Those were different times.
All the poets studied rules of verse
And the ladies they rolled their eyes.
(Lou Reed, 'Sweet Jane')
What is it in us that reflects so wistfully on bygone eras - whether they be 5, 50 or 500 years ago? I suspect there is a tendency over time to enhance the happy constituents of memory and press the fader on less pleasant aspects.
I know that's a sweeping generalisation. I have several friends who tell me that their happiest days were in their childhood, which always strikes me as a rather wistful statement to make. It is also sadly self-evident that many people - both nations and individuals - are in a worse predicament now than they were a few years ago. We always hope that such setbacks (war, austerity, one's football club being on the skids) are temporary and recoverable from. I'd like to think that generally, over time, things do improve. I can't really accept that on balance life was better in the sixties or during the war or in the Victorian era than it is now - and this week's poem attempts to make that point. So why so much mooning for past times? I'm pleased that I was a teenager in the 1960s. I think it was the most exciting time and it was great to live through that but I wouldn't want to be back there. Move on.
It might seem like a complete non sequitur (stick with me), but neon lighting recently celebrated its centenary. Thank you, Georges Claude. Happy birthday to neon lighting, or liquid fire as it was colloquially known when it first began to illuminate our main streets and city squares. It has made the world a more switched-on and exciting place. There is an exhibition of neon artworks, Neon: The Charged Line, on at Blackpool's Grundy Art Gallery for the next three months and it's well worth a visit if you're in the North-West.
I love neon signs and the one I've chosen to illustrate this week's blog reminds me immediately of two things...
One is the obvious Orwellian reference (obvious, that is, if you've read Animal Farm). The animals in that parable, pigs and dogs excepted, discovered that liberation from the yoke of human overlords only resulted in the greater tyranny of pig rule and the exhortation to work harder than ever before. They may even have longed, briefly, for the good old days.
The other is of a colleague from the English department of a large London comprehensive school back in my teaching days. The way she shaped her hand-writing had an unfortunate tendency to link o and r together in a way that looked uncannily like a and n. All school reports had to be hand-written in those days and approved and counter-signed by the head teacher before being issued to pupils. Imagine my colleague's disquiet when she was ordered to completely re-write 150 reports because when she wrote "work" it looked like "wank" and many of her reports appeared to contain one of the following phrases: "must wank harder", "wanks well", "needs to learn to wank unsupervised", "a most industrious wanker" and "carry on wanking like this and the reward will come." You couldn't invent it! (I didn't invent it. Take a curtsey, Jenny Jackson.) Now, if it hadn't been the good old days back then, the whole lot would have been word-processed, corrected online in seconds and presto!
Enough - the poem...again a work in process because I haven't had the opportunity to finish it to my satisfaction. I don't like sending these compositions out into the world half-formed, but needs must and this one will just have to grow up in public.
Golden Daze
O do not envy the people of golden daze
as they suffereth by comparison in notable ways:
for they hath not many comforts in their lives,
for as children they getteth little schooling
and they have a dearth of toys,
for they marrieth whom they're told
and chooseth not their husbands nor their wives,
for they slaveth all from dawn till dusk,
and they batheth only weekly,
they getteth pregnant far too often
and their babies die too easily;
for their teeth grow rotten in their heads,
their bones they groweth weary
before they've seen out fifty winters;
for they suffereth from frequent ills,
no antibiotics aid them;
for they're always fighting someone else's foe
and sometimes they voteth for change (in vain
and not at all if they're women);
for they liveth hard lives on earth without demur
and here's the twist:
for their reward is in heaven - which doesn't exist.
Thanks for reading. Keep looking forward! Steve ;-) Email ThisBlogThis!Share to TwitterShare to Facebook
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