Free Stairlift to Heaven by Terry Ravenscroft Page A

at Kempton Park and not something played by an ethnic minority to gain an unfair advantage, a time when people who ran banks were known as bankers not wankers.
    I certainly wouldn’t like to have been born now, despite all the advantages of inventions like television and computers and mobile phones, which weren’t around when I popped out into the world, because along with all the televisions and computers came darker inventions like smart bombs and nuclear missiles and other abominations that can destroy the world in about five minutes flat, and probably will do before we’re very much older.
    And I wouldn’t have liked to have been born very much earlier either, say a couple of centuries or so ago, because that would have landed me in an age when people got hung for stealing a loaf of bread, and if they managed to miss out on that probably died before they were thirty from the plague or rickets or scarlet fever or any of the countless other diseases the medical profession had still failed to get to grips with. Amputation without an anaesthetic? Yes, I’ll certainly take a pass on that.
    Being born at the time I was my childhood was a joy, a magic time, an age when despite being born to mothers who drank and smoked like chimneys, in spite of the lack of childproof locks and childproof caps on bottles of pills and being allowed to play with lead toy soldiers painted with lead paint, regardless of the fact that we rode bikes without the need of more body armour than an American footballer and were allowed to eat white bread with butter on it and play conkers and climb trees which we fell out of from time to time because then there was no such thing as Health and Safety, and notwithstanding that we were allowed to stay out until dark without our mothers knowing where we were, we somehow all managed to survive intact.
    And so we left school - but only after receiving quite a few hefty clouts round the head by the teachers, which didn’t seem to have done us any harm and probably did us a lot of good - and then got a job, which I seem to remember was a much easier undertaking then, as nowadays you seem to require a university degree of not less than a 2.1 to even stand an outside chance of getting a job behind the counter at McDonalds.
    Of course in those days you had to be clever to go to university, and if you happened to be one of the lucky ones you took a degree in Chemistry or Physics or English Language, unlike today where you don’t have to be anything like so clever - you certainly don’t have to be able to read and write any better than the average seven-year-old of my childhood - and along with subjects like Chemistry you can take a degree in Folk Music or Interior Decorating and quite possibly Advanced Train Spotting & Bungee Jumping. And it doesn’t make a scrap of difference if something like Advanced Train Spotting & Bungee Jumping is the only degree you’re capable of gaining you’ll still probably end up at McDonalds dressed in a silly hat cooking French fries alongside the girl with a First in Economics.
    And could I have chosen a better time to be a teenager? I don’t think so. It was the era of the birth of rock and roll. We had Elvis and Little Richard, then a year or two later the Beatles and the Stones. What have the teenagers of today got? Rap. My parents used to complain that you couldn’t tell what Mick Jagger was saying, nowadays not only can you not tell what they’re saying you don’t want to know what they’re saying because it’s usually all about stabbing each other, bro.
    Even much later, when I was about fifty and this country had started to go pear-shaped, I could still pat a child affectionately on the head without the risk of being put on the sex-offenders register; if I caught a burglar breaking into my house, detained him by force and called the police it would be the burglar they locked up, not me; if I happened to take ill at weekend the doctor would come out and treat me,