I can recall…

I saw a photo of my toddling God daughter with a mobile phone attached to her ear the other day, she looked so cute, so grown up. It got me thinking, what stories would uncle Gareth be telling little Isobel one day when she is a little older? What pearls of wisdom might I be able to shed on this budding princess?

I can recall my dad recounting days of nothing but hardship… stories of being so poor that he had to nail leather studs into his football boots before a trial match to represent his province, which he dually did, the smug bastard…. "Its not the tools Gareth…" - I can still hear those words ringing in my ears…

A regular Sunday barbeque on my uncle's farm would always have the men standing over the fire like zombies, the elderly statesmen recounting tales Of guess what? hardship, that’s right…"I was so poor that I walked ten miles to school each day, bare foot, and with my two younger sisters on my back…it was uphill both ways…

Some unfortunate relative would always end up with tears in his eyes, served him right for standing in the path of the billowing smoke….idiot!

My uncle would say: "We couldn't afford land, so we stayed in a tin can, at the bottom of the river…it was wet and cold," no shit.

My dad would say that when he got his first car, he couldn’t afford petrol, so he used to go round to all the petrol stations and empty out the petrol that was left in the pipes…"They all knew me, in my sky blue ford Anglia" he would say.

And then for fun, he would take my mo out for a drive on a Friday night and then find a spot on the side of the road, to watch the cars go buy as a form of entertainment….Nothing was too good for my mom…

Good times no-doubt.

Well you see young Isobel, when uncle Gareth was younger, we had to run to get the telephone, and sometimes we missed it cause we were outside, and the telephones was attached to a plug and well it was a nuisance.

When I was at university, we used to have to wait 15 minutes to download an image of a topless woman…we just didn’t know quite what else the internet was for in those days, it was way before Google, you are so lucky you have Google…

And Facebook? We didn’t dream of such easy ways to chat with our friends Isobel, we had to ride to our friend's house on our bicycles if we wanted to speak to them, sometimes we got a puncture and we would have to push our bikes home…but those were the times we learnt about character…Sometimes it even rained…in fact we were so poor that we were made in China.

Sometimes we would go for family walks cause we couldn’t afford a car…my sister would pick up a rock and my mom would snap.."put that down And (we couldn’t afford the y at the end of her name) we cant afford that."

When I was growing up we couldn’t afford pearls, or their wisdom, I thought nietzsche was a type of orange (Thanks Google), Marx I thought came in the middle of 'on your' and 'get set' before a running race, and Plato I thought was a planet.

So hear is something I stole…