“Young people in Britain have become a lost generation who can no longer mend gadgets and appliances because they have grown up in a disposable world, the professor giving this year’s Royal Institution Christmas lectures has warned. “
It happens. I didn't know the simplest skills like plucking a chicken or cleaning the wick on a kerosene lamp or putting the bit in the draft horse's mouth that my blind grandmother could do with ease. There was a time (in my teen years) when I knew how to change a flat tire. I used to know how to thread a 55 year old sewing machine. And in my 50s, I could code html for a web page. I hope I don't lose my ability to make an apple sour cream pie--I've never written down the instructions. A German immigrant housekeeper who worked for my grandparents would make that for an after school snack for the children (my mom and her sibs) after the long cold walk from the country school, Pineview, uphill both ways, carrying a cello (or so the story went).
My mom, second from left, front row, and her brother Clare, second from right, back row.
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