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Tuesday, November 10, 2020

Tomorrow Never Knows

Interesting chat with V. this evening essentially concerning differences in perspective and experiences. She had been giving some thought as to how I would have reacted if a similar  Pandemic  with lockdown etc. had occurred during my childhood ie in the absence of the internet providing information and Teams/Zoom to allow communication with the outside World. 

I am not sure that things would have been much different in 1960s/1970s England. We obviously had telephones for communication and our sources of information would have been TV/radio and newspapers - which for me at least - is not really that different from today. 

I did admit that if someone had given me an Ipad like the one I am typing this out on as a teenager I would probably have regarded it with some degree of amazement but the raw material of communicating information whether by news stories or encyclopaedias etc has merely become more effective and efficient rather than any fundamental change in the nature or quality of that information.

Her biggest concern (I guess she was trying to imagine what it would have been like if she had been living through a pandemic during my childhood) was how one would have entertained oneself in a pre-internet age lockdown without being crushed by boredom! I genuinely do not recall being bored as a child (although it is possible that my closest family remembering that era might beg to differ?...) even when confined to home due to weather etc (which was a pretty frequent occurrence although admittedly not the same as a lockdown). I guess we did make our own entertainment in the absence of today’s myriad distractions available on the world wide web but TV was not (on the whole) that bad and there was plenty of books and newspapers, and even when none of these options were available, I had a fairly vivid imagination that I could lose myself in.

I  do however think that a child of the “noughties” used to today’s entertainment options would perhaps be - at least temporarily- taken aback by the degree to which a 60s/70s child was forced to rely on themselves to inject excitement/ interesting activities into their own lives if they were suddenly transported back in time.

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