As Iwrite these words Christmas is just around the corner, a time of good cheer as always, but as a child of the 60s I am sure that Christmas can’t be as much fun for kids today as it was for those of us brought up in the days before the internet, when life was so much simpler.
My mum’s favourite saying was: “Moderation in all things.” How she had four kids remains a mystery to us, but we only got one banana and brown sugar sandwich each night for tea, and the only time we got sweets was at Christmas time when our stockings usually contained selection boxes of them. Even then we managed to ration our intake to one Mars or Milky Way a day to take us into the New Year. We always used to choose our Christmas presents out of the Freemans catalogue, retiring quietly to spend hours browsing, only to be told that most of our choices were far too expensive. As me and my brother Sandy got a little older, we spent even longer on private time with that catalogue; thankfully our parents never noticed when it started falling open at the womens’ lingerie pages.