TALKING ‘bout my generation… Well, some people are. There’s been a small flurry of memoirs by people who grew up in the 1950s and clearly think life has gone to hell in a handcart ever since. Really?

I can moan with the best of them, but every now and then I feel a desperate Pollyanna urge to say no, hang on, in many ways life really is better.

Yes, the NHS has its problems, partly because it does so much more. Do you want to go back to the days before kidney, knee, hip and heart replacements – that would certainly free up a few beds.

Lament the passing of grammar schools maybe – but only if you also want to bring back secondary moderns and a sense of failure.

And no, not everyone in the 1950s left school able to read and write. A family friend remembers spending much of his national service writing letters home for his illiterate colleagues.

We no longer lock disabled children away and forget about them.

We don’t think it’s a waste of time to educate girls because they’ll only get married. Women might be torn between careers and childcare, but at least they have a choice – and equal wages.

It’s harder to buy a house, but at least most of us have proper bathrooms and kitchens and don’t share an outside loo with ten other houses or wake up with ice inside the windows. Clothes are more comfortable, food is more varied, horizons are broader.

Of course not everything’s perfect.

Civilisation has never progressed in a straight line, but in raggedy little surges, so there are bound to be things we mourn.

But go back to the 1950s? No thank you. You can if you like, but I’m staying here. If only for the plumbing.

WE live near Scotch Corner, just at the start of the vast new roadworks to upgrade the A1 to a motorway. And it’s fascinating.

I never thought I’d be so enthralled.

A few months ago some chaps rocked up and hammered some wooden posts in a field. Even then I wanted to know how they knew exactly where to hammer them; the calculations behind it all, how they worked it all out.

That was followed by some posts and flags and bollards and mountains of mud.

Portakabins have gone up, trees and buildings have come down, all along the roadside – most disconcerting.

You never realise how much notice you take of small landmarks until they’ve gone and you suddenly don’t know quite where you are on the way to the tip.

A few million quids’ worth of real life Tonka toys manoeuvre endlessly.

It all looks so random and yet is – I trust – planned and plotted to perfection.

There was an old joke when I was an airy fairy arts student, that in the phone book the entry ran “ For Civil Engineers see Boring”.

How unfair. They are poets of mud and roadstone and steel. A bridge is a work of art – and useful too.

My brother in law watched the building of the Severn Bridge from the first posts in the grass through every stage. Posted to Germany just before it was finished he came back especially to watch the completion.

I’m beginning to feel the same about the A1. There’s something about seeing it change every day.

We’re planning to move from here at some point. But we definitely can’t go until the new road is finished – watching it happen is too interesting.