In my day... people kept themselves to themselves

Decorum. Not a word you hear a lot of these days. You hear just about every other word in the dictionary, mind you. And many that are far too rude to be included. All at a volume that makes Brian Blessed sound like the world champion whisperer.


Sit in any cafe or bar, in the glorious days of yore, and you could while away many a long hour musing on what was going on inside your fellow imbibers’ heads.


Was the bloke with the moustache thinking about potting his petunias, or plotting to put Penelope behind the bar in a compromising position? Was the lady in the twin-set and pearls wondering when her secret lover would arrive, or wondering whether the bloke with the moustache might tickle her fancy?

Was the big bloke in the corner an out of work all-in wrestler, or sitting there grappling with his urge to wear chiffon and high heels and have his best friends call him Shirley?

We never knew...

But it was an innocently entertaining game, that could be played anywhere – on buses and trains, or while promenading down the pavement on your morning constitutional.

The world was your oyster, and full of mystery.

Now there’s no amusement to be had in a muse – because everyone seems to be gripped by an uncontrollable urge to divulge every sordid little detail of their (no longer) private life.

Just what is it about mobile phones that makes everyone else in the room suddenly disappear?

Listen....

I don’t want to know where the doctor put his finger when you had your medical. Or whether you enjoyed it. And I definitely don’t want to know if your friend takes up your generous suggestion to re-create the procedure later (I just hope he’s qualified). So please, next time, either settle for sending a text, or get a different bus.

I’m not interested in how much Columbian marching powder you need delivering for the weekend (though I might be if worked for Mr. Peel’s finest, which might be worth bearing in mind). And I don’t want to know how far Terry tried to go with Tracy at Tammy’s party (or whether the slag, as your best friend now seems to be affectionately known, let him).

I don’t want to know how much you need to borrow. Or what you’re having for dinner. Or what time you went to bed. Or with whom. I’m not in the slightest bit impressed by how much you earn. And I don’t want to wade through the sea of names you’ve just dropped when I leave the premises. I don’t care what time the getaway driver is supposed to turn up. And I don’t want to know how much you owe the revenue (even if that’s why you need to do the bank job). I don’t care how much you want to shag your wife’s sister (unless we’re related. God forbid). I don’t care if you’re pretending to be at a meeting so you can stay in the pub with Mary from accounts (who’s just told her best mate Sandy, by the way, while you were on the blower, that she’s stuck with an arsehole from the office and will try and get away by nine). And I don’t give a toss if Pete’s ‘disrespected you’ or what you’re going to do to him when you find him (though I must admit you’re ability to use ‘fuck’ as a verb, adverb, adjective and noun is fairly impressive). You clever little fucker.

I really, really don’t want to know any of this. At all. Because it’s none of my business.

I’ve got enough things of my own to worry about, thank you. Like when I’m ever going to find a bit of peace and quiet.

Oh for a return to polite society. When personal details stayed that way. When people understood that there was a proper time and place for everything.

And when people could spot the difference between ‘telephone’ and ‘megaphone’.

In my day... all you needed was a quiet day in bed.

We all get a touch of the vapours every now and again.

A day when everything goes just a little bit wobbly. When the rat race seems like a marathon too far, and you realise that you haven't got the stamina of an Ethiopian.

When you gingerly (or blondly, or brunettely, or mousily, or baldly) half open an eye then clamp it back shut at the sheer horror of it all.

When the thought of having to mix, one more time, with the mass of paranoid humanity that lurks outside your front door fills you with unbearable nausea and the nagging feeling that venturing into the world today will surely end in tears. Probably with your name in the headlines. And possibly a lengthy jail sentence.

When life, frankly, just seems too bloody difficult.

You're not actually ill, of course. You don't need a doctor, or a therapist, or an emergency reiki practitioner. And it's not finally time to do the decent thing and press the trusty service revolver in the desk drawer into action.

You just need a rest. A bit of a lie down. Some nice peace and quiet.

Some bloody chance.

If you haven't been kept awake all night by copulating urban foxes doing their spookily accurate impression of a small child being tortured, or jolted into twitching consciousness by next door's departing dinner guests playing Colonel Bogey on their car horn as they prepare to wend their Blue Nun enlivened way home, you've got it all to come.

Believe me.

I don't mind birds, really I don't. But in the old days I'm sure they whistled tunes. Now all they seem to do is impressions of mobile phones. 'Listen! I think I just heard the first Nokia of spring…or is it an early summer Samsung?' The same four notes over and over, and over again, without the merciful release of a message service kicking in to shut the irritating sod up. And once a tiding of magpies gets going you'd swear there were terrorists on your roof top unleashing round after round from their AK 47s. I wish I had one.

