it's hip to be square...

I was thinking on the way into work this morning about the fact that both of my parents were born in 1946. This means that my dad was 28 when I was born and my mum was 27. By the time that they were my age, my parents had 3 children.

I don’t really compare my life with that of my parents, and I don’t gauge my self-worth on whether or not I am married and have children, so this doesn’t really bother me at all. What I did find interesting though was the train of thought that this nugget prompted… My parents were 20 when England won the World Cup in 1966. They were 23 and living in “Swinging London” during the Summer of Love. They will remember when “Sergeant Pepper” was released and when the Beatles split up…. Loads of stuff.

Birth control, Ho Chi Minh, Richard Nixon back again
Moonshot, Woodstock, Watergate, punk rock
Begin, Reagan, Palestine, Terror on the airline
Ayatollah's in Iran, Russians in Afghanistan

They grew up in a pretty formative time in British and World history, and it’s only just occurred to me that I have not asked them about any of these things. Not once. It’s not that I think they were figureheads of the counter-culture or anything, and they were probably pretty square, to be honest – my mum was working as a nurse and my Dad was studying to be a Doctor (he was a contemporary of future-Python Graham Chapman at medical school - another thing I’ve never asked him about). It’s just that they were there, and I’ve been too busy thinking of them as my parents to be really interested in their lives.

I must ask them about it at the first opportunity. Life’s short, and they might just surprise me.

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4,330 words, by the way.