When I was born we had none of these.

Yesterday I was spurred into recalling my own brief three-quarter century of history. In my grandparent’s soot-blackened terraced house I was tin-bathed and outside-toileted. I remember street men, knife sharpeners, rag and bone men, men selling sugar and salt carved from blocks, milk and muffins, poes under the bed and sitting by their cast-iron range till my legs got red raw, school and Sunday school. We were good Lancashire mill workers, Methodists with no swearing or alcohol. My mother could lip-read because of the noisy looms and probably glowed in the dark from licking radium tipped paint brushes illuminating watch faces as war work. Car ownership was twenty years off, it was walk, cycle or bus. There was a radio with, for some inexplicable reason, odd foreign places like Luxembourg and Hilvers on the dial. Wages must have been around £5 a week, houses £300 and there was rationing. I was born chubby but soon leaned out. No one had a waist measurement over 32” except the mayor. By the time I was five things were on the up and by fifteen, 1958, I had a second hand bike, £3.50, we had a back and front garden, an ancient wooden garage and a black and white television, but my mum still wrote all weekly expenditures in a book. And then and then, and then now. And ‘now’ is both amazing and frightening, luxurious and wasteful, permissive and puritanical, comfortable and stressful, connected and disconnected, concerned and confused. Could our brains have been heated up by the lead in petrol or it’s toxic substitutes? A more prosaic explanation might be the Monte Carlo effect. In Monte Carlo they’re so wealthy they’re left with only their whims to consider, a sort of self-incestuousness. In a recent documentary on this wealth haven an oik had a T shirt emblazoned with, ‘Don’t make friends make money’. As well as being out of date before he was born, it somehow proves his only friend is money, which as everyone knows is the only remaining friend to those who have lots of it. So have we all over the years become to some extent self-incestuous? In short, American? Most likely. We can’t watch TV without its mandatory 15 minutes of lessons every hour, magazines with pages of them and now an internet dedicated to them. When I was born we had none of these.