Sad? In what way? To my mind it was mostly much healthier in all ways. There is potentially much to look forward to but the future is not without its problems!
Well, many people have passed, including my parents and members of the church. Sometimes we look through rose tinted-spectacles at the good times and forget the bad: the hard work, the often leaden dull routine, the tragedies such as Hillsborough, Heysel, the Bradford City stadium fire, the divisiveness of the miners' strike. Not to mention the astronomical increase in violence against the person offences.
As for health, I remember sitting atop smoky double-decker buses, Manchester landmark buildings covered in soot, the air pollution, the constant drizzle and cloud cover of the landscape. I'm perturbed about the increase in vaping nowadays, which is just smoking in another guise. The reduction in smoking amongst teenagers was the one success the new academy schools had, but now seems to have disappeared in a vapour of nicotine inhalation.
