the world is a different place now and us old folk are all a dying breed.
I am in my 70s and one can only become a dying breed if one wants to become a dying breed.
You're the one who put me onto 'Who Moved my Cheese' - the cheese is always on the move! It has been moving at 90mph since I was a kid. If I think of the world I was born into - steam trains and government-owned bus companies, union-only workplaces and 'The Great Smog',
Music While You Work and
Listen with Mother - and then houses were being built everywhere you looked and music changed out of all recognition the day rock & roll was born, the first small pokey B&W television sets, to be followed by dodgy colour - and now we have cinema-quality images and sound in the home and access to almost any and every film ever made and personal communicators that are better than the ones on Startrek.
Some industries are refusing to change and are sticking their fingers in their collective ears, singing 'La, la, la!' and hoping that all this change just goes away - well it ain't! Cinemas are dying but the entire movie industry pretends that we are doing business as usual. Print is dying, but the entire news industry still pretends that the editorial agenda is set by the dailies. Banking abandoned cheques and the High Street branch very unwillingly. The next to go will be present healthcare structures, but I don't see any sign of doctors or insurance schemes anywhere preparing for this!
Last, but by no means least, governments and possibly even nations will go. The concept of strict huge geographical tribes, tens of millions in number, bound by arbitrary lines on a map and governed by a council of elected elders is a relatively new one in the overall history of mankind. It served a purpose in the days of slow communications and outside threats from hostile peoples, but it became over-weening and over bureaucratic to the point of where it is today - parasitic.
Without going (yet again!) into the numbers, government spending everywhere (and not just in the UK) accounts for about half the economy, financed by giant debts that will never be repaid and mathematically, can never be repaid. That means that sooner or later, all those things that governments everywhere either feel obliged to do or do because it is a vote winner, they no longer will be able to do.
Here in the UK, that may mean having to abandon HS2, nuclear weapons, the NHS, state pensions, vast armies of civil servants, social security payments and possibly even schools. All these things will happen piece-meal, a slice at a time - universities are already a pay-as-you-go luxury in Englandshire, schools may easily follow.
As for all those well-meaning green initiatives - governments everywhere dropped them just as fast as they could in favour of coal and gas at the first sign of an energy crisis!
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I have spent the past year having some rather tedious and protracted dealings with a German government department that require me to fill in one form after another, after another. Nothing unusual there, until I looked at the name of the department 'Bundesverwaltungsamt' and I wondered what the UK equivalent might be. It is Germany's very own 'Department of Administrative Affairs' - yes! There really is such a thing in real life - but in Germany!
Their Sir Humphrey is called Christoph Verenkotte and he heads a staff of 6,000 with a budget of €500m in Cologne.
