THE NEW YEAR inevitably provides a pause for reflection when you are in your 60s: you briefly, when suffering the depressing effects of celebrating the New Year with alcohol, begin to wonder about your mortality – this you will be glad to know is a brief passage, before you reflect upon your life. Once both morbid transitions are made you echo happier times; the times when you were young, and it is such reflections that comfort you in the later years of your life. Such memories are personal and treated with boredom and indifference when communicated to the youth that barely tolerate you. Then I realise I was just the same: the old represented the ancient; they complained when you kicked a ball about in the street, or made too much noise in the summer months when you were on your school holidays.
When young the old are part of a foggy backdrop that spoils your pleasure with complaint after complaint to your parents about the means by which you exert your youthful energy in order to burn it off. Your elderly complainants were just as peeved by the elderly in their youth, as I was in mine. But I am now entering my 66th year: and I wish I could hear the sound of children kicking a ball about on my road during the summer holidays. But children today are less free to investigate the world than were I and my contemporaries. We roamed in packs; packs of friendship, with often a dog in tow that was as much part of our gang as any other. Our parents were glad to see the back of us during those six weeks of summer that freed us from the enslavement of the classroom. We roamed far afield, far further than children today would be allowed to do.
To appreciate such experiences watch the late Dennis Potters' Blue Remembered Hills. Potter's work conveys what it was like then to be young and explorative, and to be allowed to do so. We ventured far and wide; but before we did so we had a kind of congress of six or seven to determine where we should go. In the end we just walked and walked; fenced with each other with tree branches; skimmed the tranquil summer North Sea with flattened stones gathered from the shoreline to see who could skim the most hops with one stone. We would also go stickle-backing with our nets in the dykes that are part of Norfolk, counting our catches before returning them to the dykes to see who bagged the most.
But things seemed to go array when I and my brother both learnt to swim. It was the most pleasurable activity of mine and my brother's youth. Our summer holidays from then on comprised of day after day spent in Yarmouth's open air swimming pool. Once, in our junior school, we learnt to swim and gained our swimming certificates from 25 yards to a mile by secondary school; we spent our summer days, not exploring as we once did, but wallowing away our days in our towns open-air swimming pool. We bought a season ticket paid for by our newspaper round; and could swim and dive without any concern for the time we embraced while swimming. We spent whole days splashing, swimming and diving, it was inexhaustible; the warm sea water that kept us afloat left time behind. We never tired or got bored: my brother and I had found our nirvana; at least as far as the summer holiday was concerned - for a few years.
Youth should always be allowed a long leash (although in mine and my brother's case it was always none existent); but we lived in a more relaxed time as far as children and their liberty were concerned: therefore the freedom and liberty I and my generation enjoyed is deemed no longer safe – and why? Well we live in the age of paedophilia and the internet, and therefore children are no longer considered safe. Paedophiles have always predated the innocent; and in my time, its most knowledgeable local practitioners were always known to the children. We knew our single predator. He was an old and much to be pitied man. We knew him by sight and steered clear; often, when in a group, we chastised him on sight. Which was the very least he deserved but was, in our youth sufficient to keep him at a distance. His name spread throughout the town via his reputation and warned us of his presence in our town - this is how we handled the situation at the time.
The older you get, the more reflective you get. When young there is nothing to reflect upon: you live for the day and scorn almost all of those ten, fifteen, or twenty years older than yourself. You do not have to be in your sixties, but even in your forties. Youth will always have the upper hand. Reflection belongs to the later life when regrets pile up.
The New Year intermission brings forth the individual to reflection; depending of course on the number of years he or she has spent celebrating the New Year. There comes a time when salutation for a past life becomes more appropriate than the celebration of a New Year. A New Year when many elderly citizens' main ambition is to see the next New Year out before they finally succumb. Like most things, Christmas and the New Year are the property of youth – and it is as it should be.
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