It is, to be sure, a certain sign of senility when one finds oneself making remarks about young people today; and when placed in conjunction with the observation that they don't know what's good for them, it can only mean that a secure billet in a residential home for the bewildered must be imminent. All I can say in my defence is that I have not uttered, nor will not utter, the ultimate damning line: They don't know how lucky they are.
They're not lucky. It's not luck to be born into a generation which spends so much time inhaling beta-particles in front of television and computer screens, for which the great outdoors is just a shop around the corner from Burger King, and games are some thing you play mentally on your computer, not physically outside. Modern childhood has been corrupted by fear of any area unsupervised by parents, and by the twin assaults on brain and belly by Microsoft and McDonalds.
Corpulent youngsters
No-one should be in the least surprised at the findings of Juliette Hussey of Trinity College Dublin that most Irish children of the M & M generation are reported to spend two to three hours daily watching television or computer screens, and that a quarter of all girls and one in seven boys do less than the recommended minimum amount of daily exercise. If anything, to judge from the corpulent youngsters festooned with chins and bellies and dimpled arms and bottoms scooped with a wooden spoon from a vat of suet, that is a conservative picture. If anything the situation is worse: the true Teletubbies are not on television but watching it.
Further proof of my impending admission to an institute for the gaga before I take to wandering naked around St Stephen's Green looking for an RIC man to give me directions to the Viceregal Lodge is here supplied: (a) childhood was childhood in my day; and (b) we used to have to make our own entertainment. But even allowing for the rose-tinted spectacles of the infirm and elderly which the years bestow, who would argue against the proposition that a childhood spent outdoors is 10 times more desirable than one spent on a belly watching television? Who would argue that food for a child should be consumed at mealtime with the family, rather than in hourly recreation taken with one's peers throughout the day?
How many of the M & M generation in cities play street games any more? How many play for hour upon unsupervised hour in public parks ? How many of the M & M generation run everywhere, as all boys did when I was a youngster? How many leap out of bed and bolt their breakfast in order to rush outside to play? How many of them kick a football around for hour after hour after hour? How many M & M youngsters play in vigorous war games, the equivalent of cowboys and Indians, goodies and baddies, cops and robbers ? Or is it all slink out of bedand slither up to the computer screen, meanwhile consuming coloured blobs of animal fat washed down with pints of sugary drink?
An American friend who arrived in Ireland in the 1980s says how struck she was by the handsome physiques of the Irish people. Fatness was rare, and when it was present, was a middle-aged male phenomenon, bespeaking hefty beer consumption. Irish children had thin, lithe bodies and a ruddy, outdoor complexion. Irish adults walked everywhere, and were fit and slim.
Lethargic and fat
All changed. Though it's true that Irish people are still unable to emulate the truly American buttock-haunch, each cellulite-covered example of which stores enough adipose tissue to have nourished the entire population of Leningrad during the 1,000-day siege there - and, mark you, nourished them well - we have nonetheless grown pallid, lethargic and fat. We are the Americans of maybe 20 years ago; and we are closing fast.
It would be nice to think that our schools could do something about this, but it's unlikely. We have the highest rates of illiteracy in Western Europe, and our schools have uniquely failed to communicate such basic civic skills as public cleanliness, i.e., not littering. And although our teachers have among the highest rates of pay for the lowest working hours in Europe, they are nonetheless convinced that they are both uniquely successful and uniquely victimised - an unholy combination. But since they're all off on hols in the sun for the next two months, I can say this without fear of being read by any of them, na nah na nah .
Sense of past
But it would anyway be a pious and even unfair wish to think that teachers (or even journalists) can undo those social trends now sweeping through Ireland, and which are annihilating any sense of past even as they create little porkies feasting hourly on mammal lard in all its many varieties. This is the M & M generation, to which the South is not Munster but Dixie, the west coast touches the Pacific, not the Atlantic, the Civil War was started by the shelling of Fort Sumter, not the Four Courts, a lavatory without a bath in sight is a bathroom, a defect is a deefect and defence is deefence.
Maybe coating their young hearts with fat is doing far less grievous damage than is being done to their sense of who they are. Maybe. . .Ah, here's me Complan. And after me Complan, maybe that pretty young nurse will give me a bath. . .