We are living a time of supreme Luxury: the poorest today, live in a manner to which the Kings and Emperors of the past could only dream. Food and wines from all over the world, prepared by hosts of electric and electronic slaves.The Universities are open to all. Our carriages travel at magical speeds and we talk with friends,family and colleagues instantly anywhere on the planet.
This is a wonderful era to live in.
In my youth there was no TV, Video, DVD, Computers, Central heating,fitted kitchens or wall to wall carpets. Hardly anyone had a phone or a car [no traffic!!]
I walked five miles to and from school in all weathers, with my pals; sometimes catching a lift on the coalman's horse and cart. I would see to the milkman ladle milk from his churn into our billy can which he left on the step, while his horse moved along the street to the next house.
There were no package holidays, for there were no jet liners yet - our holidays were spent at the seaside 20 miles away.
My mother made all our clothes, my granny knitted socks, vest and pullovers. Dad resoled our shoes with leather, hammer, nails and a metal shoe last.
On her way home from the hardware shop, my mother burnt holes in her stockings, carrying battery acid, for the radio set.
All our bread and jam was made in the kitchen,[although my grandmother did not have an oven - [she cooked over the fire] so her bread,pies,cakes and biscuits were taken down the road to the local bakehouse, to be baked for a small fee].
My great grandfather sold pianos, for in those days before the radio and recordplayer [gramophone] nearly everyone could play and families sang at home and at Church - neither of which seems to happen now.
The world has changed from this hands on - can do culture to a civilisation of luxurious, dependent apathy.
There is an overwhelming, tsnunami on our horizon that will wipe out this dependent luxury and leave us sliding down a slippery slope to a different world where the glamour of this magical world of cheap and limitless energy will be lost forever in our mythical even legendary past.
We will be totally naked in a cruel world. How many of us have the skills that even my mother and father had let alone reconstruct the world of my grandparents.
Can you harness a horse; milk a cow; make pegs from the willow tree?
Unless we reskill our society we will starve.Perhaps only the extended families of those recent immigrants to our shores, from a simpler world, will have the social cohesion necessary to support each other. Gone is the Day of the Lone Wolf.
Walking home from school we would nip into a series of aunties homes for a biscuit or a drink of pop for in our simpler days our families lived cheek by jowl with each other. Many were totally distraught when the social bonds of the back to back terraces [aka slums] were sundered by rehousing into maisonettes, flats and soulless estates - miles away from any where.
