Changing taste.

 Subject: Changing taste.

Having breasted the finishing line over three years ago, I'm now living on borrowed time and each day brings with it a mixture of fresh aches and pains, luckily they are not too debilitating and each an essential part of the drama of old age.

There was so much in the past regarding the many human issues, usually hidden behind what we called 'good taste'. From female dress and hygiene products to humour and what used to be called smutty jokes, those famous  double ententes of the 1950s. The fear of crossing arbitrary red lines, from the whiff of misogyny to any sort of comment regarding race and disharmony there indeed hundreds of mines to blow the innocent to smithereens.

For the person who has lasted beyond three score and ten this changing world makes a mockery of old beliefs and concepts of what is acceptable and not acceptable. We have moved towards the Iranian/Chinese concept of mind police where to think outside the party box is an offence. The Scottish Nationalist Party (SNP) have just brought into law wide sweeping rules which prohibit, even in your own home, enticement to go against and pronounce your feelings on race, misogyny, and aspects of gender proclivity, someone has come across Orwell’s 1984 or one of Arthur Koestler books about life in East Germany. Tread carefully my haggis eating friends lest your national instrument is the last er hear from you.

The question which has to be asked is change a mark of progress or are we regressing into “group think” the comfortable repose of an authoritarian mindset or in our effort to be all things to all people we loose our own identity.