May 2 2014. THE BEST OF IT?

Back in June 2007, one of the pieces I wrote for the original Stairlift to Heaven book was entitled, ‘The Best of It’. It was a nostalgic reverie in which I wrote that I was lucky to have been born at the perfect time, a time beyond the era when you could be hanged for stealing a loaf of bread but short of the present era, at a time when there were no such things as diversity and outreach officers, a time when a race card was a list of the runners and riders at Kempton Park and not something played by someone of an ethnic minority to gain an unfair advantage, a time when people who ran banks were known as bankers not wankers. Now, in 2014, I am not so sure. I have come to realise that for all its shortcomings, being born in the second decade of the third millennium has a few advantages that weren’t available to me all those years ago. Take hairstyles for example. When I was a boy of seventeen it cost me dearly to keep up my Tony Curtis haircut (which, to my narcissistic eyes, was a better Tony Curtis haircut than Tony Curtis’s), both in the cost of a fortnightly visit to the barber and the countless hours spent in front of the mirror primping my crowning glory and teasing the quiff to get it just so, and the even more hours admiring myself when I had got it just so. Today’s youths have no such costs: they can of course visit the barber to have their hair styled in the modern manner, and many of them do, but all they need do to achieve the same effect is place half-a-dozen exploding fireworks in their hair and light the blue touch paper. Ties are another necessity that I had to put up with which men of today don’t have to bother with. Suits, likewise. Hardly anyone wears either today, except for weddings and funerals, and often not even then. (The last funeral I went to one of the mourners turned up in a tracksuit, excusing his appearance by saying that he’d had to fit the funeral in with his daily five mile jog. He claimed that the deceased wouldn’t have had it any different, but of course the deceased wasn’t in any condition to verify this.) And you certainly don’t have wear a tie and suit if you’re going for a job interview. Precisely the opposite; a tie and suit are the last things you need. Even if you wanted to wear a tie and suit you wouldn’t dare wear them, for fear of getting on the wrong side of the man interviewing you, the man probably dressed in a tee shirt, jeans and a pair of loafers, and quite possibly sporting a couple of tattoos and a ring through his nose. Then there’s this business of celebrities. As is the case today, back in the 60s everyone wanted to become a celebrity. Although not perhaps with such burning ambition. The difference between then and now is that then to you used to have to work hard if you wanted to become a celebrity, and were prepared to work hard. Nowadays everyone wants to be a celebrity without doing anything in order to become a celebrity. What’s more, many of these star struck nonentities do become celebrities. The first of course was Jade Goody, now dead, bless her, who became famous for being thick, on the programme Big Brother. Many, many more, no less lacking in the grey matter department, have since followed in her footsteps, on ‘reality’ programmes such as The Only Way is Essex and Made in Chelsea and their like. (Although if it is reality they are portraying it is a reality I have never come across.) And what of all the role models today? When I was young there was no such thing as a role model. If you wanted to grow up to become somebody half decent you had to behave yourself and treat others as you would expect to be treated yourself. Now there are more role models than you can shake a stick at. Mostly they consist of the aforementioned celebrities, along with rock stars, footballers, film stars, et al. However, if you are looking for a good role model to follow nowadays, someone who will help you in your quest to becoming a valued, upstanding member of the public, the very best you can do is look at how an average politician conducts their life. And do precisely the opposite.

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