O U R C O R R E S P O N D E N T I O L F R E E T A K E S A L

O O K A T

T H E

____ ____

/ /___/ /___/ / /

/ ___/ / /___/ S

My parents would have been aged around 15, 16, around the end of the war. Fifteen is an age when life can seem vivid.

By the time of Beatlemania they would have been in their thirties and it passed them by. They met in 1960 and got married in 1966. The zeitgeist can be elusive. I don't understand the zeitgeist of now but I think I 'get' the 1940s - 50s zeitgeist.

There was less visual clutter and street clutter in the forties. People were well dressed and looked good. There were very few horrific buildings.

I go up to nature away from all the plastic and the mean streets.

When the light is good I often think, this looks quite 1940s.

But not grey. Colour like 40s Kodachrome. Colour film was only a new thing and wasn't easy to get back then.

My parents would do crosswords - which seems quite 1940s, I'm sure it was in its heyday back then. They didn't have gemini or even television at the time. So they filled in crosswords.

I see the world through 1940s eyes, enchanted by an AM radio, a film camera or simple computer, valves, vacuum tubes. But it's a good way to be. Children now don't seem to have the sense of wonder in a world gone digital : "there's an app for that".

We have one rose bush in the front garden since

1941 when our family home was new. When it makes its roses I regard them

as from the forties and fifties. It must be the same

vivid colour that they had then. It hasn't faded surely.

On the Fourth of July 2020 an American compound nearby had a

fireworks display.

The different colours looked spectacular from my window.

Pyrotechnics is quite an old tech. It didn't look digital. In my mind's eye it was like looking at an old colour film from the forties.

My parents were born just before the Wall Street Crash and the Depression followed by World War 2 and rationing. Luftwaffe bombs sometimes fell on Dublin.

By the 70s when I came along, it seemed like space travel was becoming a reality, colour television was being introduced, cars were available to

ordinary people - folks going round in Volkswagen contraptions so it must have seemed like a more hopeful era.

It was a fascinating time and I think I caught the tail end of the good old days.