The day I got old
Saturday afternoons in 1975-1976 used to be spent sat in the corner of a cafe in Torquay. How it made much money was a mystery, it was never full and seemed content to allow the three of us to sit for an hour at the corner table with our 5p cups of coffee. There was a gaming machine next to the table, still referred to as a one-armed bandit in those days, and we would feed the odd 2p piece into it. Our stay in the cafe must have brought the owner a grand total of 25p, before we wandered down into the town to look at records we couldn’t afford in W H Smith’s. I was a rustic, but my two friends were from the Midlands, they came from big towns and knew far more of the world than I ever would.
By the summer of 1976 I was 15 going on 16 and wasn’t averse to the odd pint. Not really having acquired a taste for beer, I would drink a foul combination of lager and blackcurrant, a drink served in bars in the little town in Devon where we went for our holidays, a drink I had not seen before, and mercifully have not seen since. By the time I was 18, the taste in drink had got even worse, I would drink vodka and lime cordial.
Of course, at the time we thought all we did was the height of sophistication! Sitting in cafes over cups of coffee; drinking polluted lager while the locals drank their flat pints of bitter; throwing back miniscule quantities of green-coloured liquid; this was us being cool, or trying to be.
We hadn’t a clue.
Our children attend a school where most of the students are boarders, so once a month there is a long weekend. Today, our daughter, who is fourteen, went out with friends from the United States for the afternoon. Their outing was to a big shopping centre in south Dublin. It is not the sort of place where I would have coped, when you ask for a coffee now, they ask “what sort?” The only record shop I feel secure in now is in the city centre; far from the out of town malls.
“Had you a nice afternoon?” I asked at the evening meal.
“Yes”, she said. “We went to a sushi bar”.
She did try to explain how it worked, and how the plates were colour-coded, and how there were options that were not raw fish, but it was all too much.
I suddenly realized that the world and I had parted company.Oh for the days of 5p cups of coffee.
I wonder in 30 years time how she will remember the sushi bar.
Ian, Join the club!
There is plenty of room on the shelf beside me.
Did you ever try Cider and Vimto? equally hideous!