Heart attack

Saturday, October 14, 2017

Living At Home- Part 2

Living on a farm we had acres and acres of places to explore, run completely wild and play. I think we were exceptionally lucky in that respect, unlike children bought up living in a town. No excuses when it came to finding something to do in the school holidays. My mother would never allow us to spend our time indoors. No such thing as mobile phones, tablets, computers, Gameboys or any sort of computer game console. No daytime television during the 1960's. Television didn't start until children's programmes started at around 4-5 o'clock. No 24-hour television as we have today. As I've said in earlier posts, we only had 3 channels until Channel Four came along in 1982. If it was sunny and warm during the summer we'd be outside all day and not go indoors until it was teatime. Long bike rides through the country lanes around Cardington, generally messing about in and around the village, particularly the brook that ran through the farm. I doubt children would have such a connection to the world about them today as we had then. Getting dirty, building dens, tree houses and having adventures. Probably in a world which seems to be dominated by our old friend 'Health and Safety' it's more than likely that they don't have anywhere the same sort of lives as we did.

Malting Farm house was large (and is. It's still there, although no Murdochs live there any more). Well, it would have to be because there were seven in our family. It had lots of corridors and it wasn't centrally heated. I think I've mentioned this in an earlier blog post on here. There was an Aga cooker in the kitchen, which could be very difficult to light and had to be kept going using special fuel, sort of nuts of coal. In the dining room and some of the downstairs rooms there were fireplaces which were lit occasionally. It could be extremely cold in winter. But, saying that, we didn't know anything different and we survived. With so many rooms, idea for playing hide and seek. There were two attic rooms which we used as play rooms. It meant you could make a mess up there and it didn't matter. We had a model railway layout. I'm not sure, but I think we inherited it from a relative. I'm not sure whether it was from my mother or father's family, but it was quite an extensive Triang railway with no end of track that ran around an amazing raised sort of construction which included tunnels, stations, houses and other bits and pieces. With four brothers, we did get toys passed on as they were grown out of. Me being in the middle of five, anything I got passed down had already come from my two eldest brothers, James and Robert.

I had Mecanno when I was a child. I doubt very much if young boys have this toy nowadays, or even girls. I doubt they would even know what it was. It had metal pieces, usually coloured red, blue or silver, nuts and bolts and various mechanical gears, pulley and similar pieces which you could use to build all manner of machines, cars, bicycles or a combination of mechanical devices. I inherited most of this from my older brothers and got more 'sets' as the years went by. It grew and grew. You could get clockwork and electric motors to drive the machines you created and a lot of these creations could be built using instructions you got in magazines and leaflets. I'm not sure that you can still get this 'toy,' even if you can call it a toy. Birthdays and Christmases bought more and more bits to build more elaborate creations. Endless fun and interest and no doubt it encouraged boys (and possibly girls) to become interested in engineering and probably careers in this field. I think perhaps today children are more interested in computers and similar electronic devices and the fact that they can communicate with other people via the internet makes things that are more physical, such as Mecanno, somewhat obsolete, which is a real pity.

It seems that children in particular, but also a great many adults, spend a lot of their time on smart phones and tablets (as well as other gadgets) and don't appear to communicate much face-to-face. Living in a cyber world, chatting on-line via chat-rooms, text or email, seems to have replaced speaking to another person in the 'real-world.' You only have to walk down the average street or visit a supermarket or shopping centre to see how many people only appear to interact through their devices. Also, I'm sure that manners have gone out the window. People seem to have lost the ability to be even remotely patient. Not everyone, but mostly young people. They don't like having to wait, especially in queues, for example, at the supermarket. A lot more short-tempered people on the roads. A lot of people cutting me up on roundabouts, impatient to wait if you stop at a roundabout, coming up behind me in their car and expecting me to drive faster. Pushing you to move out of the way for them or at least drive faster. People expect to have everything NOW, not time to wait for anything.

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