I vowed that it would never happen. I was determined not to morph into a misery-guts banging on about how much better everything was in the olden days. I simply can’t stand those ancients who bleat about their blissful youth scrumping apples, being handed fragrant loaves by boys on bicycles and heavy petting in haystacks.
I was confident I would never bore about growing up in 1970s suburbia because, in reality, power cuts and litter strikes were a big fat drag, telly was a test card for interminable hours and when Bouquet Of Barbed Wire came on, my parents wouldn’t even let me watch it.
Those days of yore, in modern parlance, weren’t all that. Everything was shut on Sundays. Everyone watched Songs Of Praise because it was marginally less agonising than doing your homework.
Dads (and sometimes mums) smoked ferociously on long car journeys with the windows tightly shut. Children, unsurprisingly, were copiously car sick. Leisurewear hadn’t been invented, and we looked like mini versions of our grandparents.
Nevertheless, entirely against my will, I have now become a fully paid-up member of the “It Was So Much Better Back Then” club.
Maybe it’s part of the menopause – or that life has evolved into an elegy for lost glories and rants about the sheer ghastliness that confronts us in 2025. Vulgarity is the norm. Language is foul.
Scatological disclosure is almost obligatory. TV commercials showcase bodily effluence and trumpet cures for ailments that ought to be kept private. Smartphones are making morons of us all.
Table manners are extinct. People stab steaks as if hunting wild bison. Chewing is loud and open-mouthed. Conversation has been forsaken in favour of catatonic doom-scrolling.
On the news a catalogue of catastrophe unfolds. We are teetering on the brink of climate disaster, nuclear disaster, social-care disaster and seek deliverance from a “broken” NHS.
The most powerful man in the world is feral and frightening. We are confused. Does Donald Trump’s second presidency mean that everything we were taught by parents and teachers – modesty, unselfishness, virtue being its own reward, humility, honesty, kindness, charity – was all a misleading mistake?
Is greed really good and thuggery the route to success? I’ve gone over to the sad side. All things might not have been bright and beautiful half a century ago, but, my goodness, it felt that way.