First, let me say that I did not write the following, I received it in an email last year from a close friend who has now passed into history. I don’t think he wrote it, but I wouldn’t be surprised if he had. I have modified it to suit my own particular situation.

I was contemplating writing a post about this very subject, then I remembered this email which states the way I feel so much better than I can. I don’t usually copy other peoples work and claim originality (well, perhaps just a little bit!), so if the originator of it comes forward I will give him/her credit.

“As I’ve aged, I’ve become kinder to myself, and less critical of myself, but more cynical of the way of the world is nowadays.

I’ve become my own best friend; in fact my only friend now. I don’t chide myself for eating that extra cake or biscuit, or for not making my bed, or for buying those gadgets that I didn’t need, but love to play with. I am entitled to a treat, to be messy, to be extravagant.

Whose business is it if I choose to play on the computer until 3am and sleep until noon? I will dance with myself to those wonderful tunes of the 50′s & 60′s, and if I, at the same time, I wish to weep over a lost love ….. I will.

I will walk along the beach in shorts that are stretched over a beer-belly, and will dive into the waves with abandon if I choose to, despite the pitying glances from the younger generations. They, too, will get old one day if they don’t drug and smoke themselves to death beforehand.

I know I am sometimes forgetful. But there again, some of life is just as well forgotten, and I eventually remember the important things.

Sure, over the years my heart has been broken. How can your heart not break when you lose a loved one, or when a child dies, or even when your beloved cat gets hit by a car? Broken hearts are what give us strength and understanding and compassion. A heart never broken is pristine and sterile and will never know the joy of being imperfect.

I am so blessed to have lived long enough to have my hair turning grey and eventually fall out, and to have my youthful laughs(?) forever etched into deep grooves on my face.

I have seen too many close friends leave this world too soon, before they understood the great freedom that comes with aging. So many of them have never laughed, and so many have died before their hair could turn silver.

As you get older, it is easier to be positive. You care less about what other people think. I don’t question myself any more. I’ve even earned the right to be wrong when it suits me.

I like being old. It has set me free. I like the person I have become. I am not going to live forever, but while I am still here, I will not waste time lamenting what could have been, or worrying about what will be. I shall eat crisps, chocolate and cakes, and drink beer and Pastis every single day”.

This is a follow up to my post on the same subject last year.

In 1947 I joined the ‘Wolf Cubs’ as they were known then. I was 10 at the time, so I was a bit late joining because after a year I went into the ‘Boy Scouts’ where I learned a lot about self respect and respect for others, discipline and how to survive in the wild, etc.

All our leaders and helpers were decent chaps and chappesses who wouldn’t dream of committing an offence against us or harming us in anyway. Nowadays we have the ‘Vetting and Barring Scheme’ composing of the ‘Criminal Records Bureau’ and the ‘Independent Safeguarding Authority’ , but more of that in a minute.

When I was 15 years old I became a Senior Scout. At 17 I went into the Army, and when I returned to civvy life I was an assistant scoutmaster and when the scoutmaster retired I was the skipper of our local troop.

Around 1965 the rot set in. The Scout Association began to relax the rules on the uniform, and proceeded to change everything over the years in the name of ‘progress’ until just before I retired the lads were allowed to wear everyday sweatshirts, jeans (ripped, and/or any colour they fancied) and trainers.

This meant that the discipline at the meetings went down the pan. They were cheeky, rude and wouldn’t pay any attention to me or anyone else. They didn’t seem to want to learn anything about survival, camping, and trekking etc., all they wanted to do was to sit in the scout hut and play computer games all evening. At this point I bowed out of active scouting and joined the Scout Fellowship, which is an organisation consisting mainly of old scouters and helpers who wanted to help out with the local scout troops.

A few years ago the ‘Vetting and Barring Scheme’ was set up because of pressure from the politically correct do-gooders who were concerned about the increase in paedophilia and child abuse at that time. This meant that the Scout Leaders, helpers, in fact anyone who was connected with the Scouts, Guides and youth groups had to be checked out to see if they had a murky past or not. This scheme also extended to the Scout Fellowship and I was told that I couldn’t work with children or vulnerable people anymore until I was checked out under the Vetting and Barring Scheme. As you can imagine this upset me quite a bit, not because I had anything to hide; I didn’t. I flatly refused to be checked by the faceless wonders in Whitehall who probably had murky past histories themselves. I resigned, as did quite a few of the volunteers and leaders I knew. The result was that there were not enough adults left to work with the kids and three local scout troops closed down.

