1. Although I was born slap-bang in then middle of World War Two I was too young to understand what it was all about. I remember the flashes and the bangs but when the V2 rockets started to fall I was evacuated to a farm in Cornwall. Not a bad place to spend a war.
2. Science was winning the billion year war against bacteria. Antibiotics were being discovered and children had a good chance of reaching their teenage years and beyond. Not so very long before, millions of people the world over were dying of tuberculosis, pneumonia, and even from the simplest of cuts and grazes. Polio was the big fear as I was growing up but even that was defeated while I was still at school.
3. Dickensian child slavery had been abolished in the UK so even if I failed at school I wasn't likely to be forced to work down a coal mine or in a cotton mill.
4. Refrigeration had been invented for some while but we couldn't afford a fridge. Once I started work and got married a fridge was a top priority. We were the first generation, or maybe the second, in history to not have to worry about sour milk and rotten meat. We take refrigeration for granted but I can remember at school being forced to drink sour milk. Not one of my fonder memories.
5. When the Korean war broke out and Britain became involved I was way too young to be conscripted into it. In fact I missed it by ten years.
6. After the Korean War, National Service was abolished which which meant I didn't have to do a compulsory two year stint in the army.
7. Rock 'n' Roll reached Britain in 1956 when I was fourteen years old, just the perfect age to be influenced by Little Richard and realise that there was more to life than school drudgery. Although there's still plenty of good music being written and performed today I believe I got the best of the best between 1956 and 1969. And I was still young enough to enjoy everything that came later.8. Britain's overseas trade was transported mostly by sea rather than by air and so there were plenty of opportunities for teenage boys to join the Merchant Navy and see a bit of the world and try some new ideas.
9. The Sexual Revolution kicked off in the early 1960s including the pill, which greatly reduced the risk of pregnancy, the number-one fear for teenagers at the time. Thanks to the pill there was a twenty year joy blip when we all went crazy, and then AIDS kicked in. The other big fear, the one that loomed over all of Britain and Europe was nuclear war but despite more than a dozen near-misses we got through those years and survived.
10. Britain did not go to war over Vietnam but had it done so there was no conscription so I would have missed it. In fact I became part of the first generation, probably in history, that did not have to risk dying on a battle field!
11. Immigration from the UK to New Zealand was relatively easy, not without it's hassles and it didn't come cheap but a lot easier than it is today. Then as a pommy kiwi, no hassles moving to Australia.12. It was possible for ordinary people to set themselves up in business and try and make a go of it. As a child growing up everyone got a boring job and stuck with it most of their lives. Businesses, even simple grocery stores, were family affairs handed down from one generation to the next.
13. Censorship was under fire and publishers, including hacks like me, could take chances that only a few years previously would have warranted a prison sentence.
14. Same with the law of Blasphemous Libel, in the past, thousands of people were hanged, burned or tortured to death for saying the sort of things I say about religion. Two hundred and fifty years ago it was a serious crime just to read Thomas Paine! Today I can read his books and broadcast his views and remain a free man. Mind you, that doesn't protect me from one day getting a bullet in the head or a bomb up my bum.15. Throughout my life I've seen massive advances in leisure time electronics and transport. From my first wind-up gramophone to hi-fi systems that can reproduce near perfect sound, not that I can afford such systems but even my twenty year old Onkyo system is a hundred times better than anything that was available back in the 1940s. And as for cars, modern technology has gone ahead in leaps and bounds. Even the cheapest of the cheap puts my first car, a 1938 Wolsley, to shame.
16. The first television I saw was my auntie's 14 inch black and white Murphy. One channel, but the best science fiction program that's ever been screened - Quatermass Two. Unavailable now on DVD or or even via the internet, the original print has gone missing. I've been lucky enough to see colour TV introduced and multiple channels and the televisions we have today are electronic marvels.17. Home computers are now affordable and efficient, same with mobile phones. Amazing to think that in the last ten years children have been born who can't imagine a world without computers and cell phones, yet both were undreamed of when I was growing up. We could imagine record players and cars getting better as time went by but computers and mobile phones were impossible, beyond imagination. Microwave ovens, another of those things we take for granted but as with computers and mobile phones, unheard of and undreamed of when I was growing up.
18. Supermarkets, we moan about them but we forget how convenient they are compared to the old days of queuing for a half-pound of butter and a bag of broken biscuits. Then having to queue at another shop for potatoes, and another for a pound of pork sausages.
