The legacy for our children

We often hear talk about the world that we will leave for our children and their children. At a very large political level, we talk about subjects like the polluted planet, the heavy debt burden, higher crime levels and more. But it is worth think about what we leave at a lower but no less important level. A conversation over breakfast highlighted things that I and my acquaintances recalled doing which our children may at best only read about. Remember that this was a crowd brought up in various places in the Caribbean and the UK.

• Drinking the top part of a bottle of milk, where the cream had settled; and woe betide you if you take it instead of someone else or shake up the bottle.
• Hearing the clink of the milk bottles being delivered to your door step, and in the winter time racing down to bring them in before the birds could start to peck at the cap to drink the milk.
• Knowing that milk comes from a cow, not from a supermarket or a tanker truck.
  
• Having you first sexual experience in the back of a car, and not thinking that you might get hijacked.
• Helping your parents or grandparents grow, pick, prepare as jams or cakes, fruit and vegetables.
• Having the 'bread man' bring fresh bread to the house. Or baking bread at home. Or knowing that the thickness of a slice of bread was up to you to determine. (Jamaicans and many in England, thankfully, still eat a lot of whole loaf, not pre-sliced, bread.)
  
• Walking--sometimes miles--to/from school, with a group of friends, or alone with only your books for company.
• Thinking of 'fast food' as something that your parents prepared at home in a hurry.
• Thinking of bread and jam as a luxury.
• Fighting and only fearing someone having a better punch or harder kick than you.
• Seeing friends taking drugs or drinking underage and knowing indisputably that it was not for you. (A few of us grew up in London and recalled being in Soho/The West End a lot at night times and being surrounded constantly by all of life's social vices, yet never feeling that any of it had an effect on us.)

This list is of course no where near exhaustive, so I will be glad for more remiscences.

The sense we have is that life was simpler when we were children and we appreciated more.