ISN’T it strange the way your mind sometimes works? The James Heriot series, “All Creatures Great and Small” is back on the telly, and it got me reminiscing. There are many trailers depicting what looks like a little Austin 7 car driving through idyllic Yorkshire countryside with the sun shining, and no other traffic on the road. Ahh! The Good Old Days! But were they?

I remember one of Billy Connolly’s monologues in which he said they weren’t the good old days. They were bloody lousy with mumps and measles and slums and deprivation. He maintained that what we were really longing for was our youth and we can’t have that back.

Yeah, well, all of that’s true. But we are presently suffering under the worst pandemic of my lifetime, even considering such illnesses as measles. We didn’t have Covid back then.

All of the slums have gone, but they have been replaced with Westminster imposed austerity. What has also been lost, along with the slums, is the sense of community that they generated. My childhood was lived in a small village a mile or so beyond the edge of the city. We didn’t have any slums. We didn’t have a lot of money but my parents managed. There were only a couple of families in our area who lived in poverty, and it’s surprising how often a pan of soup, or some groceries, or a knitted jumper for one of the bairns, would appear on their doorstep. Today many thousands of families, have to rely on foodbanks, and it’s a disgrace to our country that we need them!

Kids left school and went straight into the docks, or down the pit, or into the local engineering works or sheet metal works. There they would get an apprenticeship followed by the security of a job for life. That doesn’t happen today.

Much of our manufacturing has been transferred to India, where they can get cheap labour, or China where it is practically slave labour. The international conglomerates who own most of the industry worldwide are only interested in the fact that this generates more profit for them. Working men can’t keep their families on the meagre wages many companies pay today. Or, sometimes they don’t pay at all. All they offer are “Zero Hour Contracts” with no guaranteed wages.

Of course, we do have many “benefits” we didn’t have back then – like mobile phones and laptops. But are they really improvements? Certainly, with the internet, you can now have friends, and “speak” to them, all round the world. But often your “Social Life” doesn’t extend beyond your own front room. It happens without leaving your home.

We were able to watch football, golf, cricket, tennis and other minor sports on BBC with nothing to pay other than the licence fee. Today you pay your licence to watch mostly repeats from the 1980s and 90s. If you want to watch sport, you have to pay £50.00 to £60.00 per month for SKY, Virgin or BT Television to do so.

We didn’t have Global Warming back in the 1950s and 60s. In the last 40 years we have killed off around half of all the wildlife in the world through invasion of their habitats etc. So why are we told we have too many animals pumping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere today? Back then we didn’t have the number of private cars that we have today. That’s partly due to the fact that they weren’t affordable for the ordinary working man. But it’s mostly due to having less than half of the people we have today.

With a smaller population there was more room for everyone. There was space to relax and time in which to do it. I certainly can’t remember any of my school friends suffering from mental stress. Today this seems common amongst school kids. But then, we weren’t forced to compete with each other for the “better things” in life. We didn’t need X Boxes, as they do today. We just broke a branch, stripped off the leaves and it became a “native spear” or a “tommy gun”.

Maybe the Good Old Days weren’t as bad as Billy Connolly made them out to be. Maybe we’ve lost more, and not gained as much as we think we have.

Charlie Kerr
Glenrothes