Where did the last half century and a bit go?

May 1966

I will soon have reached that age when I can go to the post office and collect my State pension which of course is that bitter sweet confirmation that I am officially an old man.

I have lived through two centuries, was almost there for the birth of the National Health Service, trembled at the awful implications of the Cuban Missile Crisis, marched against the Vietnam War and felt a little of my world had been lost at the news that Otis Redding had died.

But the immediate trigger for this bout of reflection was nothing more significant than the powerful fragrance of some flowers I passed this morning which transported me back to those long childhood summers when the sun always shone and each morning offered up new possibilities of adventures.

For a full minute I was back in the big garden that my grandparents retired to with its ornamental pools, the carriage shed and hay loft and big open field beyond.

March 1954

It was August 1958 and I was nine years old and like many summers during my childhood I was spending the holiday with my grandparents in the tiny village of Chellaston.

We didn’t have a television, there were none of my friends to play with but that month walking the country lanes, catching the humming of the telegraph wires and the odd bird song were magic.

Now of course none of that is unique to me, all of us will have memories as powerful, some good, some not so good but reaching “that age” does mean they can crowd in on you.

This bout of reflection is inevitable and will come and go with varying degrees of intensity mixed with the knowledge that there are fewer years ahead of me than behind.

September 1970

And everyone who looks back on the six or seven decades they have been around will perhaps reflect that in their life there was the most profound set of changes.

So had you been born during the last years of the long wars with Revolutionary and Napoleonic France you would have seen Britain transformed by the Industrial Revolution, entered middle age as the country acquired an empire and still have had a few years left to be able to sample gramophone records, make a telephone call and see a flying machine.

And some people experienced even more.

My uncle George was born in 1899, lived through the entire 20th century and died in 2001.

Sometime in 1960

He was given a present to mark  the passing of the old Queen in 1901, celebrated Empire Day, fought in the Great War and remembered when  he saw his first aeroplane.

And during that long life he mastered the telephone, bought an early wireless, enjoyed the first "talkies" and while he had little time for television wanted a computer.

The Nokia 3310, 2000

Against which I can advance the mobile. This when I was growing up  was still in the realms of science fiction.

And yet today we use that tiny hand held device not only to speak to friends and family but also to check the weather, make a hotel reservation and send an image of Manchester halfway across the globe.

And yet we remain blind to the history we are losing be it photographs, buildings or people’s memories.

I still have a very real soft spot for my first mobile but it is now as ancient and outdated as the telegram, the Model T Ford or the fountain pen.

It has long since been lost, and while it only allowed you to speak and text it did have a battery which didn't die by midday and played snake.

Now that was something worth preserving.

So I guess I know how I want to spend the time after collecting the pension and I hope others will help me by continuing to send me their pictures, their stories and contribute their own little bit of the story of this and the last century.

And the places are all there from Well Hall and Eltham to Chorlton, Manchester, Salford, Ashton-Under-Lyne, Stretford and Stockport.

And while I am at it I will just throw in Newcastle-Upon-Tyne, Sunderland and big chunks of Canada which of course pretty much gives away the family history.  I doubt however whether Naples, Varese and Cologne will surface .......... well not yet any way.

Pictures; Albert Square and the Town Hall, 1960, courtesy of Sally Dervan and the rest from the collection of Andrew Simpson