Dreams into Nightmares.

Work is a gift we never appreciate until we retire. I left school at 15 and had one job after another until I was 30 years old when I started a business of my own. I worked every day of my life, apart from holidays. Most of the jobs I had when I was young were pretty boring and during my lunch hour I would walk the streets and vicinity dreaming of running away to sea and going to foreign climes. I had a recurring dream of arriving in New York on a liner like the Queen Mary and being astonished at my luck. Unlike today with cheap flights to everywhere ‘Abroad’ was quite unusual. The romance of dreams when one is young is that we believe they will be fulfilled. My personal dream was that I would be a famous writer, looking out over mountains and sea from a book filled study in a hill side cottage in Scotland.

Dreams in modern times by young people are, I should imagine, somewhat different. Celebrity rules the day and it seems that is what people want or need fed by thousands of articles, tv programmes and films that state that everyone should be beautiful, rich and famous and the readers, viewers and listeners are seduced into believing its all possible.

There isn’t the romance in travel now. Railway stations, Airports and seaports haven’t the appeal. Harassed by security, rushed from one check-in to another, thousands of fellow passengers milling about it is an ordeal to be missed rather than a pleasure. Whereas the journey with all the anticipation of going to a strange place with a warm climate, exotic food and different customs was so exciting it is now so ordinary, the travellers blase and looking bored and rather disdainful trying with their attitude to show they’re not impressed and have done it all before. It is no novelty and when arrival time finally comes the hotel is the same as any hotel round the world, the people watch the same programmes on tv and support football teams that are watched all over the globe and eat food common to all of us, we are all globalised and shaped into a lumpen mass of unexciting inhabitants in an ever shrinking world that is perilously close to disappearing soon and taking many millions of us with it, some would contend deservedly so.

If you’re retired you think about these things and reflect how awful it all is and wish that you had a job that kept you busy all day so that the terror of the world we live in can be swept away from your mind for a little while. The books I like to read reflect the world before the sixties. That was the world I was most comfortable in. There were trouble spots, there was starvation, there was the threat of the bomb and the iron curtain still fixed firmly into place but there was hope.

6.x.006.