Don't give me the good old days

4:43pm Friday 20th April 2007

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I AM one of the biggest moaners in Bucks - and justifiably so. But even I don't subscribe to the daft myth that things were better in the "good old days".

In fact, I am sick of hearing the refrain.

No offence, but the world wasn't actually any better. It's a distortion caused by too many people looking through rose-tinted spectacles.

This came home to me a couple of times recently.

Firstly, I was visiting the excellent Wycombe Museum (it's free - I bet you didn't get that in yesteryear).

One entertaining display rammed home the fact that, just over 100 years ago, raw household sewage was pumped directly into the River Thames. The fumes were so awful, they could barely breathe in the House of Commons.

People got sick and died, and it was generally pretty disgusting.

In those days, most people couldn't afford to go to schools. Widespread state education is surprisingly a relatively new phenomenon - barely 100 years old.

Life was cruel, often short and pretty depressing.

But, I hear you cry, it was better in the 20th century, wasn't it? People could leave their doors open without fear of having their homes burgled and you could walk down the street without fear of being attacked.

Er, actually, no you couldn't.

I was enthralled to read a piece in our sister paper Midweek entitled "Life on Marsh".

It was written by reporter Neil Phillips and was themed on the hit TV series Life on Mars in which a policeman goes back in time to 1973.

We sent Neil back to Wycombe Marsh in 1973 (via the archives) and based a double-page spread around what he found.

The most interesting thing for me was the rampant youth yobbery in High Wycombe. Traders at the Octagon Centre were up in arms at the hooliganism long before ASBOs were invented. Shopkeepers formed a group to stamp out the completely uncontrollable behaviour of teenagers. This included drunkenness, drug-taking, shop-lifting criminal damage and threats to shoppers.

Other crimes in Wycombe at the time included an old lady having her bag snatched.

I can't believe the swinging 1960s were a lot different because it was the age of liberation when everyone began to cut loose.

Now I'm sure you'll say the 1950s were better, but wasn't that the time of rationing? Meanwhile, there was the war in the 1940s. And before that, there was the Great Depression. And before that the Great War and before that the stinky Victorians.

Maybe the crusades were the good old days, then.

Or maybe we can hark back to the cave dwellers.

Or maybe there wasn't really ever any better days, and in fact the Bucks we have now is still a much better place to live despite all its obvious faults.

We live in an age where values have disappeared, where healthcare and education are failing too many people.

But, thanks to modern-day technology and sanitation, I'd still prefer to live now than at any time during history.