And postmen now moonlight as skip delivery drivers. I know this, because they patently deliver their skips before they start their day (or shall we say morning) jobs

The sound of a ton of rusty iron being dropped onto concrete from six feet at six in the morning takes some beating as an alarm call. You can't exactly ignore it. Before you realize it you've leaped out of bed, hidden the wife and kids under the stairs and painted the windows white, fearing another Hiroshima.

And paper boys need oiling. They never used to squeak. But that was before papers came with 17 different sections and the poor sods had to resort to industrial trolleys to avoid forever walking like the hunchback of Notre dame.

And maybe I've led a sheltered life, but though there are lots of things I've contemplated doing at seven in the morning (they can't arrest you for contemplation yet, can they? Can they?) erecting a shed isn't one of them. Surely you have to build up to that sort of thing. Have a bit of breakfast. And a cup of tea. Do some sketches and calculations on the back of an envelope. Hang around a DIY shop rubbing your chin and wielding an extendable tape measure. Have another cup of tea.

You certainly don't start hammering, willy nilly, at 7 in the morning.

Unless, of course you're trying to compete with the builders who have already started at half a dozen of the other houses in the street, knocking up loft extensions, conservatories and bloody garden pagodas, whilst having to bellow at each other in Polish to get above the din being created by the music played by the DJ on 'radio halfwit', who's inane twitterings are going to echo round your room for the next 8 hours.

Still, it's probably best that you're awake. Because your mobile's going to ping with texts from Nigerians looking for someone to help them bank their inheritance, and calls from people wanting to know if you're happy with your gas supplier.

As if anyone could ever be happy with a gas supplier.

The door bell will ring, and outside there'll be a man with a large, exciting looking package. But it won't be for you. It's always for the people 2 doors down that you've never met.

The postman will come about eleven and ask you to sign for a letter. That won't be for you either. And he won't apologise for the skip.

A bloke will come to check your meter. Ten minutes after you've been offered your third copy of 'Watchtower'. A small child wearing a homemade, mis-spelt 'official' laminated badge will call round to sell you dusters. School children will use your wall for football training, while their mates blabber incessantly on their mobiles. And a breakdown truck will stop right outside your house and flash orange disco lights in your bedroom for a good two hours.

A lorry will reverse down the entire length of your street time after time, bleeping like a heart monitor attached to a fading, spluttering patient.

The council, who haven't done any work in your street in living memory, will send someone round to lift the paving slabs in front of your house. Then put them back with a rubber lump hammer. While two blokes from a TV cable company holler at each other from either end of the street while they play tug-of-war with an unfeasibly long piece of green tubing.

Some greaseball will decide it's a good day to adjust the exhaust on his motorbike, and test drive it round the block. And everyone will blow their horns at him.

The kids will come home, go off in a sulk, slam their bedroom doors and belt out music that makes your teeth rattle to avoid the horrors of actual conversation with their parents.

And the wife will have a go at you for malingering.

Still, it beats working.

In my day...

.... you only found mobile discos at church halls.

Seven thirty, every other Saturday night, a beige ford estate car would pull into the church car park, laden with everything a hormone ridden adolescent needed to guarantee an evening of ecstasy.

Well, almost everything.

It contained two record decks, a pair of wood effect speakers, a string of flashing Christmas tree lights, a glitter ball, a slide projector that threw blurred images from a lava lamp onto the peeling wall paper, a cardboard box full of the very latest 45s, and a bloke with a pageboy haircut, red glasses, a waistcoat, a cravat and a string of plastic love beads, who at weekends disappeared into a red phone-box as Ron, the timid jobbing electrician, and emerged as 'Rocking Ronnie - the demon of the decks'.

All that was needed now was a gaggle of girls and a bottle of cider, purchased from the offy by the one kid in the class who could grow a moustache, and the world was your oyster. Or your Vesta boil-in-the-bag curry, at least.

It was something to look forward to.

And now the glamour has all gone. Because now you find mobile discos absolutely everywhere.

You simply can't avoid having your ears assaulted by the bloody things. Just walk past any one of our charming English traffic jams and you'll hear what I mean.

In fact, you don't even need to walk past one. Stick you head out of the window now and I'll guarantee that you'll get the message. Delivered at about four hundred decibels.

And it's not just rap boys in jacked up Ford escorts that are determined to announce their presence by attempting to rattle your eyeballs out of their sockets. Now every bastard's at it.

