At quite a few singarounds I've been to recently, there have been any number of songs about the passing of industry, the changing of the countryside, and other material with a quasi-nostalgic longing for times gone by. And I think to myself, "Oh - really?"

There are indeed many things to lament the passing of but, in doing so, we seem to forget the downsides to it all. For every bucolic/rustic song where the young loves sit down by a sweet bank of briar to hear the nightingale sing, there were untold miseries of agricultural labourers unable to find work because of new machinery in the fields, sent to the "union", separated by age and sex - or given a passage to the 'colonies' and told to hop it.

And the passing of some industries also led to the passing of child labour, wages that allowed workers to subsist while the mine and mill owners waxed rich. So what say ye to the "good old days"?

I can recall, even in my comparatively short span of years, the horror of a dentist with a treadle drill, the vile gloop that passed for medicine in the post-war years, the general greyness that abounded - soot and smoke from local mills - and a general air of "knowing one's place".

Good old days? Bah! Humbug! I've never looked back through the years and thought, "Oh I wish I were such-and-such again". I've always enjoyed being the age I am and living in the time I live in - there here and now.

Not perfect, I grant you - but then, nothing ever was...