Isn’t it funny how we find something to complain about, no matter how things are? About three weeks ago I was out in my little back garden which is flanked by a footpath, quietly watering my tomato plants. It hadn’t rained for a while and I was obliged to use the hose: the water in my rainwater butt had run out. It was early in the day and the sun was obscured by a morning cloud.
I was feeling really rather pleased with the weather. The plants I have put in this year are all doing well, because the weather has been so good. As I watered, a voice floated over the fence to me. ‘We don’t get the summers we used to, do we?’.
I was truly stunned, not knowing how to respond. I mean, it’s not awfully polite to say, to a complete stranger, ‘What a load of bunk – the weather’s been beautiful!’ however much one might want to. On the other hand, agreeing was not an option. We are having a lovely summer. Well, my garden and I are having a lovely summer. The speaker on the footpath was, clearly, not.
I don’t agree, cannot agree, that things were better when I was a child. We didn’t have a fridge. Butter went rancid in days, milk had to be boiled to keep it from going off, we didn’t have television, and I lived in the sticks with little to do and no money to go anywhere. In winter we froze, living in a house heated with one fire in the main room. We had a rug on the floor -no wall-to-wall carpeting for us. We were not poor or living in dreadful circumstances. It was just how it was.
I remember it raining a lot in the Summer. It seemed to rain every time I got into the sea. I learned to swim in the rain. I think that I may have thought that was the way life went: you swam, it rained. I don’t hanker after the good old days. They were not particularly good. I think now is wonderful. Everything is so exciting and the technical revolution amazes me daily .
I remember, all too clearly, what it was not to have the Internet, to have to write every piece of work in longhand. When I worked on pieces of music it took forever by hand. Now there is music software that responds to my every wish and whim. If I want information I do not have to take the twenty minute walk to the library. It is there, on my laptop. I am careful not to look everything up in Wikipedia, and prefer to get at least two takes on any question, but it is all there.
So when confronted by people, often people my own age or older, bewailing the fact that society isn’t, or buses aren’t, or families aren’t . . . whatever, I maintain my cool, count to ten, very quietly and try hard not to forget my manners. After all, just as beauty is in the eye of the beholder, so is a summer’s day, I suppose. It depends on which way you are facing, and on which side of the bed you got out of. The side I leave by leaves me cheerful. Aren’t I lucky?
Dianna Moylan (editorial team)
Tags: cheerfulness, good manners, optimism, technological revolution
