Robert McNeil: Back to the 50s… you've never had it so funny

Published on Monday 10 August 2009 20:44

HOW I laughed to read that, in the 1950s, citizens used to chuckle three times as much as they do now. Oh, the halcyon Fifties, when a black-and-white sun clearly delineated light from shadow. Now, everything is in colour. Everything is grey.

We shouldn't get rosy-eyeballed aboot this. Ancient accounts often speak of the pain experienced by sensitive men on witnessing the grim countenances of their fellows. But the problem, I believe, is worse now than ever. You see it in the streets, or if you watch passing drivers in their cars. Many are grim to the point of looking malevolent.

Three groups of people must take the blame for this: the churches, the courts and the Royal Mail. One of the reasons people look grim now is that they are basically evil. Put another way, they are not good. They do not know what good is.

The churches used to have some idea and explained it to everyone every Sunday but, ultimately, as we became more intelligent and disillusioned, we deplored dumb talk of a deity that clearly did not exist or, if he did, should be had up for war crimes. So, folk stopped going to Sunday service. Today, the average church is a cod-Gothic, musty-smelling chamber of stale air, in which dilapidated organs lead dour hymns droned out by elderly people fearing death. It's all so Victorian the faithful might as well wear top hats and dodge steaming piles of horse manure on the pavements outside.

Today, we depend for our moral instruction on the printed words of New Age authors encountered on Amazon or, for those still thirled to real life, at Bordersor Waterstone's. And that's only those of us who care. Most persons nowadays do not give a primate's. Lack of ethics means people just look out for number one. Many times, well-meaning friends have advised me to do this when I've been taking on evil, single-handedly as usual. Few people have nice thoughts of anyone beyond their own families. That's one reason why the citizenry is so grim and, indeed, aggressive.

Another is that they pick up their papers to read about paedophiles going free and minor fine-defaulters being jailed by the courts. Then they read unbelievable accounts of the awful Royal Mail dressing up old-fashioned job cuts as "modernisation". This in a year when it doubled its profits to 321 million.

Look at your postie these days, drenched in sweat and faintly panic-stricken as he trots round ever-lengthening routes, many with locked tenement front doors, as the seconds allotted for the job by some stopwatch-sucking desk-jockey tick by. Young persons won't even remember when the cheery postman was a given. Often, your postie even whistled. They'd time for everyone. They worked hard, up at 4:30 six mornings a week, but they were doing a valuable job and were well respected for it. Now they're being worked to death, and the service has got worse. This is called progress. And it frightens us, particularly when a recession exposes the chaos lurking just beneath the surface of the modern economy.

So, it's no wonder modern man and burd is grim. Times were harder in the 1950s. You couldn't have a curry delivered, alcohol was expensive and sexual intercourse was forbidden outwith the festive season. On the other hand, few people suffered the stress of a foreign holiday, there were no grim-faced cyclists or joggers, and you didn't have the agony of choice on the television.

We can recreate the 1950s, if we put our minds to it. Come on, everyone. Shut your eyes tightly. Men slick back your hair, women see yourselves in pretty frocks. Let's all enjoy milk-shakes and scan the skies for wobbly flying saucers on string. They don't frighten us. Sir Harold Macmillan and Sir Anthony Eden will know what to do. Soon, we will never have had it so good. Then it will be time to call a halt and go back, once more, in a neverending loop, to the days when times were hard, and people chuckled three times as much as they do now.

Sunbathe? Get a second life

NOW they're telling us to go outside and stand in the sun or we'll die of vitamin D deficiency. Honestly, we don't know whether we're coming or going. Last year, I seem to remember, they also started telling us we had to plaster ourselves in sunscreen, and not rub it in, or it wouldnae work. Estimated number of citizens disporting themselves thus in public: nil.

We can't walk aboot with our coupons all covered in cream. It's bad enough looking Scottish as it is – freezing cold in winter through our thin, peelie-wallie epidermis, burning up in summer like weeds before a furnace – without covering ourselves up any more. What's the point of slapping on sunscreen when you've already got a bag over your head?

Anyone remember the Morlocks in the first film version of The Time Machine by that HG Wells? They lived underground, shunning the sun, and only came up occasionally to eat the beautiful, blond people with the honey-coloured skin. The film depicted the horrible sun-shunners wearing kilts.

Why does the non-existent Lord hate us so? Why must we shun the sun, giver of life and beauty? And why, when we shun the sun, do we get rickets? Let's face it, if you were in Sidpai Bardo, the Buddhist limbo, and some bald git in a saffron robe was laying out brochures depicting places in which you might reincarnate, you wouldn't choose this rain-sodden, bigot-infested, politically craven dump, would you? Oh, you would? Aye, so would ah.