Almost the entire month has passed by in a flash.  Since I came back from my week long vacation last month (which now seems like a faded memory), it’s just been one helluva rollercoaster ride. 
It’s not that I don’t try to simplify my life; I really do.  And every once in a while, I succeed.  But, by and large, the demands of working in a fast-growing company in the business capital of the country creep up and say  ‘boo’.
So, it was with much interest and enthusiasm that I went through a forwarded email on my school’s egroup :

According to today’s regulators and bureaucrats, those of us who were kids in the 60’s, 70’s and early 80’s probably shouldn’t have survived, because our baby cots were covered with brightly coloured lead-based paint which was promptly chewed and licked. We had no childproof lids on medicine bottles, or latches on doors or cabinets and it was fine to play with pans.

We drank water from the garden hose and not from a bottle and it tasted the same.We ate chips, bread and butter pudding and drank fizzy juice with sugar in it, but we were never overweight because we were always outside playing.We shared one drink with four friends, from one bottle or can and no-one actually died from this.

We did not have Play stations or X-Boxes, no video games at all. No 99 channels on TV, no videotape movies, no surround sound, no mobile phones, no personal computers, no DVDs, no Internet chat rooms.

We had friends – we went outside and found them. We played elastics and rounders, and sometimes that ball really hurt! We fell out of trees, got cut, and broke bones but there were no law suits. We had full on fist fights but no prosecution followed from other parents.

We walked to friends’ homes. We also, believe it or not, WALKED to school; we didn’t rely on mummy or daddy to drive us to school, which was just round the corner. We made up games with sticks and tennis balls.

The majority of students in universities today were born in 1986……..They are called youth. They have never heard of We are the World, We are the children, and the Uptown Girl they know is by Westlife not Billy Joel. They have never heard of Rick Astley, Bananarama, Nena Cherry or Belinda Carlisle. For them, there has always been only one Germany and one Vietnam.

AIDS has existed since they were born. CD’s have existed since they were born. Michael Jackson has always been white. To them John Travolta has always been round in shape and they can’t imagine how this fat guy could be a god of dance. They believe that Charlie’s Angels and Mission Impossible are films from last year.

They can never imagine life before computers. They’ll never have pretended to be the A Team, RedHand Gang or the Famous Five. They can’t believe a black and white television ever existed. And they will never understand how we could leave the house without a mobile phone.

Ah, what I would give to live a simple life again !