More Past than Future.

They say you live in the past when you get old, and in a way they are quite right, simply because when you’re old you have more past than you’re likely to have future….

With my sixty fourth birthday looming, I find myself harking back more and more to the ‘old days’, and then a recent TV programme about more recent history had me dredging up events that have ‘stuck’ in my memory.
It’s the most peculiar mix with a lot of long blank spots when I can only imagine the kids were ill or there was some sort of family crisis.

Given that I married just before my eighteenth birthday and from then on was busy taking care of a growing family, the swinging sixties and flower power went right over my head, and apart from singing The Beatles ‘She Loves You,’ to get my fractious daughter off to sleep, I never caught up with the music scene after Bill Haley and the Comets and Elvis Presley.

Naturally, like most of my generation I know exactly where I was when Kennedy died….

It’s disconcerting that despite the countless thousands of hours of television I must have watched, the following are the only five that leap immediately and clearly to mind.
I recall watching Churchill’s funeral and Princess Margaret’s marriage and was glued to the TV all day while they salvaged the Mary Rose from the sea bed in Portsmouth Harbour.
Two other TV programmes remain etched on my brain.
The first: That Was the Week that Was, was a Saturday evening satire programme on BBC presented by David Frost. I also remember some of the cast: Millicent Martin who sang as well as taking part in some of the sketches, Lance Percival who was also in some of the Carry On films, and Bernard Levin the newspaper critic….
The other programme pre-pre-pre- DNA tracking and the brilliant Eve theory, was some sort of scientific programme where two experts argued over the theory of continental drift, the break up of continents and how people of the world ended up where they are today. Fast forward, and it’s now an accepted scientific fact, but I’m thrilled to have been there at the ‘birth’ so to speak.

Earth shaking news included The Cuban crisis which scared the pants off me, because my new American husband was actively serving in the USAF at the time.
My blood ran cold when I heard about the explosion of a nuclear reactor in Chernobyl in Russia on the radio, because at first no-one could be certain how much fall out there would be and I feared for my children.
Later on I was kept up to date on our tussle with Argentina via my call up age son, and prayed that it wouldn’t escalate. The first moon landings were of course top of my agenda to watch, but Bill had shingles and the kids promptly went down with chicken pox, so with three of them lying in bed suffering, watching that momentous event came pretty far down on my list of things to do.

Of the more mundane events that stand out, I shopped in the very first supermarket in our town and ate my first hamburger at a Wimpey bar, but didn’t enjoy it because we were bought up to believe it was bad manners to eat whilst walking along the street.

On the fashion front I was there when it finally became acceptable to wear trousers. Despite war-time land girls exposing the shape of their legs, decent working class girls didn’t. And as for wearing high heels with trousers! It was enough to get us disowned.
Once the war was over although stockings cost an arm and a leg, it was frowned on for women to go out in public with bare legs. That in turn meant fancy, but hugely uncomfortable suspender belts if you were slim or elasticated roll on girdles if you were inclined to bulge. Consequently I embraced tights with open arms and was delighted when Mary Quant burst on the scene and I wasn’t too old or misshapen to flash my bare legs in a mini skirt.

We oldies have seen the birth of the internet, mobile phones and all the other gadgets today’s young can’t seem to live without. But looking back I reckon the greatest legacy handed down was the death of the elasticated girdle... A passion killer par excellence and God didn’t it itch when you took it off……