk it up slight inclines. If you hit a pothole the wheels would buckle. I know we didn’t have any potholes in my day, but still, bikes are much better today. They’re made of carbon and feathers. They have suspension and gears. Mine even has a battery tucked away in the frame. I press a button and I float up the hill, and everyone thinks I’m Chris Hoy. Better.
Music
I’m not talking about the actual music, which was definitely better in my day. I’m talking about the way in which we listen to it. In the beginning it was vinyl, which was tedious. I know the anoraks say it sounds better, but all I can remember is having to tiptoe around the record player to stop it jumping. Then there was the Walkman and everyone gets sentimental about trying to record the Top 40 off the radio. Also tedious. Then came CDs, which were great for about five minutes and now they just occupy half the attic. Spotify might be the destroyer of the music industry, but any track by any band at the touch of a button? Better. Much better.
Interior decoration
I just about missed the 1970s and I’m sure they were wild, but in my day it was magnolia. Magnolia, magnolia, magnolia. I felt sorry for the Dulux guys. For three boring decades every single conversation in a paint shop ended with, “No, I think we’ll just go with magnolia.” Then came the Llewelyn-Bowen years and the less said about them the better. Now? It’s all hues and tones and subtle shades. It’s just better.
Advertisement
Tennis rackets
Definitely better. See also duvets, double glazing, coffee, shower heads, lawnmowers and breakfast cereal options, but not vacuum cleaners, trains, M&S underpants and the state of public discourse.
Television
Yes, I know. Civilisation! The World at War! They don’t make TV like that any more. But — and don’t shout at me for saying this — it was a bit slow. In my day there were three channels and I wasn’t allowed to watch one of them. For the two weeks Wimbledon was on I wasn’t allowed to watch any of them. Now there are 14 million hours of “content” and even though 13.9 million hours of it is likely to contain Michael McIntyre, Ant and Dec and/or Fiona Bruce, that still leaves an awful lot to watch. Better.
Boredom
My in-my-day parenting sermon begins with a brief summary of what school holidays were like in the 1980s — all burning ants with magnifying glasses and throwing a tennis ball at a wall for three hours straight. It ends with an uplifting section on imagination and how lucky we are that Isaac Newton wasn’t watching Netflix under that apple tree. Don’t tell the kids but it’s all nonsense. My school holidays were interminable. By the beginning of August I was ready to go back to school. That’s how bored I was cycling my concrete bicycle round and round the block. Sure, young people today might have no attention span and who knows what YouSnapTock is doing to their brains. But in my day I spent a whole afternoon sliding down the stairs on a tea tray and that’s an afternoon I’ll never get back.
