Golden Years

It was probably AI, but the point holds true.

I saw a video on Facebook the other day. An older lady explaining how these are your Golden Years.

“You still have your health, loved ones are still around, the dog still lay at your feet”.

I’m seeing a lot of AI recreations of the past at the moment, in the various social media feeds. They usually have a tag line Christmas 1995, or 1967 or something. And what these videos aim to capture is the mundane everyday awesomeness of the past.

We’d all love to go back twenty years, thirty years, forty years, to revisit just one absolutely ordinary day. See our parents again, full of life, our siblings, our forever friends before they drifted on toward pastures greener. To see the dog and hear him bark at the neighbour. To hear the old phone ring, the gate at the bottom of the garden creak open and slam shut.

The point that we keep missing though, is that this is our twenty year ago now, right now, this ordinary moment is one that we will in future years look back on with longing.

And worse than that, our memories of today will be recalled as “nothing happened” because of the time consumed by social media. None of us will lay on death beds lamenting how little time we spent on twitter. This is a warning, a call to sanity.

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Wheel Flats

It occurred to me the other day that we don’t hear wheel flats anymore.

Wheel flats are a train thing. When there is uneven wear on the steal wheel, they hit the track like a hammer with every rotation. Wheel flats causes track damage and has led to some horrific rail disasters in the past. So they are monitored, and fixed.

I spend a lot of time on the railways, travelling here and there, and it occurred to me that this sound is absent.

The thought of it took me back down the through the decades, back to when I would stand at the station, watching the slow coal train chug past. The stench of diesel fresh in the air and its thick black exhaust following the sound of the engine receding in to the distance, but there was still the squeak and clatter and squeel of the 36 coal hoppers slowly following the locomotive up the gentle incline. Standing out from the typical sounds was that low thud of the wheel flat. You would hear it coming, you would hear it pass, and you would hear it miles in to the distance, its frequency increasing with the speed of the train, long after the flashing red tail light had vanished in to the dim evening haze.

And then you’d go home. And tea would be made for your by your mother, a plate of chips, deep fried in lard of course, home cut, served maybe with sausages, the type that were thirty percent gristle, but it didn’t matter. Lashings and lashings of salt and vinegar more than made up for it. The best thing in the world. The most ordinary thing in the world, now marooned, out of reach, in the Golden Years.

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A Lovely Evening

Beer o’clock came in after midnight, and I could have been really grumpy about it, but I wasn’t, though I was getting a little stressed at times.

It was supposed to be an evening of me and the lass going to see the Spooky Men’s Choir, but the youngest son’s return date/time was announced after we booked tickets, so the oldest went in my place.

The show was expected to end at about nine pm, though I have no idea where that time was plucked from, while the youngest was due back from France at half eight.

Any way. It was going to be tight, but I was optimistic about the plan to drop them off at seven in Kendal for the show, drive to Kirby Lonsdale, watch YouTube in the car while waiting for up to about an hour, no biggy, and then return to pick up at the Taxi Rank in Kendal.

After dropping off my first born and his mom, I then got the message that the coach was delayed until ten pm, so I went home and ate half a roast chicken, dipped in hot sauce. I have an undocumented Hot Sauce problem, but thats another story.

So it was then back to Kendal for nine pm. The show was still going after 21:40, and messages were unhelpful, so I had no choice but to back to the school, 30 minutes away, where I got the message that it would now be eleven. I also saw that the show had ended and they were ready to be collected. So I had to weigh up if I now had time to get back to Kendal with time to return to the school.

I decided that it wouldn’t hurt if the wife and boy waited in the pub for an hour or so.

By now it was proper dark, and chucking it down. I took a photo from the carpark. Lots of cars. In the dark. Engines running. Headlights on.

Checking the maps I saw that the M6 was shut near Lancaster,  it is often shut near Lancaster, so I asked my youngest son to send a screen shot of his map.

I would have had time to return to kendal after all, if I’d know sooner. He finally arrived at 23.15 with stories of high adventure in a French chateau, bomb site, chocolate factory, market, beach, etc, and we went to pick up the rest of us at the taxi rank in Kendal, after being kicked out of the pub in to the rain with anecdotes of comical outrage from an under sized angry alcoholic, or something, and packets of dry roasted peanuts, that I can’t eat, but thats another story.

Its a lot like driving through the Postman Pat set, are the roads of Cumbria, during the day. At night, in the rain, and stuck amidst the somewhat impatient arses that are the typical Cumbrian drivers, that have been waiting hours to collect their own child, it is something else entirely.

Not proud to report that I almost caused an accident where I approached a roundabout all wrong because I had forgotten it was there, thinking it was the main M6 junction roundabout, and not the little one just next to it. It is dangerous to drive by assumptions on a familiar road in the dark and wet, but so easily done. Scary, but luckily I drive over cautiously anyway.

We finally arrived home after midnight, where a beer was waiting for me. In the years that come, God willing, I will look back on this as a really lovely evening.