Part 1 was published here yesterday.
Now I freely admit that I, too, once had a scooter. It was bright red with white wheels and black tyres and the frame was emblazoned with the maker’s name in raised letters proudly proclaiming the legend ‘Triang’. It gave me much pleasure at the time when I was six years old and before I graduated to a bicycle. Thinking of this brought a smile to my face, which soon disappeared as we walked out of the car park only to see a security guard talking to these ‘kids’ who were putting their scooters in the boot of a ‘hot hatch’ which one of the pair was driving. They were not kids but young women in their early 20s, obviously reliving their youth I thought, but at least that explains why they were not at school, but not at work either. Maybe they had ‘pulled a sickie’ or were in training for some event of which I’d not heard but at least they were out in the fresh air getting some exercise and not walking around barging into people as they stare intently at their smartphones, clutching a now de rigueur recyclable cup with coffee from the latest designer coffee shop.
Not wanting to sound like ‘mom and dad’ (which is a bit worrying when you find yourself doing it), ‘the youth of today and all that’ or comment along the lines of the actuality being that they are probably correct, but let’s face it things and times are different now, a fact often brought home forcibly when seeing the behaviour, dress and interaction with the general public of some of these guardians of our well-being. A reflection of our society, lack of training, lack of supervision or just a lack of knowledge of how to behave. Perhaps we should give some thought to it, the next time some politician purports to be the font of all knowledge, and ask them to explain the society they have created over the last 40 years.
It does seem though, that we have many in a generation who have just not ‘grown up’ and it’s becoming more and more evident as we rush headlong into the second decade of the 21st century, led it seems by adolescents. We have become accustomed to stories about millennials and snowflakes and all the rest, schools and universities allowing or promoting behaviour that would have received heavy censure 25 years ago, but it does seem that many people refuse to ‘grow up’ (even when in late middle age) and become responsible adults or members of the wider community. They have a ‘me, me, look at me’ attitude and to hell with the consequences writ large by people who have as their motto ‘no fear’ or ‘only one life live it’ or the utterances of some celebrity or other as their role model.
Now role models, that is a vexed question, politician, probably not, how about a sportsperson branded now as they are by big business, teacher, lecturer or clergyman, older sibling or other relative, probably not, which leaves us with ‘celebrity’ the passing one of the moment. Suggest someone? Well to be honest I’d rather not as I can’t really think of someone to suggest especially and particularly to the younger generation, if the two 35-year-old men are examples, that I had to quickly get out of the way of as I walked in the centre of town in the expensively built and renamed ‘piazza’.
Millions were spent on it for the third time in 25 years as a vanity project by our city fathers, it opened with a fanfare and is now used as a racetrack by cyclists (well, where isn’t?), buskers, street beggars along with regular street markets which have damaged the rather expensive stone paving, although not quite as much as the utility companies who thoughtfully replaced stone paving with tarmac after botched utility line repairs.
But back to our two 35-year-olds, both over six feet tall, sporting hipster beards, headphones and baseball caps, the latest style shorts and trainers as they perform jumps and slaloms at speed on their skateboards, in and out of the – at that time – mostly elderly pedestrians out for a stroll, who were mostly unimpressed, as was the busker who stopped mid-song as these two 35-year-old children sped by whopping and yelling as they went, and this on a Thursday afternoon. I wonder who their role model is and how their children do or will behave. These are just a couple of incidents, you see this childish and selfish behaviour on a daily basis, many have no idea of how to be an adult or maybe why you should behave as an adult.
We have, in two generations, gone from young men 19 years of age, flying what was then state-of-the-art bombers at high speed and low level at night on what must have been obvious to them as they took off a one way suicidal mission which for many it was, to 25-year-old women playing on scooters and 35-year-old men skateboarding like children on the pavement, obviously with nothing else to do with their time with many of their social media ‘friends’ suggesting that the older generation are, to hear them speak, ruining their futures, It’s maybe time somebody told them to shut up, learn how to behave and ‘grow up’ .
The mind, as mother used to say ‘boggles’.
Norman has hit the nail on the head. It is ME ME LOOK AT ME nowadays. Isn’t that what is behind all the ‘celeb’ culture we are subjected to? Or ‘they’ are subjected to rather. I’ve switched it off. Those ‘people’ glued to their smart phones are probably on social media sites which is another symptom of the same problem. Perhaps it’s what used to be called an inferiority complex. You remember it don’t you. If someone has to say look at me aren’t I good it’s because they feel the lowest of the low.
Well I was ACE on roller skates so there! I think it is more than 2 generations that the decline has set in Norman – 3 or more surely since WW2. But yes there certainly has been an all round decline. My roller skating was well controlled and never interfered with pedestrians, traffic or any thing else. 3 of today’s kids recently forced me off the pavement whizzing with their assorted wheels, without even noticing. One friend said recently that both parents have to go out to work nowadays and the schools are bad too – meeting SATS is it? instead of actually teaching. She was probably right on both counts but I’m not sure that is the whole answer.
Pauline – Yes, mixed race – my suspicion is that there is Neanderthal in me, and you have no doubt heard of what the French are quite adept at, that which the land-girls enjoyed – so that French must be somewhere in my DNA. Not to mention that four leaf sprig of clover which raises its head when the Guinness flows with the Liffey water. Oh, and let’s not forget the Gaucho ladies that my Great Grandfather wrestled with in Argentina. Then of course there was the family gold-prospecting in the Klondike – and I am quite sure you have heard that the Eskimo ladies had a rather unique way of keeping warm in their igloos. So. Are we not ALL mixed race? All of our ancestors emanated from Africa.
