rss feedThought for the day
The realisation has dawned that the BrusselsBlog is nearly always angry. While there are many causes to be angry about we sometimes need a rest. It is with pleasure that I post this piece by Phil Roddis. Tweet @GeoffBeacon to ask for more…
Thought for the day
On Saturday mornings Radio 4 has a slot where listeners send in stories of cherished possessions, objects they’d brave smoke and flame to retrieve should home turn raging inferno. Today’s contributor – just seventeen when Hendrix blasted the Isle of Wight with reverb, screeching feedback loops and elect ri f y ing rendition of Dylan’s All Along the Watch tower – told of a very special blanket.
Her presence at the 1970 festival had been in flagrant defiance of parental decree. A feb rile press had for years titillated readers with tale upon lurid tale of, take your pick … fatal, LSD induced attempts at flight from tenth storey windows (never had that effect on me) … horny guys with too much hair, too little soap, stoned grins and glib flannel about free love … Mick, Marianne and the Mars Bar (to this day she denies it) … a turn-on, tune-in, drop-out threat of monumen t al proportions to decent society …
To add to the mix, the well-heeled IoW residents, having already been unwilling hosts to two such festivals and found them wanting on every conceivable criterion of civilised taste, had mount ed such effective opposition that the location was switched from the promoters’ choice to Afton Down, deliberately picked for its unsuitability. (Though it had the wickedly zeitgeist advantage of being overlooked by a large hill, so ensuring that tens of thousands would watch for free.) Against this backdrop, dad’s foot had come down with predictable firmness. In any case, he must have reasoned, who in their right mind would pay to hear the tuneless, mind less racket the Doors, the Who and that Fender-screwing devil with the Afro specialised in?
Radio 4 lady, now almost sixty, recalled resigning herself to missing the event of a life time. Then glimmer of hope appeared, swiftly morphing into shafts of radiance as M & D first pondered then booked a last minute holiday-for-two guaranteed to test filial obedience to breaking point. With the stony old straights scarcely through the door, daughter and best pal had hit the road with thumbs out to form one of the myriad snaking tributaries destined to flow into a 600,000 strong crowd of star dust that would outnumber by six to one the island’s resident population.
The big event, upstaging even the mighty Who, was Hendrix – and he’d not disappointed. By the time Jimi had left the stage, and a serene Joan Baez was coaxing acoustic guitar into the opening chords of Let it Be, Radio 4 lady had fallen into her first sleep in two days. When she awoke, hours later, it was to the discovery that someone she would never know had covered her with a multi-coloured woollen blanket.
The hippies Grew Up; got degrees, careers, husbands, wives, kids, cars and mortgages. Radio 4 lady did likewise but the blanket stayed; doing service on family picnics and as wraparound on star ry nights. Even when the kids had grown up too, the blanket remained – till one day it was gone, how or where no one could say. Husband knew nothing – or so he claimed. It was a while before he fessed up. There’d been a wasps’ nest in the garden. He’d piled damp leaves on smouldering fire to send the stripy buggers on their way. The blanket, handy for wafting smoke, had caught fire and been disposed of; surreptitiously, hubbie knowing full well its historic importance.
Radio 4 lady took the loss philosophically, as any right-thinking ageing hippie should. The thing to be cherished, she saw, was not its worn-out threads but the kindness of strangers and the ideals – easy to mock now they are no longer feared – of a generation that had thought such acts might bring a world of wars and pin-striped savagery to its knees. They didn’t. They couldn’t. But I – also seventeen the night the virtuosity and elemental force that was Jimi Hendrix ripped across Afton Down – today feel ridiculously proud and happy that I once shared, briefly, those ideals.
Philip Roddis, February 11, 2012
That reminds me of this whinge from some grumpy old person that’s been doing the rounds. Anyone know where it comes from?
WE DIDN’T HAVE THE GREEN THING…
Checking out at the supermarket recently, the young cashier suggested I should bring my own carrier bags because plastic bags weren’t good for the environment. I apologised and explained, “We didn’t have this green thing back in my earlier days.”
The cashier responded, “That’s our problem today. Your generation did not care enough to save our environment for future generations.”
She was right about one thing — our generation didn’t have the green thing in “Our” day.
So what did we have back then…? After some reflection and soul-searching on “Our” day here’s what I remembered we did have….
Back then, we returned milk bottles, fizzy pop bottles and beer bottles to the store. The store sent them back to the plant to be washed and sterilised and refilled, so it could use the same bottles repeatedly. So they really were recycled. But we didn’t have the green thing back in our day.
We walked up stairs, because we didn’t have an escalator or lift in every store and office building. We walked to the supermarket and didn’t climb into a 300-horsepower machine every time we had to go two minutes up the road. But she was right. We didn’t have the green thing in our day.
Back then, we washed the baby’s nappies because we didn’t have the throw-away kind. We dried clothes on a line, not in an energy gobbling machine burning up 220 volts — wind and solar power really did dry our clothes back in our early days. Kids got hand-me-down clothes from their brothers or sisters, not always brand-new clothing. But that young lady is right. We didn’t have the green thing back in our day.
Back then, we had one TV, or radio, in the house — not a TV in every room. And the TV had a small screen the size of a handkerchief (remember them?), not a screen the size of England. In the kitchen, we blended and stirred by hand because we didn’t have electric machines to do everything for us. When we packaged a fragile item to send in the mail, we used screwed up old newspapers to cushion it, not Styrofoam or plastic bubble wrap. Back then, we didn’t fire up an engine and burn petrol just to cut the lawn. We used a push mower that ran on human power. We exercised by working so we didn’t need to go to a health club to run on treadmills that operate on electricity. But she’s right. We didn’t have the green thing back then.
We drank from a fountain when we were thirsty instead of using a cup or a plastic bottle every time we had a drink of water. We refilled writing pens with ink instead of buying a new pen, and we replaced the razor blades in a razor instead of throwing away the whole razor just because the blade got dull. But we didn’t have the green thing back then.
Back then, people took the bus, and kids rode their bikes to school or walked instead of turning their mums into a 24-hour taxi service. We had one electrical outlet in a room, not an entire bank of sockets to power a dozen appliances. And we didn’t need a computerised gadget to receive a signal beamed from satellites 2,000 miles out in space in order to find the nearest pizza joint. But isn’t it sad the current generation laments how wasteful we old folks were just because we didn’t have the green thing back then?
Please post this on your Facebook profile so another selfish old person who needs a lesson in conservation from a smarty-pants young person can add this to their status.