One last word. If a person is scrutinised and found to be as white as the driven snow, and then allowed to work with children, what’s to stop him/her from going off the rails and molesting a child in the future? The Vetting and Barring Scheme is flawed from the start. Anyone with money, influence and a dubious past can probably get round it anyway.

I was looking through some old family photographs when I found one of my old grannie Henton. She was a great character and loved by all the family. She was born in 1889 and died in 1962. In fact I took the picture in 1962 only a few days before she collapsed and died.

She used to say and do the strangest things at times. Whenever she visited me, or any of the family, she would draw an imaginary line across the threshold with her cane before entering and say, “With this cane I draw the bound, all malice and bane I thus confound”. Her walking cane always had a fresh flowers or bunch of herbs tied to it.

One of her favourite sayings was:

“When I die, please do not cry,
For I will leave you riches,
A knife, a fork, a cabbage stalk
And a pair of mouldy breeches”

Another one was:

“Farting is such merrie fun,
It giveth great delight,
It cheers thee in the daytime,
And keeps thee warm at night”.

and :

“Where ‘ere thee be, let the wind go free,
For t’was the wind that killeth me”.

I can’t remember many more and I wish now that I had written them down at the time.

When we went to the farmhouse for a meal she would always recite this “grace” before we ate:

“We wish that all people everywhere will have food to eat, water to drink and friends to meet. May the spirit of the Gods be at this table and in the hearts of all those we know and love”.

We all missed her when she died because she kept all the family together and sorted out any differences that cropped up, as they do in a large family group from time to time. Now 50 years on what was a united family unit has gone, every one has drifted away because of silly arguments and other unpleasant situations. I have lost contact with cousins and their siblings, and even my own sister has become a stranger now.

My Gran lies in Twycross Church graveyard next to Grandad, three of my aunts, two uncles and a cousin who died young. Every year at this time I buy eight red roses and place one on each grave. All the graves are in a row under a big tree, and don’t have any headstones or memorial.

Perhaps it’s a good thing that Gran can’t see what has happened to the family she was so proud of once.

This video is one of my all time favourites.

I commented on a recent post from Zoe about her son, Todd, who seems to be a bit of a “tearaway” as my old Gran (silly old bat!) used to say when she described me in my teens as a “Teddy Boy”.

Then I got to thinking about those halcyon days when we didn’t have a care in the world. That is until the media attacked the Teddy Boy culture in 1953 following a murder from a ‘gang’ stabbing on Clapham Common and moral panic ensued condeming all teens dressed in the flamboyant Edwardian style. We were banned from dancehalls, restaurants, some cafes and cinemas if we dressed in our “gear”.


Teddy Boys were part of a continuum of male peacockery that descended from, among others, the London Spiv. Teddy Boy styles and attitudes spread from London to the rest of the country where they fused into regional variations like Tony Curtis haircuts, sideburns, drape jackets or drainpipe trousers. In general we were pretty harmless, although we did rebel against the authority of our parents, the police and anybody who had a go at us. All we wanted to do was “pull the birds” and have a good time hanging around “Banner’s Milk Bar” on a Saturday Night, and walking around the “Monkey Run”. (A local arcade in the town where boys met girls). The boys walked around in small groups anti-clockwise, and the girls in a clockwise direction and eventual paired off and disappeared in the local park for a bit of “snogging”!

In those days the pubs closed at 10:30pm and you had to be 21 and over, strictly enforced, before you could buy alcohol but our gang wasn’t interested in booze anyway. Drugs were rare, in fact I don’t think any of us ever tried them, I much preferred to have a Strawberry Mike Shake in the company of a nice girl! I still sometimes sneak into McDonalds for a sly milk-shake, but the company of a nice girl has long since eluded me.

Yes, we did go to Margate and Skegness on Bank Holidays and raise hell, but although there were a few scuffles with the “Mods” we didn’t go in for shooting and stabbing that seems to be so popular nowadays.