Attracting the young

 The Long Suffering Husband has been worrying about his golf club for a while. The current owner has made noises about wanting to sell and has suggested that golf is a dying game. 

“We’ve got to attract the youngsters,” said the LSH, sounding like a very old man.

I’m not sure. It’s like Radio 4. Radio 4 would be dreadful if they started to attract the youngsters. It would stop being a place where you could accidentally listen to a very boring program about primordial slime and find yourself still thinking about it a day later. If you were making programs to attract the young then that one wouldn’t have made the cut. When you are young, you still have the energy to get up and change the station or know how to properly work your car radio.

I didn’t always listen to Radio 4 but I did always listen to radio. In my youth, I flitted. The Archers was my only concession to the old person’s station. Radio 1 and local stations took most of my attention. In my thirties I moved to Radio 2 and loved Soaps on the TV. It’s only now that I’m old that my Radio knob is stuck on the oldies’ channel. 

Maybe the golf club doesn’t need to attract youngsters, as long as young people are playing sport they will naturally be drawn to it when their knees are too old and creaky for football. (The step after is bowling)

Yesterday, I spent the day in Reading records office, reading autopsy reports and other interesting documents. After a while I looked round and realised that the other people there were all old ladies and wondered if History needed to attract some young people.  

Thinking about how to make sure there are old ladies sitting in record offices in the future I wondered what we need to make sure we offer to children. Is it good stories from the past or a rigorous school history curriculum? However, I suspect that it’s nothing except being human. History is what we go to when we become history ourselves. Living in 1882 has certainly made me feel younger. However, thinking about my sudden attraction to original source historical documents has now made me realise just how old I am.