A WINTER’S WAIL

I don’t like winter anymore. In times past, I rather savoured the opportunities to focus on the indoors: cinema visits, an hour of smugly worthy self-punishment in the local gym, curling up with a book in front of a fire, meeting mates in the pub, going to gigs, having friends to supper etc. But as Caitlin Moran angrily noted in last Saturday’s Times magazine, “13 years in to austerity, across Britain 1000 swimming pools have closed, 773 libraries, 750 youth clubs and 7,000 pubs.”

Whilst I was never much of a one for municipal swimming pools, these are obvious signs that living standards for most Brits have plummeted in recent years. And as I’m unable visit London so much anymore where at least diversions and socialising were plentiful, I’m finding the realities here in rural mid-Wales less than encouraging.

For example with my town councilor’s hat on I find myself helping to fight the funding withdrawal closure of our local Leisure Centre with its swimming pool, gym and indoor courts etc., and also the Day Centre which is a social care lifeline for many of the town’s elderly residents and the temporary-going-on permanent closure of a county council subsidised venue used for everything from the annual panto to farmer’s markets and the dwindling supply of books to our library which presages another round of closures, and the  further shrinking of bus services to larger, nearby towns which along with the long-gone youth club and cost of living crises have all cultivated an atmosphere of social malaise which at its extremes has burst into outbreaks of vandalism and the universal frowns on the faces people, especially older people, I see as I walk around town which seem to be tinged with a fear that wasn’t there even six months ago.

It’s hard to persuade friends to go to the pub anymore when the price of drinks has almost doubled since Covid, same goes for cinema tickets which involve a round trip drive of 50 miles to indulge in and there are far fewer rockaboogie gigs to go to… and by now you’ll have realised that I’m having a typical moan about my personal lot. But, I hear you say, or at least would like to, doesn’t the sainted Caitlin do exactly the same in her Times columns? Well yes she does but then she always manages to segue it into a dissertation on the common good, or the lack of it, and so I shall now try and do the same. And all of my aforegoing carping seems to me symptomatic of two things.

Firstly, the consequences of being a 70-something in a world that’s changed hugely from the one I was familiar with until, say, ten years ago, a world that admittedly steadily changed since the days when I myself was engaged in gleefully pushing the cultural, social and even political boundaries back in the ‘60s and ‘70s, but changed at a pace my own emotional, intellectual and physical development could understand and embrace. Digital technology hugely sped up the process of change, and the nature of change, and although we baby boomers generally tried our best to grasp and adapt to it, with very few exceptions that I personally know, we failed.

So if you’re a sentient human being of roughly my age, you probably find yourself regularly swearing at the instructions for a Bluetooth speaker, an infuriatingly unhelpful chatbot, an app your bank or your council parking bay obliges you to download, and the likes of TikTok and X are unwelcome anathema to you. So you indulge in the comfortable familiarity of newspapers and TV whilst vaguely aware that the former have become really expensive and less newsy as they decline in number and try desperately to migrate online, and the latter given over to celebrity fluff and films you’ve already seen ten times whilst perhaps flirting with slyly expensive streaming platforms. ‘Life’s too short to change now,’ you quietly but convincingly tell yourself and try and make the best of what you’re got and where you’re at in the digital pecking order.

Secondly, even professional commentators in their forties and fifties now note that uncertainty about life in general is becoming widespread and unnerving, and to paraphrase (I think) Stella Gibbons, it’s a fear that has no name. Worse still, it’s inclining our citizenry to extremism from the relatively mild but still unacceptable spitting at shop assistants and shouting at teachers to the Trumpish polarisation that incites mass civil disobedience bordering on violence, and with it the permanent breakdown of public order and the public services we’d long become used to.

Yep, that’s all a pretty gloomy prognosis for mankind and one that doesn’t even take into account climate change which only adds additional fuel to the allegorical socio-political pyre I’ve already outlined.  But as I’ve also opined, those of an age to’ve known better, more optimistic times, e.g. thee and me dear reader, are now inclined to bury our heads in the equally soothing and metaphoric sand and whilst knowing the horrid realities of modern life won’t go away, we will, and relatively soon.

Or at least that’s how it seems during these dark, cold, isolating winter months.

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