When was the Best Time to be Alive? (or A Blast from an Old Fart)
Parties Dancing Outdoors / Bess Georgette / Flickr
People who claim to have been reincarnated often recall a glamorous past as a Hittite princess or a Renaissance nobleman, but after a only a few moments’ reflection , you realise that that there would be much about living in those times that we would find intolerable – my dear, the smell, apart from anything else!
For a start, as a woman, anything pre-1853 is out of the question : 1853 was when anaesthetic was first used to alleviate the pain of childbirth, and the lucky lady was Queen Victoria, so you’d have to add a good few years for it to percolate down the average woman.
Average is what I’m talking about here, and the UK as well, as there are enough places where it hasn’t been too great to be alive for much of the time, and the UK hasn’t been – and still isn’t – too great to be alive if you are below the average standard of living.
There are unmistakeable signs, though, that the best has been and gone: no more free university tuition, higher retirement age, longer working hours, etc. How do these weigh in the balance against smartphones, FaceBook and onesies?
After a long time believing that progress, a.k.a. improvement, was unstoppable, that there was a clear line stretching from a hazy past of woad and squalor, via open sewers, the abolition of bear baiting and finally to the railways, old age pensions, Victorian sanitation , free education, the Beveridge report and social welfare, foreign travel and central heating, and that things would simply go on getting better and better in every way, I’ve realised that we have peaked and we are now on a downward trajectory.
So how could you have avoided the receding tide of progress and lived your life in the most comfortable conditions possible?
By my (totally unscientific) reckoning you should have been born in 1943. As a small child, unless you lived in a Blitz area, you probably would not have noticed – and may well have been protected from – the war itself and the post-war privations. You would have gone straight from the healthy (and healthily modest) wartime diet to thriving on free milk, orange juice and cod liver oil. In 1953 you would have had the huge gift of the end of sweet rationing.
In 1963, when sexual intercourse began, according to Philip Larkin, you would have been well placed to take advantage of it, emboldened as much by better access to contraception as by the freedom of the age.
Having availed yourself of various plentiful job opportunities, you could have settled in a job you liked – and even if you didn’t like it very much, as long as you did your hours you were probably OK.
By the time Thatcherism, cost centres ( that’s different departments in the same organisation charging each other for paper clips), and performance management really kicked in, you would have been only four years off early retirement on a final salary pension.
I rest my case.