Memories of a gentler age

I'd been to view a cottage and was standing on a bridge looking at the ducks when an elderly (even more elderly than me!) gentleman approached. I made a remark, he replied and we got talking. It turned out that, like me, he had been born in Liverpool so we got talking about all the changes there had been. There was a shopping trolley in the water (even in the deepest countryside I have seen rusty shopping trolleys in rivers, lakes and streams: do they go on their holidays and feel they have to have a swim?), and the old man informed me that a pair of swans used to live in that part of the river and some local kids had used the trolley to trap and kill the female, after which the male swam up and down, up and down for days, and eventually pined and died.

"You don't want to live around here," he said. "Too many thugs." This was a chap in, I guess, his late seventies, who had spent some years in the army. A man who had been brought up in the Liverpool slums but who had principles and a strong sense of fairness. I realised that we had both been brought up in gentler times, when people respected one another and before every house contained a screen saturated with violence that numbed and distorted the sense of right and wrong, that trivialised death - that, in reality, censored death. On the news we are told that viewers might find some scenes distressing, but the scenes of bodies being carried out of collapsed buildings, or lying in the street following a shooting, are nothing compared to the gory close-ups shown on CSI.

The trouble with death on TV series is that it seems quick and easy. No agonising writhings and screams, no long-drawn-out suffering. It's unreal. It's a fiction. As the 'feelies' mentioned in 1984 have yet to be invented, there is no way for a would-be thug to experience the death agonies of the victims of violence. Death has become a game. Kicking someone to death looks on TV like kicking a football. I know I shall be accused of being a fascist, but I can't help thinking that the teenage gangs who stab people to death should be forced to spent some time in Afghanistan facing a real enemy and knowing that this time it could be their turn to have their brains splattered on the pavement. Maybe, faced with such grim reality that's happening to them for a change, they would re-learn the value and preciousness of life. Or is this too much to hope for and today's youth have been brutalised out of all reason?