History

Town bridge, Bridgwater

Coffee bar

Linda, oil on glass


Not deceased, not for years yet, just lazy and lacking in oomph this year so a quick look at history in my time…..

History is what happened before the day I was born so the 70 years or so previous including the invention of the radio, the telephone, the growth of the railways, my mother as a child walking down to the great north road hoping to see some cars and the remains of the fire bomb long preserved after it landed on my father’s Essex home during the first world war, along with women getting the vote all belong to history, like the battle of Hastings.

The period since my birth has surely had an equally dramatic impact on all our lives….

I recall busses with signs forbidding both spitting and putting lead-acid batteries (for our radio sets) on the seats. As a schoolboy electricity eventually reached our village, replacing the oil lamps and candles. Similarly mains water supply arrived and the village hand-pump down the road was never used again. Our neighbours got a television set in time for the 1952 coronation although we didn’t get one in our house till I was away at college. I did share a reel-to-reel tape recording machine the size of a suitcase with my brother and twenty years later resisted paying a week’s wages for the new ‘Walkman’ pocket tape player. We used slide rules at school while waiting for calculators to be invented and used books of tables to help with the complicated pre-decimal coinage calculations – with any luck perhaps the English language will be at least phonetically written during the next 70 years?

At the cinema we had to stand fro the National Anthem at the end of the show – or ostentatiously remain seated as republicans. I guess this was mostly to slow the rush out of the doors and the practice must have finished about the time I got married. With the children at secondary school we at last got central heating and the trendy continental duvets to replace the old blankets. Before retiring from work the brick sized mobile phones came in as status symbols and a way for the office to hassle you when you were out on site. Our first computer came alongside a television course on how to use it and how to write programmes, in the office we went on training sessions explaining how to reformat hard-drives and we waited for the programmes to be developed that would make life simple, dispensing with the typing pool and for the internet to reach our desks. Holidays from being a week at the seaside or camping in the Lake District once a year have evolved into two, three or even four foreign holidays each year flying away not just to Europe but to the Americas, Egypt and Thailand at prices far below the six months wages that our honeymoon in Spain cost us.

Further away from the home virtually free nuclear electricity has not, after all been realized, its waste remains an insoluble problem. Nuclear weapons have been invented, remain and collected by a growing number of Countries seeking the status and security that they are thought to provide. Global warming offers new challenges that with the demands of the ‘third world’ where up to now even toilet paper is seen as a bourgeois luxury, and the short-termism of politics worldwide can hardly provide any optimism. Invasions of other Countries in the interests of the invaders continues from Egypt, Guatemala and so many others. On the other hand life gets more liberal with homosexuality becoming legal, the death penalty vanishing and with radio, television and the internet linking ordinary people around the planet so its not all downhill !