Call me a sap but I just read a blog that bought a tear to my eye. Even sadder, but more expected, is the news that its subject, 108 year old ‘blogger’ Olive Riley has passed away. The truth is that Olive’s eyesight was well beyond the point of actually being able to blog or ‘blob’ as she preferred to call it. Which is no matter because she had a small team of people who were prepared to blob on her behalf.
I applaud these people because they understand the value of what she had to say. Old people are exactly like you or I - just older, and with more experience of being a human being. Furthermore, to look at life through the eyes of an old person is to put your own experiences into perspective. For better or worse, it is always interesting to see how life has changed over the years.
Back in the day, you could cop a mouthful from an old person if you misbehaved. I’ve had a few octogenarian fists shaken at me in my time.
‘What the bleep do you think you’re doing? Our generation fought a bleeping war for the likes of you’.
Straight up! It sounds like a cliché but it’s true and it had no emotional resonance whatsoever for me at the time. What on earth were they talking about? The war was a memory that existed only in the minds of my parents. ‘Rationing’ was something that was mentioned when we wanted too many sweets. ‘Evacuation’ only if we got really unruly.
I had little concept of what life was really like for my elders until I began this project and two things happened. One, I started to interview old people, and two; I began to research the past.
‘Testament of Youth’ was the bullet between the eyes. Published in 1933, this was Vera Brittain’s account of life during wartime. Six hundred and sixty two thousand British men were killed during the First World War. Flick through your Face book page and count your male friends. You don’t need to be a mathematician to work out that many of them wouldn’t be there had the same set of circumstances played themselves out today. They would have gone to war and they would not have come back. Many of them would have been young men, eighteen years old, nineteen years old. Babies.
Different circumstances produced different people. Times were hard and people had an appreciation for the simple things that we take for granted.
On a happier note, the economy has often reflected our libido. Skip forward to the end of the Second World War and people literally had sex to celebrate the fact that they were still alive. Hey presto, the baby boomers were born and in many respects we have never looked back. Of course life is not that simple and that’s what I love about this project, the ability to get perspective by looking into the past.
One might say that it’s a classic case of swings and roundabouts.
Whilst we may shag with an abandon that our grandparents could not, - only, it must be said, because they were terrified of getting pregnant. There was no lack of desire. It’s a commonly held belief that people were prudish about sex in days gone by and I am here to tell you that they were not – modern life has bought a whole new set of issues to contend with.
Are we happier now that we can have sex whenever we like? Maybe. Is the demise of religion a good thing? Perhaps. But as my mother once said to me, a woman who does not ‘do god’, there was a hell of a lot less trouble in the streets in days gone by, when religion gave people structure to their lives. See what I mean? Swings and roundabouts.
‘Don’t ever suggest we should go back to those days’. This is what one of my interviewees once said to me, a woman who did get pregnant in the early sixties (the pill became available to married women in 1962) because the vinegar and water solution that she used as a contraceptive failed to work (now there’s a surprise).
But time marches on and our lives become quicker, less risky, more convenient and in theory, more fulfilled. What am I trying to say? Just that understanding other people’s lives and their personal circumstances helps us to keep our own in check.
I’m not here to tell you whether any of these things are good or bad, well, not most of the time anyway. I am just here to say that it’s great to know what makes us what we are.
Mass Observation had this idea years ago. Read about them. They are genius. When Cosmo Landesman interviewed me last year for the Sunday Times News Review and called the Virginity Project ‘a kind of Mass Observation for the internet age’. I pretty much died and went to heaven.
Documenting our lives is a good thing. I have said this before, but it makes no difference how many flash forms of communication we invent. You’ll always find good stuff on the Internet but people’s personal stories are irreplaceable. When grandma goes, her stories go with her. Listen to her whilst you have the chance.
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