Children rule, ok?

Have you noticed lately how everyone seems to be getting younger while you're getting older with every passing day if not minute? Well, when I say everyone, I’m really referring here to all those in positions of authority or responsibility, some of them in the highest offices of state.

Some of the worst 'culprits' are teachers and police officers, members of parliament and local councillors, doctors, lawyers, heads of corporations, tv newsreaders and weather people, celebrity scientists and historians, company managers and directors, and even pensioners, and the list just goes on and on.

On comes someone on the television who has 'doctor' or 'professor' in front of his name, talking knowledgeably and authoritatively about a subject, and you can’t believe your ears and eyes. Is this fresh-faced spring chicken of a youth old enough to be a doctor or professor?, you ask yourself. Apparently yes. After all, he’s on the telly spouting off about scientific phenomena or historical events and seems to know what he’s talking about. And yet when you were already entering middle age, with a nagging wife and a bevy of hell-raising sprogs, he was still in short trousers sucking on lollipops! And now he’s a doctor of science, a professor of everything, and disseminating his wisdom to you, me and the rest of the world.

Similarly, this girlie-whirlie comes on and holds forth about matters geological and anthropological and other such ologicals and, lo and behold, just as you’re thinking she’s too young to be out of school at that time of day, you discover she’s… you guessed it, another doctor or professor! Well, I never! When did she have the time to graduate, let alone postgraduate? Or has she been using some miraculous anti-ageing cream?

Experts are invited onto night-time discussion programmes to enlighten and pontificate on this matter or that, this weighty issue or that, and you wonder if their mothers know they’re out so late. You listen enthralled at the amount of knowledge they have accumulated and can’t understand why you didn’t know one quarter of that when you were their age? But what is their age in fact? Are they out of their teens? Must be in their twenties at least, or even thirties. Surely? And they seem to know what they’re talking about, if anyone can in these days of limitless information.

The worst offender of all is of course the Prime Minister or President of your country. Once upon a time a national leader looked the part and had the years behind him to lend him some gravitas. Now they look so boyish (or girlish) that you ask yourself when they had the time to rise to such a high office so early in life. Did they take some sort of short-cut to the top? Or have they drunk from some fountain of youth? Or made a Faustian pact with the devil? It hardly seems that it was so long ago that they were still at school and yet here they are now running a country and bossing everyone around, including those who remember them as snotty-nosed schoolboys. Where was Barack Obama when I was losing my sexual virginity? Nowhere! Yet now he is president of Uncle Sam and presumes to command the world from his Oval Office. And where am I now? Nowhere!

The other week I opened the door to two policewomen (advising on home security) who looked as though they had played truant from their school and donned fancy-dress! But no, they were the real thing apparently, and I tried concentrating on what they were saying whilst thinking I had children of their age or even older than them! Two rosy-cheeked damsels, with skin as smooth as a baby’s bottom, and here they were in front of me in police uniform representing law and order. How much younger can they get before we demand to see proof of adulthood?

You see teachers at secondary school and you can only distinguish them from a lot of their pupils and students by the fact they’re stood at the front of the class behaving like teachers are expected to. As soon as they mingle with their charges in the corridors or the playground you have difficulty in picking them out from the real youngsters! No wonder their pupils are so familiar and laid-back with them and give them lip. The age gap between the pupil and teacher has narrowed so much that it's eaten away at any air of authority they might have had and this is often reflected in the way the pupils interact with the baby-faced teacher.

And so the years pass by and you’re showing unmistakable signs of ageing, but not so with the aforementioned persons in authority who just go on getting younger and younger, a bit like Brad Pitt in the movie “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button”, who is born old but after “growing up” begins to regress, getting younger and younger until he finally reverts to babyhood and dies! Can this be happening in real life with people in authority? Will our Premier or President one day parade in a romper suit before us, drooling at the mouth and gurgling incoherently? Is it possible? Or will a law finally come out forbidding anyone under 10 years of age to become Prime Minister or a High Court Judge? I rather hope so.

I recall a time when the average MP looked as though he was on his last legs, such was the burden of his advanced years. Old and frail and wizened by time, he shuffled about like a true wrinkly not long for this world. If you don’t believe me, just take a look at some 1940s/1950s footage of MPs debating in the House of Commons and see if you can spot anyone there who does not look like a geriatric case! And why do you think that august body, the Senate, which still exists in the USA, is called the 'Senate'? From the Latin ‘senex’, meaning ‘old’, it was an organ of government composed of grand old men, many of them bearded and moustachioed and pot-bellied looking just about ready to be shipped off to the knackers’ yard! Now their modern counterparts look like a band of delinquent students indulging in schoolboy antics.

