By Roy Hobbs
THIS country is a dangerous cesspit nowadays. You can barely walk down the street without something terrible happening. Not like it was in my youth, when Britain was a safer and better place.
When I was a lad we carried a knife with us at all times. There was no namby-pamby fussing that we might hurt ourselves, and we used them for whittling sticks, cutting fishing line and threatening kids from the next town. If you did accidentally slice your hand, you rubbed a dock leaf on it and crossed your fingers you didn’t get tetanus. Happy times.
Speed cameras weren’t invented. You could go as fast as you liked, because we didn’t have an authoritarian nanny state telling us how to drive our cars. Now I’m much more likely to crash because I have to keep looking at the speed limit signs all the time. OK, so the number of road deaths was around four times higher than it is now, but is that worse than not being allowed to choose how fast you go? Hard to say.
We didn’t have DNA testing either. No need. We were a tight knit bunch so everyone knew who the neighbourhood wrong ‘un was without fiddling around with science. If any kids went missing we’d all get together and attack the weird bloke on the street who wore glasses and lived with his mum. If we were wrong, no matter. He still deserved it for being a bit different. That’s what being part of a community is all about.
Anyway, the kids always turned up. They’d usually just been hanging around smoking super strength cigarettes, smashing bottles and climbing down wells at the derelict mill up the road. That’s how safe it was. It’s tragic that those halcyon days have gone for good.
