Open Writing

Seven years ago the British Labour Party rode into power on the back of the song “Things Can Only Get Better.’’

Now hold on there. Don’t hide in a corner or run for the hills.

This is not a political article.

It’s about…well it’s about things getting better. Or maybe not.

All my life I’ve assumed that things would go on getting better. That I would be better off than my dad, my kids better off than me.

That there would be more things in the world. More food, more gadgets, more opportunities to travel…

And there are.

A refrigerator in every home, dishwashers and DVDs, more cars than we have roads to put them on, robots to do a lot of the slave work in factories, supermarkets bursting with produce gathered in from all over the world, video games to fill every youthful minute, enough cash to afford to jet off to Spain for the weekend…

Henry VIII and Elizabeth I had nowhere near as many opportunities for comfort and leisure as we have now.

We should all be as happy as kings and queens.

But you don’t see many folk walking around with day-long smiles on their faces as they relish their royal good luck.

Could it be that happiness and contentment are not located in cars and wall-to-wall carpets? Fridges, flat-pack furniture and flat-screen TVs?

No television in my Spartan wartime boyhood. No wall-to-wall carpet.

There was lino round the edges of what bits of carpet we had. Lino which was polished by house-proud mums at least once a week.

No video games to keep us youngsters entertained. We had to use our imaginative powers, to make-do and mend.

A spare length of floor-board was shaped into a cricket bat. A scuffed shiny tennis ball featured in many a game of rounders.

A tumble-down two-room cottage became a castle, a den, a fort to be defended against a marauding band of Red Indian braves.

A broken-down pram was a tank, rumbling across the desert to attack Rommel and his Afrika Corps.

Not many sweets to be had then. A few ounces of mint humbugs as a weekend treat, bought from Mrs Senior’s terrace front room shop.

No sweets, and no obese children.

We played day-long in the lanes, streets and fields. No fear of kidnappers or child molesters.

At the end of a day’s inventive freedom, we ran home to listen to an old “steam’’ radio. The latest episode of Dick Barton, Special Agent.

No pictures to guide us on the latest hairy escapade of Dick and his sidekicks Snowy and Jock.

Only our imaginations to fill in the details of their adventures - and the entertainment was all the richer for that.

No package flights then to Malaga and Majorca, Tenerife and Tunisia.

A holiday was a week - or even a fortnight if you were one of the better off - in Blackpool or Scarborough, Morecambe, Whitby or Bridlington.

And what holidays! Buckets and spades and sandy beaches. Fairground toffee apples and candyfloss. A Pierrot show on the pier.

And pleasure unlimited, rain or shine.

Then, when I reached the age of travelling independently, it was a midnight flight to Paris in a piston-engined aircraft. And Paris was all that I had imagined “abroad’’ would be.

Funny-smelling cigarette smoke, noisy taxis, peculiar street signs, food that tasted strange on the English palate. The intense thrill of being in another country.

There are McDonalds in Paris now. And it takes not much longer to get there than it used to take us to trundle to Whitby in a battered old Austin.

Nowadays of course we can get “new’’ hips and knees when the ones which Nature gave us wear out.

We can buy Thai curries in Sainsburys and Morrisons, watch television 24 hours a day, conduct our banking business by telephone from our own homes.

We can fly away on a package holidays to Katmandu or Tierra del Fuego.

We can even live longer than our fathers and mothers, and a lot longer than our grandfathers and grandmothers.

But things can only get better?

Ah…

That all depends on what you mean by better.