I remember long walks with my nan, with her telling me all manner of things about her childhood, from the time I was about 7. I was amazed at all the changes that had happened in her lifetime. She had been born in 1908, so had grown up and seen the suffragettes win the vote for women, Alcock and Brown's first transatlantic flight in 1919, the first and second world wars, the introduction of tv, and the transformation from horse-drawn to motor vehicles ... and this was only up to the 1960s.
Now, aged 63, I find myself in a similar boat of looking back, and seeing all the changes in my own lifetime, good and bad.
The flickering images on black and white tv (2 channels to begin with) that expanded to colour, and 4 channels, and now (courtesy of Android boxes, cable and satellite) hundreds of channels from all over the world. Among those 1960s images, news programs showing Yuri Gagarin's first manned space trip, Valentine Tereschkova, the first woman in space, and then Neil Armstrong, in 1969, taking those first steps on the moon. Amazing. In MY lifetime.
It amazes me that there is now more memory on a smartphone than there was in a huge room full of computers that sent those first astronauts into space.
Around the age of 11, I had a "tranny" (a transistor radio) that I listened to "pop music" on ... and we had a radiogram in the house that played recors at 3 speeds - 33 rpm, 45 rpm and 78 rpm for the "oldies". Only a few years later we had 8 tracks and cassette tapes, soon replaced within a decade, by compact discs, which are now (in themselves) obsolete with the advent of i-tunes and downloadable digital media.
I can remember reel-to-reel projectors that showed home movies, and then the Beta and VHS vcr tapes ... now long gone and replaced by DVDs and (again) downloadable digital media.
I grew up with lots of heroes, real people who had done extraordinary things, not like today where it seems the only people feted are actors, musicians or sports players.
People like Albert Schweitzer, who opened a hospital in Africa which still serves the local area and has one of the lowest child mortality rates for malaria there; Gladys Aylward who helped stop the process of foot binding on female children, in China, and led 100 to safety when the Japanese invaded in 1940; Dr Martin Luther King Jr and Rosa Parks, who helped change America during the civil rights era; Yuri Gagarin and Valentina Tereschkova, and the many American astronauts who took part in the Mercury, Gemini, Apollo and the Shuttle flights; Edith Cavell a nurse during WW1 who helped smuggle injured British and Allied soldiers to neutral Holland and who was executed by the Germans for it (there was a school near my nan's in Hackney, named for her, and local people were very proud of her) and Violette Szabo, a heroine in WWII, who was executed in Ravensbruck concentration camp; Jane Goodall, Dian Fossey and Birute Galdikas were also among so many people that I admired, as I was growing up. Jane Goodall is still alive and pursuing her dreams, an amazing lady.
I consider myself blessed to have grown up in the era that I did.
