World has changed so much since the start of the Sixties

Double Vision with Charlie Adley

I’m glad I was born in 1960 because I grew up in a world where all knowledge was not instantly available. The internet offers every truth and untruth, so today’s generation still have to sort the wheat from the chaff, but if I wanted to gain knowledge as a child, I had to go and find the most pertinent book, or talk to someone older and wiser.

By the age of seven, I decided that the best way to garner knowledge was through actually doing stuff: harvesting the barley, cycling up a steep hill just to swoop down again, getting sweaty in a good way.

These days it’d be called something like Direct Experiential Planetary and Social Interaction. To that little boy in 1967, it simply felt like wringing a good life from the world, in a way that PS4 can never offer.

I’m not knocking the gaming. A huge part of me is envious of today’s teenagers sitting in front of huge flat screen TVs playing FIFA 16.

I’m glad I was born in 1960 because I’ve experienced the whole technological journey. I can marvel at what is new while reflecting how life was also good without it. Our first TV was a huge wooden box with a tiny sheet of glass that offered two channels, after the valves had warmed up.

This ain’t nostalgia. I’m not hankering for the days of disappearing white dots or clunky channel controls. I do not miss fiddling with the horizontal and vertical controls, nor twiddling with a rabbit ears aerial.

I love digital TV and remote controls, but having lived through the transformation of innovative machines of old into the sophisticated devices of today, I can enjoy modern technology with true relish. I’m glad that I grew up without computers so that I can now embrace their use with a broader perspective.

I’m glad I was born in 1960 because I was a 13-years-old boiling bag of hormones when David Bowie released Aladdin Sane.

Desperate to be rescued from twee pop music, I leapt and bounced around my room as Ronson and Bowie ripped through songs that still prove perfectly modern in 2015.

I’m glad that I was born in 1960 because by the time 1976 came around I was bored stiff of Progressive Rock Supergroups playing on stages half a mile away, offering little beyond 20 minute drum solos and drug bust stories in the papers.

To read Charlie’s column in full, see this week’s Galway City Tribune.