by John Graham

Created on: October 25, 2008

We relish old times and look forward with distaste towards the times to come. It is the nature of the human persona.

We think back to our youth and remember our mother's cooking and the unlimited fruit that grew in our garden. We remember times at the beach and the sun that shone throughout our days spent searching the streams for watercress and the hillsides for blueberries. We remember the college dances, the shy girls and walking them back to their rooms through the park in the dark. We remember the first challenges and successes of our jobs and the pleasure of a pay packet.

They were the very best of times that will never come again.

When we look forward we see only new restrictions; no longer being able to smell the burning autumn leaves; no longer being able to approach a woman as a woman without the thought of HIV and sexual disease; no longer being able to speak freely without being politically correct. We are saddened that the youth of today will never be able to enjoy the good life through which we lived.

As John Steinbeck put it, more clearly than I, In the East of Eden, "Oh, but strawberries will never taste so good again and the thighs of women have lost their clutch."

Yet, we stand at a point in time, on an exponential curve of change, from which vantage point the past appears continuously level and stable while the future appears volatile and in a state of fast changing flux. This is true at any point of time, whether it be 1950 or 2010.

Furthermore we are selective in our memories. Oh! Remember that taste of fresh strawberries and cream.

We forget that in our youth the need to collect scraps from our neighbours to feed the chickens was a weekly chore during wartime; that we searched for watercress only on the way back from a boring chapel service on Sunday afternoon; that the sun shone rarely in Wales; that walking shy girls home through a dark college park was an unfulfilling embarrassment; and that pay packets were never truly satisfying.

If we were younger we would pay no attention to political correctness, it's a way of life; we would treat HIV and sexual diseases as deserving to those who didn't choose partners well as we will; and that having never smelled burning leaves in the autumn we would never miss it.

The moral, I think, is to treat tomorrow's prospects as something we will appreciate and remember joyfully, the tomorrow after that.

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