Lest we forget the bad old ’80s

MY father is of a generation old enough to have regaled us spoilt city brats with ‘béal bocht’ stories about having to walk to school in bare feet carrying hot potatoes to keep his hands warm.

I often wonder what today’s fathers’ standard story of childhood hardship will be. The best one I’ve seen so far was in a newspaper cartoon a couple of years ago. In it, a father was telling his son that when he was only a slip of a boy he had to get off the couch, walk all the way over to the television and switch the channel before returning to the couch again.

Soon, even the collective memory of that impoverished past will itself be confined to the past. Even the raw memories of the Supabus generation of the 1980s, who emigrated en masse to England and the US, are now only footnotes.