CHIANGMAI, Thailand – 1 January 2005

Welcome to 2005.

January is a time when both broadcast and printed press often have retrospectives concerning the year just finished.  Yet why stop with just one year?  Why not roll back the clock a little further?

According to (western) regulators and bureaucrats, we who were kids in the 1960′s, 70′s, and early 80′s, probably shouldn’t have survived into this century.  The following are a few reasons for this, from friends now scattered around the world, and from me.  How many can you relate to?

Our baby cots were covered with brightly coloured, lead-based, paint, which was promptly chewed and licked.  We had no childproof lids on medicine bottles, latches on doors or cabinets, and it was fine to play with pans on the cooker.

Riding bicycles, we wore no helmets, had flip-flops on our feet, and stuck sticks in our wheels to make that annoying clacking sound.  As children, we rode in cars with no seat belts or airbags, and the front passenger seat was a treat to replace standing on the hand brake.

We drank water from the garden hose, not from a bottle, and it tasted the same.  We ate chips, bread and butter pudding, and drank fizzy pop with sugar in it, but were never overweight, because we were always active.  We shared one drink with four friends, from one bottle or can, and no one actually died from this.

We’d spend hours building go-carts (soap box carts) out of scraps, and then went at top speed down hills; only to find we’d forgotten to add brakes.  After running into stinging nettles a few times, we learned to solve the problem, and got hell from our parents for destroying the toes and heels of our school shoes.  We’d leave home after breakfast, and disappear all day.  As long as we were back before dark, no one worried.

We didn’t have PlayStations, X-Boxes, or video games, nor 99 TV channels, no videotape movies, no surround sound, no mobile phones, no personal computers, and no Internet chat rooms.  We had friends, went outside, found them, and played football, street cricket, or washing-line tennis – getting chased when mothers came out to take in the laundry.  We fell out of trees, got cut, or broke bones climbing cliffs, but there were no lawsuits.  We had full on fistfights but no prosecution followed from other parents.

We carried 30 kilos of newspapers, on ten-mile paper rounds, on foot, at 6:00am, seven days a week, before going to school on five of them.  We washed cars and windows at weekends for pocket money, and spent weeks in the potato fields every summer, because it paid better.  Every autumn, we collected wild fruits for our parents and learned the secrets of jam and wine making when we got home, while feeling sick from eating more than we harvested (rather than because it was unwashed).

We walked to friend’s homes.  We walked to school, along uncongested roads, without relying on mum or dad to drive us there.  We made up games with sticks and tennis balls.  We rode bicycles in packs of 7 or more on the main roads, wearing duffle coats and anoraks by only the hood, and didn’t have collisions with cars.  The idea of a parent bailing us out if we broke a law was unheard of; they’d side with the police.

Our generations produced some of the best risk-takers, problem solvers, and inventors, ever.  The past 50 years have been an explosion of innovation and new ideas.  We had freedom, failure, success, and responsibility, and we learned how to deal with it all – before we left junior high school.

Maybe you were one of us?  If so – congratulations!  You had the luck to grow up with real kids, before lawyers and governments regulated our lives, … for our own good?

So how have we changed it for our own offspring?

Start with the thought that the majority of students, in universities today, were born after the Falklands War.  They’ve probably never heard of Woodstock, yet believe they are the original hippies and “New Age” devotees.  They’ve never heard David Bowie, Slade, or T-Rex.  Rod Stewart is known only for his wives, and Sir Cliff is to them what Vera Lynn was to us.

To them, Michael Jackson has always been white, John Travolta has always been tubby, and the Beatles were never together.  For them, Elvis has always been dead, the Apollo moon landings a hoax, and they don’t know where Kennedy was assassinated, let alone where their parents were at the time.

Today’s youth cannot ever imagine life before computers, nor a divided Germany or Vietnam, and AIDS and CD’s have existed since they were born.  They don’t understand the concept of black and white television, and can’t switch on or tune a TV without a remote control.  They’ll never understand how we could leave the house without a mobile phone, or would have to get the vegetables, meat, and bread at three different shops.

They’ll never have played “Japs and English”, or pretended to be the “Famous Five” … Enid who?  They’ve never applied to be on “Jim’ll Fix It” or “Why Don’t You”.  Monty Python and the Goodies are akin to Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin.

They don’t know how to select a branch from a living tree to make a bow and arrow, which fruit juice makes invisible ink, or the thrill of apple-scrumping from the vicarage orchard.

Exercise for them is something conducted in an expensive personal fitness centre, and fresh air is acquired on unaccompanied overseas holidays, usually during the pre-dawn, in an open-air disco on the Costa del Sol.

If you understand what was written above and it makes you smile, or if after a night out, you usually need to sleep past noon, then you may be “getting old”.

Are you amazed when you see small children playing comfortably with computers, and do teenagers with mobile phones make you shake your head?  Do you remember watching Dirty Den in Eastenders the first time around, or pine for the traditional Sunday afternoon, black and white, war movie on TV?

Do you sometimes debate the release date of the first Star Wars or Grease movie, supporting your argument with comments like, “I remember taking [insert name of boyfriend or girlfriend] to see it, so it must have been 19xx”?  Do you meet friends from time to time, and talk about the good old days retelling your experiences together?  Yes?  Perhaps you’re becoming “older”.

Do these symptoms show our age-gap from today’s “Youths”?  Perhaps.  Do their opportunities appear to arise from spending the wealth that we, as parents, acquired from lessons in the “School of Hard Knocks”?  Having had such “tough” childhoods, is it why we offer them protective luxuries in theirs?  In doing so, are we enriching or impoverishing their learning?

Is it why we decide to expatriate to lands where so many of the simpler joys of our own childhoods appear to still exist?  Are we searching for a return to our own youth in doing so?

Any of you “oldies” up for a box-cart race down Doi Suthep?

Happy New Year to you all.