Ah! The good old days!

Do you remember them? It was a time of innocence. Children, with rosy cheeks and sparkling eyes, played outside in the endless sunshine; there was little crime; young people respected their adults and .....

If these are the good old days you imagine then perhaps it is time you checked your memory banks.

I had a man in my office the other day complaining about the ways of the world.

“Young people have no respect any more. They think they know everything. It wasn’t like this in my day!”

Someone else said something similar:

“The young people of today think of nothing but themselves. They have no reverence for parents or old age. They are impatient of all restraint.

“They talk as if they alone knew everything and what passes for wisdom with us is foolishness with them.

“As for girls, they are forward, immodest and unwomanly in speech, behaviour and dress.”

That statement is alleged to have been written by Socrates, the Greek philosopher who lived in the good old, very old days - more than 400 years BC.

It is both sad and yet gives you hope.

It’s sad that things don’t change but since the world hasn’t been destroyed before now, there is hope that we do indeed have a future.

I do think some things have changed, however, and that probably has more to do with disposable income than anything else.

My childhood passions were reading and listening to my records.

Every Christmas Santa would bring us a book and a record among our gifts. I would also usually get a record album for my birthday.

You can’t imagine the excitement of removing the record from its shiny sleeve and playing it for the first time. You can’t imagine the thrill of waking up at 4am on Christmas morning and sneaking out to the lounge to see what book I had and taking it back to bed to read. (The year it was Anne of Green Gables I cried all Christmas morning!).

I don’t think kids have that kind of excitement anymore.

I’ve seen the kids in my own extended family on Christmas morning with three or four CDs. Because they have them in bulk they are no longer special.

Mind you, maybe waiting for the next video game to come out is the equivalent excitement.

I feel sorry for the kids today because they don’t have the freedom we had.

Everyone complains that they sit around playing video games, watching TV etc. But n many instances this is the fault of the parents.

We worry about a world that is no more dangerous than it ever was, except for more traffic.

We would be out from daybreak to sunset. Our parents didn’t know half the things we were up to and it wasn’t because they were neglectful. All parents seemed to be the same. Maybe there was some good in the good old days!