What hard luck stories will the next generation dine out on?

A Different View with Dave O’Connell

The  easiest way to bore the heads off your children – and in fairness most parents will agree they can do this in a variety of ways and with consummate ease – is to start telling them stories about how bad we had things in the old days.

Sometimes they walk into the ‘bad old days’ trap themselves when they ask you what sort of remote control you had for the telly – just so you can dive straight in to point out that we didn’t need remotes because we only had one channel and even then it didn’t come on until three o’clock.

We can anaesthetise the heads off them with sob stories about cold and damp mornings – the world before central heating where pupils brought sods of turf to school – corporal punishment, single-glazed windows, perhaps even outdoor toilets, when breakfast was a choice between lumpy porridge and no breakfast at all.

We will point out that the way to combat the cold was to put on an extra jumper or to actually get up off the couch and walk to the sink with their dishes.

We can drone on ad nauseum over the long summers we spent, effectively locked out of our own homes, playing football from dawn until dusk with jumpers for goalposts, and going home only because it was time for your dinner and this was an era when the only floodlights we knew were on the telly at Wembley.

And Wembley once a year for the FA Cup Final was about the extent of our live football unless it was a World Cup year – outside of that we might have had Match of the Day, although RTE had an inexplicable predilection for horse racing on Sports Stadium, with Brendan O’Reilly and his magic hair anchoring things back in studio.

We got the rugby of course, but it was the Five Nations and none of your Heineken or Rabo – and the closest we came to sky was standing under it whether or not it was raining.

We tell them that three in a bed was the reality for children in a big family and a small house – it wasn’t a sleazy story from the Sunday World.

And in a bizarre way like generations before us, we get off on recycling our misery memories, our version of Angela’s Ashes – only without the incessant rain.

Then we wonder – what stories will they bore their children with, because from our perspective these little buggers have never had it so good?

Will they drone on about the fact that they only had Sky Sports but were brutally denied access to Sky Movies; that they only had an original Playstation model when all of their friends were on the newer version; that they had to share an indoor bathroom with other members of the family because not every bedroom was en suite?

They will cry that they’ve never been to Manhattan for Thanksgiving or South America on their summer holidays, in the way that we moan on about a time when heading south for your summer break meant a few days in Lahinch.

The crew from Monty Python, back in the news these days as they creak out of retirement, had a famous sketch on competitive misery first time round, where the boys worked to outdo each other in terms of their awful childhoods – and it goes like this:

Graham Chapman: “We were evicted from ‘our’ hole in the ground; we had to go and live in a lake!”

Terry Gilliam: “You were lucky to have a LAKE! There were a hundred and sixty of us living in a small shoebox in the middle of the road.”

Michael Palin: “Cardboard box?”

Terry Gilliam: “Aye.”

Michael Palin: “You were lucky. We lived for three months in a brown paper bag in a septic tank. We used to have to get up at six o’clock in the morning, clean the bag, eat a crust of stale bread, go to work down mill for fourteen hours a day week in-week out. When we got home, our Dad would thrash us to sleep with his belt!”

Graham Chapman: “Luxury. We used to have to get out of the lake at three o’clock in the morning, clean the lake, eat a handful of hot gravel, go to work at the mill every day for tuppence a month, come home, and Dad would beat us around the head and neck with a broken bottle, if we were LUCKY!”

And on it goes – each Python with a tougher childhood than the other.

By comparison, the first world problems of today’s teenagers seem like they’d scarcely raise an eyebrow – but then we have to see what the future brings to really know.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.