Many, many years ago
When I was just a kid,
And I had just began to grow,
There’s stuff I had and did.

I’m thinking back on all those things
That life saw fit to give me.
If I can’t remember everything,
I hope you will forgive me.

Chocolate candy cigarettes
And big bubble gum cigars.
Mini Bricks and Red Ball Jets,
Hopscotch and Dinky cars.

Mercurochrome and iodine;
Band-aids in a can.
Your watch required a daily wind,
And Etch-A-Sketch was grand.

In school, the teacher had to see
Just what you had to do.
You held one finger up for pee;
You held up two for poo!

Marbles, Slinkys, Lincoln Logs,
Ker Plunk and Pick Up Sticks,
With Yo-yos, you could “walk the dog,”
And ice cream came in bricks.

Arrows all had suction cups
And guns had rolls of caps.
Paddle Balls and Tonka Trucks
Big red lips were wax,

Measles, mumps, and chicken pox
Always seemed to flare.
They opened up Pandora’s Box
And caught us unaware!

With medicine and care from mom,
Our time in bed was cut!
But I can’t remember anyone
Allergic to a nut!

Nancy Drew and Hardy Boys
And also Brothers Grimm.
But Mark Twain was my pride and joy!
I never could resist him!

Hide and seek and tag were there.
New energy we found!
No more teacher scorns to bear
When summer came around.

PF Flyer running shoes,
Steel roller skates had keys.
There were phone booths we could use
If there’s emergencies.

Rolling down a grassy hill
In parks was a delight.
Nicky Nine Doors was a thrill,
But only played at night!

We rode our bikes with playing cards
Flapping on our spokes.
We played in all our friends’ backyards
And told our “Knock Knock” jokes.

Climbing fences, climbing trees
Were common things to do.
Getting bruised or skinning knees?
That was nothing new!

Two wheel scooters, kiddy cars,
We had Soap Box Rallies.
Baseball teams and monkey bars
And close by bowling alleys.

In winter, there were snowball fights
And snow forts for protection.
And when a bitter wind would bite,
Few kids raised objection!

Speeding down a snowy slope
On sleds and blown up tires.
“Is it too steep?” We all said, “Nope!”
We wanted to go higher!

In our teens were Levi jeans,
Duck and pony tails.
Sock hops were a common scene
Where dancing would prevail.

Bobby socks and poodle skirts
And continental slacks.
White buck shoes and fancy shirts,
Guitars and wailing sax!

Computers? What on Earth were they?!
Well, they would show up later.
And none I knew could dare display
Cell phones or calculators!

Many things I’ve mentioned here
Are still with us today.
But lots of kids, it does appear,
Ignore this great buffet!

What happened to the world I knew?
Have kids today stopped growing?
If time machines were really true,
I know where I’d be going!

2.1975: Junko Tabei, first woman to achieve?
b) Climb Mount Everest

3. Marie Curie discovery of two elements, can you name both?

a) Polonium and radium

4. 1955, Rosa Parks (‘The First Lady of Civil Rights’) became famous for refusing to give up her seat to a white passenger in which American city?

b) Montgomery, Alabama

5. Margaret Susan Ryder was born in Leeds in 1924 and opened the Sue Ryder Foundation in what year?
b) 1953

6. Which actress became the first to win a Best Actress Academy Award for a non-English language performance with her 1961 role in Two Women?

b) Sophia Loren

7. Who said: ‘I married beneath me. All women do.’?
a) Lady Nancy Astor

8. Who is generally regarded as the richest self-made woman in America?

b) Oprah Winfrey

9. Can you name the first Woman Yorkshire MP in 1945, was it?

a) Alice Bacon

10 Nicola Adams was the first woman to win an Olympic gold at London 2012 for what?

b) boxing

Which I think generally does history a disservice by simplifying it into a series of league tables. The 17^th century Great Plague may have been the most terrifying event since the 14^th century Black Death and we’ll have to wait a while before we can make a comparative assessment of the Covid 19 pandemic, although in every case the victims were more concerned with their rapidly failing bodily organs than their place in history.

The president of the Royal College of Psychiatrists, Dr Adrian James,  has concluded that the present plague constitutes the greatest threat to mental health since the Second World War, which is probably true, although if you take into account the mental health effects of the Holocaust, civilian bombings, widespread famines and the numbers killed in fighting (probably 42 million in the USSR alone), the comparisons with life under Covid19 seems, to at the very least, very tame indeed.

I know, from my childhood, a tiny bit about the connection between mental health and war  because where I was brought up in Gainsborough, Lincolnshire, there was big Victorian institutional building, maybe a former workhouse, which seemed to specialise in looking after people irreparably damaged by the First World War.

They are all long-dead now but in the 1950s and 60s they were relatively young old men by today’s standards. Some, the legless ones, would get around in contraptions called invalid carriages, which were large, clumsy tricycles driven by hand, electric locomotion being a lifetime away.

There were also, to frighten and fascinate children like me, a number of old men who would walk the streets mumbling or sometimes shouting into nowhere.

I could see they were terribly distressed but the adults reassured me that this was just shell shock (now known as Post Traumatic Stress Disorder), so I forgot about them until Dr James brought up the connection between wars and mental health,

This made me wonder whether the heightened anxiety and feelings of boredom and depression which some of us may presently feel should be lumped together with the sheer terror of total war, or with the immediate suffering and trauma which has resulted from every single one of the thousands and thousands of Covid deaths so far.

I know that some of the illnesses which fall under Dr James’s remit can be ruinous and crippling, but feeling uncomfortable during difficult times is not generally a psychiatric condition, it’s a human one.

And if you think you are suffering as much as someone with a regular physical disease, I can only remind you that symptoms such as  disturbed sleeping patterns are nothing compared to diphtheria.