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June 11, 2005

Kids These Days

Kids these days. They think they have it made. DVD’s, iPOD’s and Barney. In my day it was videotapes, Walkman and Sesame Street. I was an early eighties child in a simpler time. Back then we played Nintendo. We were happy with 8-bits. Blissfully lost in playing Super Mario for hours because if Bowser caught you back then, you’d have to start the whole game over again. Not like nowadays. Nowadays the kids can save their progress in a game. Sure that’s practically cheating. We had none of that back in ’83. You’d sit on the floor; two inches away from the TV set and battle the forces of evil until your hands bled from the rectangular joypad. We didn’t have curves back then.

Then there were the trees. You don’t get trees like we had em’ back then. By God, I could climb a tree like a monkey and still have no regard for the health and safety regulations from the Ministry of Tree Climbing. We’d build our own tree houses out of some old wooden planks and a few rusty nails. Nowadays they have interior tree designers who’ll give you a quote based on the size and type of tree you have in your garden. I mean, honestly. How are they ever going to be ready to face the big bad world if they’ve never even fallen out of a tree? That’s an integral part of every childhood.

And then there’s the skateboards. Way back when, we only used skateboards to sit on while someone pushed you down the road. We didn’t have any fancy stunts or tricks to show off. The best way of showing off on a skateboard back then was doing a Hollywood style leap off the thing before you went head long into an oncoming car. We didn’t even know there were people in the world that made a living out of it. Back then MTV showed music videos. It wasn’t the Jackass/Viva la Bam skater show marathons that we see now. Don’t even get me started on the clothes. Kids these days are too bloody fashionable. Back in my day, you’d be happy just to have a pair of LA Gear let alone a whole wardrobe of expensive clothes. St. Bernard was the brand back then. Try telling that to kids these days. They want to look identical to they’re favourite singer. It’s all about celebrity these days. Weren’t always like that you know. Back in my day, the closest to a celebrity we had was Ray D’arcy and you sure as Hell didn’t want his wardrobe.

Didn’t have mobile phones back then either and anyone that did had to carry a generator the size of a small goat around with them just to keep the battery going. These days every kid has to have the latest picture phone to text each other with. Back in my day, we had alternative communication methods. Two soup tins with a piece of twine connecting them so you could have a conversation with your friend around the corner. We had good old-fashioned lemon juice. You could write a message with it that would be invisible until you put in the oven for a few minutes. Then there’s the Internet. We didn’t have the information-super-highway back then. In those days if you were going to be kidnapped it was going to be by a man in a car offering you sweets not online in a chat-room. The Internet, indeed. Windows 95 was the thing to have back then. My entire childhood soundtrack was in mono. Try telling that to kids these days. We didn’t have time to be fashion conscious or surf the Net. We were too busy falling out of trees.

Trains, Buses & Automobiles by Liam Geraghty appears every week in the Kildare Nationalist.

Posted by LiamG at June 11, 2005 10:51 PM