By Tim Shaw
I know people might take issue with me on this, but haven’t we perhaps heard too much of the opinions of the young? The clamour on the airwaves monopolising the media platforms, crowding out voices while at the same time claiming to be the voices of all.
I want to raise a different voice, while at the same time absolving myself of any claim to be spokesperson for this growing but all too often ignored section of society – I am talking about the older citizens. Firstly, do I class myself as old? To answer that question, I reach for a yardstick I find useful; namely; if you consider yourself to have more past behind you than future in front of you then you are probably classified as being ‘old’. So, the answer is… maybe.
In an age where technology improves at light speed it is so much easier for the older generation to get left behind. I am old enough to remember when, if you were having trouble with your car, your plumbing or anything mechanical then grandpa would come round in greasy overalls and a box of tools and it would be sorted quicker than you could say ‘socket set’. Now the boot is on the other foot; try giving a mobile phone as a present to a septuagenarian and it will be the twelve year old grandchildren who are the ones sorting out the ‘electronic interfaces’.
I’d heard it said that one of the signs that you are being left behind technologically is when you refuse to update your mechanical devices; whether it’s phones, washing machines or labour-saving devices in the kitchen; unless of course you absolutely have to. Of course, we all know how the mechanics that we have to invest in are locked into the scam known as ‘built in obsolescence’, as in, it’s only meant to last so long and then you simply have to buy a new one. Or the tyranny of the ‘sealed unit’. You know how that works; you have a bulb blown on your car headlight; go to your local garage to get a replacement and the mechanic looks at it, shakes his head and says “Sorry mate, it’s a ‘sealed unit’, that’ll be £200 including parts and labour”, or the line on smartphones, tablets and cameras, “It would cost more to fix it than to replace it”.
I was born only thirteen years after the end of the second World War. Our telephone at home had a dial on it and you had to speak to the operator to tell them which number you wanted to connect to, most phone numbers were three digits. People wrote letters; cars had only four forward gears and no seatbelts and windows that were cranked up and down by winding a handle. Menfolk wore hats (usually caps) and women headscarves. Some of the men were marked and disfigured by war injuries, more often First World War veterans. Miners had blue scars on their foreheads, trophies from the coal face. In schools, children were beaten with a stick if they didn’t behave. If you were a young male with negative, anti-social or criminal inclinations you were told that your downwards trajectory was likely to be; Borstal, then prison, then the end of a rope. I had coinage in my pocket that had the heads of a young queen Elizabeth, a neatly trimmed George VI, bearded George V, chubby and jowly Edward VII and various incarnations of Victoria (Young, Jubilee and Old heads respectively). This is all true.
Fast forward to 2020, like a frog placed in water which is gradually brought to boiling point, I’m not sure how much I noticed the onwards high-speed rush of technology. The world didn’t suddenly flip from a pre-Internet existence into a fully-formed, all-encompassing World Wide Web. What was a novelty became a necessity, but over time, arguably a relatively short period of time.
With age comes earned respect… I wish. ‘Anachronism’ has become my middle name. As a youngster it was important to me to be noticed, now I am ‘the Invisible Man’. I used to joke that nobody notices the man with the dog, (a personal theory), if ever you wanted to be invisible on a stake-out get yourself a dog (not that I have ever been on a stake out). I now am ‘the man with dog’ and I don’t even have a dog!
This fact occurred to me one Friday night. I met some friends for a drink in the middle of a bustling, robust county town, I had to walk home on my own at the end of the evening. Drunken twenty-somethings spilled across pavements, tumbled out of bars, carousing, rollicking, larruping, yarping at the top of their voices. I felt alert, anxious. My upbringing in an industrial northern town where violence was the mode, put me into hyper-vigilance, but I needn’t have bothered; to my surprise I slipped through the crowds like a hot knife through butter; I was the Invisible Man… and all because of my age. I was no threat to anyone. Radar? What radar? I was on nobody’s radar; ‘persona non grata’ would have been a blessing. I wasn’t distressed by this revelation, maybe slightly saddened. But I had slipped through an invisible barrier. A friend of mine told me about her own experience, only with her it was when men on building sites didn’t whistle at her anymore.
When I was sixteen I used to work on a farm. Most of my time was spent shovelling shit. I often worked shoulder to shoulder with an older gentleman called Cyril. He had spent most of his working life shovelling shit. Every so often he would lean on the shovel and say to me, “If I were your age and knew what I know now…”, just that, a phrase left unresolved and hanging in the air. One day I decided to challenge him and ask him just what it was that he wished his younger self had known? With a suitable pause and a conspiratorial hush he said, “I wish I’d paid more attention at school”. My point is that while this may have been as truer confession that would have ever passed his lips it was not what I, as a sixteen year old, wanted to hear, I was massively disappointed; this was a platitude too far.
In all these years what exactly have I learned? What gems of wisdom would I like to share with the younger generation? Here are a few:
Start with a shocker… Your generation didn’t invent sex.
When people say, ‘Oh there’ll always be another opportunity’ …. there never is!
You are not invincible! [Particularly to young males].
(Linked to the above) Anyone who says, ‘You have to try everything once’ needs to be asked if that includes setting yourself on fire or jumping off a twelve-storey building?
Stop trying to be ‘interesting’, you already are!
To those of school age; most of the skills you learn in school will be defunct by the time you get to the workplace.
In the workplace; always keep ahead of your boss on technology, but be careful how you let him/her know.
‘Culture’ trumps ‘stuff’ anytime. It will be your appreciation, understanding and uses of ‘culture’ that will define some of the most significant high points in your lives. Drink deeply.
‘Three score years and ten’ is not a guarantee, it’s an aspiration.
I shouldn’t let this out of the bag but, by the time you reach the age where you realise that older people are not really deserving of the respect of the younger generation it would actually not be in your interests to dispel the myth.