19. Same with ATMs, I recently had to queue up at my local bank because the ATM was out of order. Reminded me of the days we always had to queue just to draw $20 out of our account or ask for a balance. Not so very long ago.
20. I was born at a time, the first era in history, when starvation wasn't a fear. We may not be able to dine like kings but nowadays no one in the West need starve to death. We take that for granted but it's a relatively new concept.
21. Justice, though far from perfect, is better than it has been throughout history and until very recently. No one in Britain or Australia has witnessed the awful spectacle of men, women and children being trucked like cattle towards the gallows to be hanged for minor theft.22. Air travel is another of those ideas that was unheard of until recent times. After the crash of the first three Comets in the 1950s, I can remember trembling with fear when flying to Montreal in a converted Flying Fortress bomber, re-badged a Stratocruiser, in 1959. Despite the occasional bird strike or wheel falling off, air safety has improved outasight.
23. I'm not a racist, I'm what you might call a godophobic. But for all its bullshit and lies Christianity has become almost civilised. Civilisation was forced on Christianity. It can no longer torture to death, burn, drown or hang people for being witches or heretics. Throwing "demon possessed" babies onto bonfires is politically incorrect these days. Islam however remains a sick religion like the ghastly and hideous Judaism from which it sprang. Islam is a religion for brainsoaked god-grovellers, child mutilators, woman-hating acid-throwing "men of honour" and sleazy paedophiles. Lucky me, I lived in a time when Britain and Australia were virtually Moslem free.24. And it looks like I'm going to miss the second Great Flood. If it's true that climate change is as serious as scientists say it is then there are terrible times ahead. The idea that we'll adjust our lifestyles to avert a disaster is a pipe dream. Can anyone imagine greenies driving to work in the summer with their air conditioning off? Some people will do a little bit and that's about it. Will Indians remain content to cook their food over dung fires? Will China give up its dream of equality with the West? Will pigs fly?
25. I retired at sixty-five on a full pension, plus rent allowance and pharmacutical benefits. I get subsidised transport and free car rego. I've just had a thousand dollars worth of free dental treatment whereas my uncles had false teeth. I consider myself incredibly lucky. People moan about the pension but some people just never stop moaning. Those who live in subsidised housing have enough money left over each week to live a life that billions of people in the past would have given their right arm for. If they choose to stuff it down a slot or piss it against a wall, more fool them. We are the last generation to retire so young. The retirement age will be raised gradually until it reaches seventy. We are indeed the lucky generation.26. I've known poor times, good times and poor again, but throughout it all I've been lucky enough to enjoy the second half of the 20th century and the first few years of the 21st century. Even though the wealth was unfairly distributed, this was the most affluent period the planet has ever known. It won't last. Already there are signs of the global economy creaking at the seams. When the seams burst, as they surely will, and the dollar goes belly-up there will be suffering on a scale we don't want to think about. Fingers crossed that I'm wrong.
And so all in all, 1942 was a very good year to be born. Give or take a year or so either side, I would say - THE best. Call me a pessimist but I don't see things continuing to improve substantially. The major advances in recreational goods have already been achieved. Colour TV, multiple channels, recorders, shatter-proof windscreens, automatic gears, electric engines, computers, software... all they can do now is keep tweaking to make TV images clearer than the near perfection they've already achieved, and 3D, cars safer and more economical. Mobile phones will get more buttons, more special gimmicky effects, and they'll probably float in the air. Computers will become so powerful that today's most sophisticated will look like clunkers, but so what? I'm having plenty of fun with an eight year old Mac. As for sound, there's not much more they can do with sound. For those people with money hi-fi is already 99.9% perfect, how much better can it get?
A cure for cancer may eventually be found, same with AIDS, but there is one massive scary monster glaring at us from just around the corner. Antibiotics are starting to fail. The scary monster is called Bacteria. Mankind has held the scary monster at bay since 1925 and we may be able to hold it back a few more years. But by 2025 it is likely to make a massive comeback. To me, this prospect is far more frightening than the prospect of climate change. As nasty as climate change is we will adapt to it. Mankind cannot adapt to the new and improved super-bug when it attacks with a vengeance. Drug companies are turning their backs on anti-biotic research, it's too expensive for small financial reward. Governments are not concerned, the public isn't even aware. We are heading back to an era when the tiniest scratch can turn septic, gangrenous, and there's nothing in the armoury to defeat it. Our victory over bacteria may turn out to be a short lived reign. One hundred years max. Too horrible to think about, but really, people do need to start thinking about it, seriously.
