Stuck in the sixties

Hi Robin

It's time you are informed about a horrible truth about your old granddad. It's better you get it from me, from the horse's mouth so to speak, then from someone else.

Culturally speaking, I am stuck in the sixties. There, that's the turd in the tomato soup. That's the horrific little secret that has been the subject of an elaborate cover up among family and friends. But there should be no secrets between you and me, kid.

You see, the sixites was a wonderful era. Geopolitically speaking, it was the simplest of times. There were good guys (us) and there were bad guys (the Russki's). That was simple. You could understand that even if you had a brain the size of a peanut. On the good guy side you had people like John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King and Mahatma Ghandi. On the bad guy side, you had Nikita Chroutshev (or however it was spelled), Mao Tze Dung and a bunch of other commies. In Berlin, they built a wall: on one side of it were the good guys, on the other side of it were the bad guys. Simple!

In the sixties, NATO was not yet a four letter word. In the sixties, there was no terrorism and the term Al Qaeda at best conjured up associations with some strange form of mathematics. In the sixties, the good guys as well as the bad guys had nuclear missiles pointed at each other with such a devastation potential that the world's population could be anihilated 10 time over. But the people with their hands on the button were smart enough not to use them. Of course, there was that nasty business in Vietnam, but that was far away and we were told it was for a good cause... by politicians that somehow we could believe in.

Most of all, though, the sixties was love, rock and roll and shaking your fist at the establishment. The sixties was Elvis Presley, Marilyn Monroe, the Beatles, Mary Quant, Twiggy, mini-skirts and Eurovision song contests where people actually could sing and no Eastern European vote rigging occurred.

Can you imagine that in the sixties youngsters like your grandfather did not have computers, the internet, cell phones, iPods? Just how lame were we? But funnily enough, we DID communicate. Young peole actually wrote each other good old fashioned letters, with an actual pen on actual paper, and with words spelled out in full, not mutilated to expressions like 'C U L8TER'. And we had actual CONVERSATIONS with other young people. We were interested in them. They were interested in us. Friendship still meant something.

As Dutchies, in the sixties our sporting ambitions were also a tad more modest than they are these days: Dutch football fans were already ecstatic if our national team won at least one of its semi-annual friendly matches against Belgium... against BELGIUM, for the love of God! And the harvest of one single bronze medal at the Olympics for something vague like clay pigeon shooting was cause for mass hysteria, state sponsored celebrations, a polonaise in the garden of the Royal Palce (with the old Queen leading the parade) and the inevitable knighthood and a celebration tour in a horse drawn carriage for the lucky winner of that single bronze medal.

Because I liked the sixties so much, I got stuck in them, culturally speaking at least. Don't take my word for it, check out my CD collection. And even now, with internet and limewire and downloaded music, what do I download? Yup, 'sixties stuff'.

If you want to truly understand what the sixties was all about, Robin, check out this video by Billy Connolly. He is of my generation. He was there like I was. He understands. As he says: It was amazing. We were teenagers when rock and roll was invented. We were the chosen ones!




I rest my case!

Hugs from

Granddad Faraway