Mutterings and Musings

Farmyard fairytales

Challenge: When you are old, what do you think children will ask you to tell stories about?

The most obvious and currently relevant answer to that is, of course, covid. But will children want stories about a global plague? Did my parents ask their parents for stories of Spanish flu? What will media look like in thirty or forty years time? Will it actually be easier for children to ask their Google-equivalent than a 'real' person for a history lesson?

And will they still want stories?

Of course they will. No matter how advanced technology gets and how many films Disney crank out, children will always want first-hand stories. They are fundamental to who we are as human beings. But perhaps what will capture their imaginations will be a rural childhood - dogs and cats underfoot, bottle-fed lambs and piglets, wild swimming before we even understood it was 'wild,' and the same with camping. Learning to gut a rabbit by torchlight, and building a fire with scavenged wood. Hiking for miles because we were bored or sea fishing out past the bar in a tiny motor boat and watching swarms of pulsing moon jellies swim by. Perhaps this will take on a fairy-tale mythos to the children of the future; at university one of my friends found it incredible that I had lived on a farm - a real-life farm! It astounded her more when I said almost all of my friends had grown up likewise; that we learnt to drive not in cars, but in tractors and dumper trucks (and, it is entirely possible, completely skin the bark off a few trees in the orchard in the process).
But if that was incredible to someone *gulp* fifteen years ago, how much more unbelievable will it seem to someone in another forty? Maybe my children's children won't want stories of working on the front line during Covid-19; maybe they won't care that I typed this with my arm still stinging for an unlicensed vaccination or that the nurse advised my to keep a photo of my vax card on my phone as thieves are stealing handbags not for cash or phones or bank cards, but for the black market sales on a tiny piece of card that lists me as fully vaccinated against a delightful little virus called SARS-CoV-2.

Maybe my children's children will only be interested in stories about near-mythical creatures that lived in odd little places called farms. And maybe my children's children will dismiss the stories as fantastical nonsense from a grandma who clearly grew up in a different world.