If you ever wondered what an unholy jam session between Pavarotti, Abba, Frank Sinatra, Motorhead, Puff Daddy, Dizzee Rascal and Glen Cambell would sound like, simply seek out your nearest traffic queue.

Actually, don't waste your energy on the walk. Simply turn your radio up full and spin the tuner randomly, while banging repeatedly with a lump hammer on a saucepan placed over your head and you'll get the idea.

Don't get me wrong - I like music. All sorts of music. I just don't want it thrust down my lugholes with such ferocity that I end up spitting out all of my fillings, drenched in boiling blood, before I get to the tube station.

And if it's that ear-splitting on the outside, what the hell must it be like on the inside? How do these people stay alive? Why don't their bones vibrate to dust and leave a lifeless sack of organs clamped beneath the seat belt?

And how on earth can you drive with all that racket going on? Come to think of it, I know the answer to that one. Like an arsehole.

The truth is, none of them are actually playing music for their own enjoyment. They're saying, 'Look at me!.... Look at me!' See my nice car… hear how hip I am, or how classy I am, or how different I am…

Well guess what? We don't care. We don't give a shit if you idolize the latest crack addict who's managed to rhyme whore with bedroom floor. We don't care if you can hum every bar of Beethoven's fifth sodding symphony. We don’t give a toss if you can religiously recite some indie idol's dismal sixth form poetry. We're not impressed that you stubbornly reject modern trends and cling hopelessly to your old Led Zeppelin records. And we'd rather that you saved your sing-along to the sound track of Mama Mia for your pink tiled bathroom (as long as you don't live next door).

We just want to walk the streets in peace, listening to the birds sing.

And no, I don't mean Girls-a-bloody-loud.

In my day...

...men could carry suitcases.

And not just carry them.

They could lump them up high onto roof-racks, man-handle them into luggage compartments, and hump them up endless flights of stairs. They could stagger, a bulging leather receptacle full of Typhoo tea and knitted bathing costumes clamped in each hand, up and down road after road of serried ranks of Bournemouth boarding houses, searching for the elusive 'vacancies' sign with nary a whimper.

They would trudge across miles of hot sticky tarmac at obscure Spanish airports (no namby-pamby courtesy buses in those days, thank-you) with the entire family's luggage and buckets and spades grasped in their sweaty palms, whistling the top-ten tune of the day with gay abandon.

Not a whinge. Not a moan. Because they were men. And carrying suitcases was what men did.

But that was then. Nowadays, the average bloke seems unable to carry even his tiny little wallet with him unless it has wheels. And a big, girly extendable handle.

You see them everywhere, trundling their pathetic designer cases behind them, splattered with the blood from a hundred innocent shins that have been assaulted blithely along the way.

They mince along with their faceless, square little dogs snapping obediently at their heels, unable to lift anything heavier than a mobile - and even that's usually clamped in a belt holster and 'blue-toothed' up so they can blather away at the top of their voices to apparently no-one, like an terrifying invasion of care in the community lunatics. With slavering dogs.

They take up double the space on tubes and trains, and mean you've usually missed your stop by the time you've clambered over them, like a sad, injured and crestfallen contestant on an urban version of 'It's-a-Knockout'.

And what about the noise? The cacophony created by a coach load of tourists' puny plastic wheels clattering over London's hap-hazard paving stones (specifically laid with at least a centimeter height difference between each, so we can all still enjoy the old-English custom of tittering behind our hands as unsuspecting punters are sent sprawling in headlong, gurning Norman Wisdom-esque fashion) is enough to make you hack your ears off with a discarded Starbucks' plastic spoon.

And that's if the cheap little wheels are mercifully intact. When they're down to the bare metal it's like listening to dozens of Edward Scissorhands grimly sliding down a Matterhorn sized blackboard. Or Joe Pasquale getting kicked repeatedly in the nuts.

So what are the heavyweight essentials that have to be carted around these days that have suddenly made the humble carrying handle sadly redundant?

Has everyone taken up power lifting? Are they all carrying their money around in big gold bars instead of putting it in banks? I doubt it.

Looking inside any one of these offensive articles and all you probably find is a half-eaten sandwich, a banana and a copy of the FT. Hidden inside 'Razzle'.

It's not big (often small enough to slip into a proper man-sized pocket). And it's certainly not clever.

The only people, in the good old days, that were allowed wheels and handles, were air hostesses. Which made life easy.

These days, if you stroll up to someone and casually enquire if they fancy joining the mile-high club it's likely to be an accountant from Bromley.

And sex with them, I believe, is banned by law at ground level, let alone 35,000 feet.

So come on lads, do everyone a favour.

And get a grip.

Photos from flickr, by malias and gobbo 1000