Well, I suppose I may have betrayed my age with all this ranting and raging against the reign of the young and the youthful. In fact, it may be that the said people in authority and on the goggle-box are not so young after all, but rather that we’re so old! And the older we get, the younger they and everyone else looks. That may be the terrible truth and the word that dare not speak its name: s*n*l*t*!

Now where’s that blesséd  rejuvenating cream of mine?

They were such times...

It was such a time, such a world, with such places, sights and things, and we were such people as once knew and moved through such a world.

It was also a world deep-scarred by the cruel hand of war.

But was it really as we are now pleased to remember it? Were those places and things as we recall them so many years long past? Were we those people, those fresh young faces? Did it happen as our memory has fixed it in our mind’s eye? Was it in this same world, in these same places and spaces where it all went on? Was it here that we lived a life that was of that time and of that world, never to be so again?

Does this happen anymore?

Was it for these times that we strove and for these things that we longed and for this state of being that we dreamed? Could we have imagined how it would be, how we would fare, and how our lives would run their course far into the future? That future is now this present, and this present is also our future and... our future end. The hopes and dreams of years to come are the memories and souvenirs of years now gone. The fresh waters of the fast-flowing river have slowed to the stagnant water of a turgid lake and we did not see when one became the other.

They were such times whose rich promise matched and stoked our desires, such days as stretched out to infinity. The world was always as we had come to know it and would forever be so. Family and friends too continued seemingly unchanging since first we knew them and would always be such. Our universe was stable, predictable, constant, slow and knowable, and we had it in our hand and under our control. So we thought.

Were we the last generation that would feel the undiluted promise of the future? Were we the last of the innocents, the dreamers, the hopefuls? Was the world we knew breathing its last while we opened the doors of experience that loomed limitless before us? In a time when the instantaneous and the global promised more than they delivered, could we have imagined our existence otherwise? We the hopeful, the gullible, the naïve, the children of the war generation scarred by savage conflict and full of terrible memories.

The Beatles will forever be identified with the 1960s

But either way it did not matter. It did not depend on us. The clock ticked on, patiently marking the passage of time, the days altered in colour and meaning, our certainties grew less certain, our values and beliefs grew dimmer and less reassuring, and our lives became imbued with a sense of apprehension we could not understand. But we were young and simple and confident and brash, and we had the wind in our sails and the sun on the horizon. We had youth and strength and energy and resolve, and we would not be told.

Yet even as we had youth in our bones and hope in our hearts, our era, our world, was nearing its end and it was not the world that our fathers had fought and died for or even imagined. As the old generations passed out of this realm and we took up the baton of life, stepping diffidently into the breach, we could not know we would be the first generation that would be shaken to the core by a tide of change that would sweep away all certainty, stability, conviction and self-assurance and leave a void in our hearts and anxiety in our souls.

They were such times as shall never again be seen and we were such folk as could glimpse the limitless possibilities of a world that was on the move, set in motion by the past and driven forward by the future.  Glimpse them we might but understand them we could not. The fast-flowing but tame river of life was turning into a raging torrent that would burst its banks and hurls us all into an unknown landscape where nothing was as it seemed, where the transient would replace the constant and the fast and furious would dislodge the slow and steady.  

Those unmistakable bell-bottoms of the 1970s!

The past was ours, the present is everybody's, and the future is out of our hands. So it is and so it has always been. The world we came into was black and white and grey and grim; the world we leave behind is a kaleidoscope of colours and a confusion of sights and sounds. We lived and we died and were reborn and must die again. We are you and you are us. You lived in us and now we will live in you. You are our future and we are your past.

In us you see yourselves and our hopes will be your hopes, our laughter and tears will be your laughter and tears, our joys and fears will be your joys and fears, our dreams will be your dreams. We once gave you life as you yourselves now give life, and some day to come you may say to those that follow: “It was such a time, such a world, with such places, sights and things, and we were such people as once knew and moved through such a world."

(Dedicated to my beloved mother who passed away so many years ago and whose passing changed me forever. She has lived in me as I may hope to live in my children. God bless her!)