President Barrack Obama has been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize and critics wonder why. People forget that in the first year of his presidency he prevented a nuclear stand off. The Bush regime had made plans to install nuclear missiles in Poland and Czeckoslovakia, close to the Russian border. That would have forced Russia to respond by moving it's missiles to within pissing distance of Europe resulting in a 21st century missile crisis every bit as dangerous as the Cuban affair. The chances of something not going wrong would have been slight. And remember, the USA came a few thousand votes and a heart attack away from being governed by the scatty, moose hunting airbrain, Sarah Palin. How safe would you feel with her finger on the nuclear button? This is my hobby-horse and I'm not going to go into it here. But as with the Bacteria horror, the public is completely unaware of the danger we're in, the numerous near misses there have been. They remember Suez and Cuba and that's about it. They know nothing about the other fifteen or sixteen times we've come within a hair's breadth of global nuclear war. People breathed easy during the Yeltsin period, eight years during which the fate of the world hung on a vodka bottle. We were at the mercy of a drunk who carried the nuclear "football" - launch device - with him where-ever he went. Even when he was in hospital being operated on the device was chained to his bed. Everyone breathed easy during that period and I don't know why. I believe we have President Bill Clinton to thank for seeing us through that period. His father was an alcoholic so Clinton knew how to handle and humour Yeltsin. The two men actually seemed to like each other. It would have been a different story had Reagan, Nixon or Bush been in at the helm.
Incidentally, it never seems to occur to anyone that were it not for the trillions of dollars wasted on the military, its weapons and delivery systems – submarines, aircraft carriers, bombers, missiles – we would by now have found cures for all or most cancers, AIDS, Alzheimer's, spinal cord injuries and we would have at our disposal an arsenal of new antibiotics to combat the soon to emerge super-bugs.
For three years or maybe seven, the USA has a sensible and peace-loving man at the helm but who can predict what will follow? Will it be another fundamentalist Christian who believes that nuclear war is predicted in the Bible and therefore is unavoidable and even desirable? Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush both believed that they would be "raptured" into the sky to meet Jesus just seconds before the bombs explode on Earth, killing all mankind except for "born again" Christians. The life of every living creature on this planet, with the possible exceptions of rats, fleas, flies, cockroaches and deep sea molusks, depends on rational leaders making rational decisions, and nothing going wrong. No more false alarms by the rusting Russian early warning systems. Twice in the 1990s Russia came within one minute of a full scale nuclear launch against Europe and the USA. Also, no terrorist virus please, and don't hack into Pentagon or Norad computers, if you don't mind.
Meanwhile the public changes its light bulbs to save the planet.
Well enough doom and gloom. No one likes being old but I'm grateful to have lived in a time when I was able to enjoy the best of the best. I hope I'm wrong, I hope things continue to get better and better.
And so here's to you Thomas Paine, Voltaire, Robert G. Ingersoll, Charles Dickens, James Watt, Robert Louis Stevenson, Dr Louis Pasteur, Dr Alexander Flemming, Dr Joseph Salk, Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, Orville and Wilbur Wright, H. G. Wells, Margaret Sanger, Sir Winston Churchill, Logie Baird, Little Richard, Elvis Presley, Beatles, Rolling Stones, Dr Alfred Kinsey, Richard Neville and the Oz trial battlers, Larry Flynt, J. Krishnamurti, Dr Arthur Janov, Dr Madalyn Murray O'Hair, Steve Jobs, Bill Clinton, Monty Python, Basil Faulty, Eric Cartman and the Southpark boys.
Thanks to you I reached old age and I did so without major illness or suffering. My son lived longer than Charles Darwin's beloved daughter Annie, and is still going strong, his children also. I avoided slavery in a Nazi prison factory, I remained a free man despite going to the edge on numerous occasions, I travelled the world in relative comfort and safety, my life was made immeasurably richer and more fulfilling by the wisdom of your words, I am not forced to worship a hideous murdering deity or his hell obsessed demon seed, I enjoyed an exciting and varied sex life, I drive an up-to-the-moment 1981 super van, I have warm clothes, electric heating and air conditioning, my milk is cold, I have an electric theatre in my living room, I communicate with people across the world in an instant, I danced to some of the wildest music that has ever been recorded and I laughed my stupid head off at your crazy antics.
Life might possibly have been better, but not much.
