The times aren’t really changing . . .

A COUPLE of Sundays ago, something made me smile as I reflected that while things change, they somehow stay the same — an old universal human truth.

It happened when one of my grandsons (just turned nine) and my granddaughter (a few months younger) were moping and flouncing on the first warm, sunny day of the year (or so it seemed) and saying they were bored. Bored!

And all the family at our place, and a barbecue to look forward to, and ten acres to roam, and swings, etc. Lucky kids!

Like any wise grandmother, I keep quiet when a parent is in the room — but on cue my daughter went ballistic.

She berated them for being so spoilt, unimaginative and tedious — and told them that when she was their age she played outside endlessly with her friend next door, making dens, inventing games and so on.

In an instant, I remembered times I sniffily told my children they didn’t know they were born, having so much, living in a big house, etc — and that when I was a child we were content to play hopscotch on the pavement behind the flats until our mothers called over the balconies to say tea was ready.

And of course, in turn, my father lectured me about how people in the 1930s were poor but happy and made their own entertainment and felt grateful. No bad things happened then! I wonder if, in turn, Grandad told him of the camaraderie he felt heading off to France with his fellow soldiers in 1914.

It reminds me of that preMonty Python sketch The Four Yorkshiremen, in which four comedians, including John Cleese, vie with each other to tell ludicrous lies about deprivation — ‘We lived in a hole in the ground’, etc. Memory can work the other way too, deceiving us that life was perfect in comparison with today.

So on it goes, through the generations. Nostalgia makes utopians of us all, but it’s important to realise that maligned young people have yearnings we’d recognise.