The problem we have of course is that if we keep importing a quarter of a million a year, most of us will need to move back to Africa.
Keep smiling!
Now then mrpaul. If only I’d been born earlier I really fancy being a land girl and being promiscuous with the Yanks. I mean, they were clued up about condoms you know. (More than can be said for my parents who married on the understanding they would not have children then proceeded to have two.)
Some of the rest of your comment is true – but wasn’t it you who said you were of mixed race? Far as I’m concerned UK is already too crowded. UK is already overburdened by too many too fast and anyway it’s up to UK who and what we let in, not that foreign evil Empire.
Our decline began just after the Second World War.
The American military brought with them the very worst aspects of the New World of which there were many.
Yes, brave ‘Hicks from the Sticks’ and with the morals of the backwoods – to a man single-mindedly promiscuous.
Many of our young men were either dead or destitute.
Because of the depleted ‘work-force’ the Masters of Industry demanded ‘bodies’.
Immigration then began in earnest, and totally different cultures began to burrow away into our once fairly evenly balanced society.
‘Pot’ was introduced and was as easily available as lollipops.
This was the beginning of ‘multiculturalism’ – interbreeding of the ‘cultures’ the introduction and absorption of alien lifestyles and the cacophony of primitive ‘Pot-induced’ noise, passing as ‘music’.
Some of us are still searching for where this influx improved our Nation. Still searching.
Thank God some of us survived to the extent that we are just able to resist the decadence and ‘cool’ and, some able to write, could still remember how to record for posterity a cogent history of ‘The Decline’.
Then came the plethora of misuse and patent abuse of our ‘Social Contract’ – and the realisation of the opportunities that the introduction of ‘Family Support’ provided, although these services were meant for the ‘indigenous’ unfortunates, poor and needy, they were seized upon by any and every means by every ‘layabout’ who put their heads through the doors of the ever open ‘Social Security Carousel’. The Civil Servants passively handing out their ‘goodies’, after all – it wasn’t THEIR money they were doling out.
Next? The lines and lines of single mothers, given state-of-the-art nursery equipment and prams and perambulators the size of limousines.
Oh! and stay-away ‘fathers’ seriously opportunist, condom-free – then serial bedhopping began in earnest and became the norm – and a living could be earned from ‘helping’ their compatriots and other vulnerables with their daily ‘cool’ essentials – for a small ‘fee’.
Nice work if you can det it!
Then the circus really got going. Some of the more enterprising immigrants, percolated through to ‘legitimate professions’ (I use the term very loosely). In particular the notorious ‘Legal Profession’ – that licence to manipulate the law and when challenged, to claim ‘racism’, which they continue to plead whenever the ‘cases’ they take on board are in fear of justifiable sentencing or reprimand.
The Judiciary, already corrupt for centuries, simply played the game with the ‘newcomers’ in order to ensure ‘ a level playing field’. In other words, ensuring that all newcomers were eqully as corrupt as those who ‘owned the game’. The Judges.
But during this time a greater corruption was brewing – in ‘politics’.
Many dedicated men and women, many ordinary folk holding down respectable jobs, who believed in their country and sought to end the variety of genuine injustices – passed from the scene.
To be cursorily air-brushed from our glorious history. Working class offcasts.
Soon we had Governments populated by the scallywags, failed legal ‘students’, Soliitors, Lawyers and Barristers, each with their own versions of ‘Justice’ – and each and every one finding chinks and opening in the Westminster Trough System to systematically cheat and rob the public by the inflation of their ‘expenses’ – down to the last PENNY.
Now we are faced with the choice of a rabid, scruffy some-time Socialist/Communist/Islamic sympathiser and a bloated, immoral, bumbling, bed-hopping, second-rate comedian – running the corrupt Westminster Follies – Mssrs. Corbin and Johnson.
Have we all gone mad, you ask?
YES!
Excellent points Mr. Paul.
Jack Thomas – Thanks Jack!
And so the decline continues unabated.
Anyone who has even cursorily studied Gibbons’ ‘Rise and Fall’ will find his treatise more and more pertinent as the days, weeks and months go by.
I am informed that Boris read the Classics? By his actions, attitudes and performances in politics, he also has studied Machiavelli, The Prince. With equally sad results.
Unfortunately for us, he simply does not have the quality, the nonce, or the character to compete with The Prince.
He recently, I believe, published something on the life of Churchill and I am told he considers himself of the Churchillian mould?
What sheer arrogance and supreme self-deception. By comparison with Churchill Boris is a political Pygmy – and an untidy, blithering schoolboy, clearly even unable to comb his own hair. The comparison is odious.
Perhaps I will follow up on the ‘Rise and Fall’ and give a comparison between that fallen Empire and the reasons for our INEVITABLE decline which mirrors in so many ways our own self-destruction.
Good luck.
Thank you “Norman” so true.
Politicians:
“…ask them to explain the society they have created over the last 40 years.” Indeed they should, preferably from the dock of the Old Bailey. We can dream. Of course there is much to be said about education too, or should we rename it “indoctrination”?
Norman – Clearly you were raised in a family of incredible wealth! In my day we made our own scooters from two short planks of wood, a block of wood and two ball-bearing wheels. Even the axles were wooden. The wheels were noisy blighters on the paving of the day but the finished article was lots of fun.