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Strange new and remembered times

For those readers who may have missed it – particularly female ones – I begin my post today by providing a link to a piece by Meghan Daum that appears today upon the website of The Guardian in case it may be of interest.

It is a thought-provoking opinion piece from the perspective of a middle-aged woman who feels slightly disconnected from some of today’s “right on” younger feminists.

See here – THE GUARDIAN

As it happens, one otherwise unremarkable sentence in Ms Daum’s article in particular attracted my attention:

I once read that there’s scientific proof of a correlation between increased nostalgia and creeping senility.

Now. I don’t have the slightest idea as to which research by which august academic body or institute she is referring to, but it occurred to me that even if this statement isn’t strictly true and/or corroborated by other similar research results from around the globe, the very thought is one that Rusters everywhere ought to bear in mind (and perhaps guard against?) as the modern world flashes by.

It seems to me there’s a small difference in consciousness between ‘being stuck in a rose-tinted past’ and recoiling in something like justified horror at the hectic pace of 21st Century social and technological development which seems to come with an inherent underlying assumption (that either all change is good and/or, even if it isn’t, there’s nothing that anyone can do about it) that is logically flawed, but that gap is where many of us beyond a certain age live out our uneasy existence.

It’s that strange balance between being ‘alert and alive to the new’ (at least such of it as seems sensible and undeniably positive) and the sensible approach of filtering out and/or ignoring the ‘rubbish’ – albeit hopefully without boring anyone with our tales of the past and thereby either genuinely exhibiting signs of senility and/or being perceived to be doing so!

My second text of the day relates to reports that for his latest tour Rod Stewart has decided to drop certain of the ‘inappropriate in 2019’ greatest hits in his repertoire.

I have to be honest and admit that this extraordinarily important ‘breaking news’ had entirely escaped my attention until I came across a debate upon the subject between novelist Emily Hill and tyro journalist Julie Burchill:

See here, as features today upon the website of the – DAILY MAIL

Being of the vintage I am – and therefore being in the eyes of some perhaps a past-it old dinosaur – I am resolutely in the camp that regards Rod The Mod’s PC-virtue-signalling decision as not only unfortunate but completely misguided.

Going back – yes, into the mists of time and the halcyon days of my youth – innuendo and suggestion were ever-present and accepted by everyone as a perfectly normal part of life.

(This was long before the days of #MeToo and Millennial snowflakes, of course).

Back then nobody took offence or paid a great deal of attention to it (to all intents and purposes it was regarded as “just a bit of fun”) and – as the Carry On films and The Benny Hill Show amply demonstrated – rightly or wrongly we Brits may have been generally regarded as buttoned-up and stilted by nature, but we certainly weren’t averse to a bit of sauce now and again.

Never mind Hot Legs and similar ditties from the oeuvre of Rod Stewart – or to give but four other examples from yesteryear: Come Outside, the Number 1 hit by Mike Sarne with interjections by Wendy Richards, You Really Got Me (1964) by The Kinks, Sonny Boy Williamson’s Good Morning, Little Schoolgirl (first recorded in 1937) – a hit for The Yardbirds in the 1960s – and Marilyn Monroe’s version of I Wanna Be Loved By You (from Billy Wilder’s classic 1959 movie Some Like It Hot, originally composed by Herbert Stothart and Harry Ruby – lyrics by Bert Kalmar – for the 1928 musical Good Boy) – neither sex (and there were only two in those days!) saw anything untoward in such offerings.

In fact, I’d go further than that.

Let’s take the all-time classic Beatles (Lennon-McCartney) number I Saw Her Standing There which first appeared on their debut Please Please Me album of 1963 although Paul McCartney had originally completed the basics of the tune the year before.

Those old enough will recall that this rocker opens with McCartney bellowing “One, Two, Three, Four! …” and goes straight into the line:

Well she was just seventeen

You know what I mean

And the way she looked was way beyond compare …

I don’t doubt for a minute that at the time this bragging ‘one of the boys’ celebratory statement immediately – literally as well as figuratively – ‘struck a chord’ with every red-blooded young male that heard it.

But – take it from me – it also resonated with every young teenage girl, irrespective of whether she happened to be the age in question, or up to five years either side.

I know this because at the time I was one (albeit, to be wholly accurate, four years shy of that milestone).

Everyone in my class at school knew exactly what Paul was referring to – and those of us still years younger than the object of his desire were imagining ourselves on our seventeenth birthdays and/or cursing the length of time it would be before we reached them.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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About Jane Shillingford

Jane spent the bulk of her career working on women’s magazines. Now retired and living on the south coast, she has no regrets and 'would do it all again'. More Posts