Andy

No. It wasn’t always like this.

We grew up in a different world. Now my kids tell me I have become one of “The Grumpy Old Men”. Actually, I like progress and I embrace change. But I abhor lack of moral values, courtesy, decency, integrity and respect that is now almost ‘the norm’. And in terms of ‘respect’, it is a word that is mostly banded about freely by those who either don’t know what it means or don’t show it.

Andy, I know this sounds impossibly quaint but I remember walking in the street with my Mother and we bumped into her boss, who tipped his hat and greeted her.
She referred to him as Mr Norgate, and I had to greet him as such.

Can anyone tell me what we have here now is better??
How did we travel from there to here??
What happened..?

If you want a protest song, try this…
It perfectly encapsulates how I see the World.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1FR842KUaOw

“I try to put everything into perspective
Set it against the scale of human suffering
And I thought of the Mugabe government
And the children of the Calcutta railways
This works for a while
But then I encounter Primark FM
Overhead a rainbow appears
In black and white…”

I like it so much I’m having played at my funeral.

Andy, and you’re correct.
What happened to this country–our country.
You know, the one we grew up in.
It wasn’t always like this.
I know the experts would tell me that I’m harking back to some golden age which never existed, but it wasn’t always like this–was it..??

Did I miss something somewhere??

My last post was written in reaction to A Saunders unmodified post.
If that makes sense.
A.

Andy

Are you honestly suggesting that a sick society, lacking in morals and values of decency, was/is a legacy of Mrs Thatcher? Sorry. But no.

No, as ever people don’t read what I write.
Sorry Andy, but as with all adherants of Margaret, you seem to interpret any hint of criticism as total condemnation. It seems to me that everyone is locked into some sort of left/right hate thing.
But the creed of greed instant gratification certainly had a strong upturn in the 1980’s–and it hasn’t ceased yet.
And if what you see around you today makes you feel that this country has benefitted from that–I’m listening.

Andy.

It is, perhaps, a sad reflection on our sick society, lacking in morals and any values of decency, and an eager willingness by many to be whipped up into a frenzy of hate.

Andy.
Re my last post above.
When did all this start..??

Because we are are divided–perhaps worse to honest.

Charlie.
Also re my post.
Give it some thought.
I can’t see things getting better until these issues are addressed.

A.

Thanks for that.
Wonderful stuff.
A.

In the 1980’s I lived in a couple of rented rooms in Stevenage, and I had the dubious pleasure of watching the newly created ‘middle class’–only made into what they thought was middle class by being allowed to borrow money at favourable rates to buy their tacky box council houses, baying for the blood of the miners who were on strike.
Just think, only forty years earlier, the parents of these ordinary folk from both the North and the South had stood shoulder to shoulder to defend the country against an even greater enemy. Now, they had allowed themselves to be divided and ruled by a clique whose only creed was greed and self aggrandizement. I actually don’t know which lot made me feel the most bilious, the politicians or the British people who were taken in. I did however make a decision then, that being that I’d make my own way through life, making my own judgments and having my own opinions and everyone else could get stuffed.
When I look around the waste land around me now, I see the results of greed all around me, something that has filtered down from above over the ensuing thirty years.
Of course greed didn’t start with Thatcher, Winston Churchill wasn’t above cooking the books to make a quid for himself but it was in the 1980’s for the first time it became a religion I think–well apart from the ‘South Sea Bubble’ that is.
Now, twenty three years after Queen Margaret was deposed by her own people, we as a people are as divided as ever–and I’m bored with it.
Bored with the self-righteous pretending they’re offended by a song from ‘The Wizard Of Oz’, and bored by a load of stripped pine socialists pretending to be ‘right on’, and who actually wouldn’t know what it feels like to be working class if the words ‘WORKING CLASS’ was etched onto the end of a four foot iron bar and rammed up their collective backsides.
What an unhappy nation we appear to be, all stuck together on this miserable little pellet of land in the p*ssing rain–and hating each other.
We deserve to sink beneath the miserable, polluted, grey waters of the North Sea.
As to the BBC and what it may or may not play, the day the f*ckin’ Daily Mail is the arbiter of good taste and censorship, I’ll take the TESCO disposable barbecue into a small sealed room and end it all quickly.
Quite frankly, it’s been like a particularly malignant form of mob-rule on there this week–no better than witch burning. For many who no doubt brag to their friends at dinner parties (between mouthfuls of Waitrose chicken) that they’re middle class and respectable, I’d say this, act like civilised people, and not the mob!! To the mob, I’d say this, F*ck Off and stop trying to pretend to be me and my family–You’re not representing me.

I’d love to know why we’re so divided–no I really would like to know.
Despite what the Daily mail readers here might have to say, whenever I visit our neighbours across la Manche, they seem much happier and content.
So what goes on here..??

Most of what I write here is firmly tongue in cheek. I love to see the pompous trailing out all the old cr*p, and I’m of the belief that a bit of baiting is a good form of cheap enterrtainment, but tonight I’m writing as close to being serious as I’m ever likely to be.

Andy.

PS. I’ve done the maths, and with the room I have in mind, I reckon it would take two Tesco disposable barbecues to get the Carbon Monoxide ratio sufficiently high to cause it all to be painless.