Every generation thinks they have found a better way of doing things than the people who came before them. It’s one of the reasons teenagers ridicule their parents and why the contribution of older people is so often undervalued.
But we turn our backs on traditional skills and knowledge at our peril. “Progress” rarely runs in straight lines and right now there may be more U-turns ahead than we bargained for.
The gradual dawning of the need for more sustainable living has cast “old ways” in a more favourable, and indeed fashionable, light. The soaring cost of living is a new pressing reason to count the cost of convenience.
There are signs of a new appreciation of how our parents, or at least grandparents and great-grandparents, could turn their hands to creating and repairing, before life became an ever-quickening cycle of buy, throw away and repeat. The trouble is…
