Mr Grumpy

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By Mr Grumpy - Thu 3rd May 2012

 

I was looking back on my childhood the other week with dewey-eyed nostalgia, and was thinking how much old folk have changed over recent decades.

I can recall how, decades ago, anyone over the age of 60 was considered positively decrepit. As a youth I was used to seeing scary looking old women with blue-rinses and horn-rimmed spectacles and flat-cap wearing old men with rickets who always used wear their regulation shirt and tie regardless of the day of the week, or season of the year.

If they weren’t being pushed around in wheelchair with a blanket over their knees they were driving their pale blue invalid carriages or polishing their reliant robins.

Then seemingly overnight, and without anyone noticing, something awful happened.

Old people stopped being ‘old’.

I can remember in the late 1980’s trying to convince my grandma to get a Microwave oven. She told me that at 65, she was too old to learn ‘new-fangled technology’ (She even complained when Channel 4 launched as it was too confusing for her to have another channel when changing TV stations). These days the over 65’s are rapidly becoming the largest growing number of internet users (although, I suppose that could be because of increasing mortality rates and falling birth rates ?)

These days my mum has to show me how to work Sky TV.

And as a guy that bought his first mobile phone in 1992, but struggles to so much as work the phonebook I find it sickening when she sends me ‘TXT MSGS’ from her smart phone, that I can not even understand, let alone reply to.

I yearn for the days when old people would just grow up and stop chucking themselves out of aeroplanes, or go abseiling or try to master new technology, or whatever, and act their age.

I feel robbed not to have an elderly relative doling out Werthers originals to my daughter and talking endless crap about ‘the good old days’, and how 'a weeks wage used to be tuppence ha'penny' etc...

Then again, nostalgia isn’t what it used to be...