The End of the Golden Age

We were born at the end of the Golden Age. All of our childhood and our youth were spent teetering on the edge of chaos. There were the wars, the terrorist attacks, the strikes and other forms of strife both within our civilisation and against our civilisation, where its enemies tried to tear it all down.

Somehow, though, for all those long years we were growing up: our world, our civilisation, our country, managed to carry on. Things fell apart: there were political, social, economic and all manner of other crises and disasters, but somehow we managed to have a home, our parents had jobs – most of the time - and we managed to survive it all, until we were grown up ourselves.

It was then it all fell apart.

There had been a long war, far away mostly, lasting for most of my childhood and teenage years. It was fought far away; in desert lands inhospitable and remote, where the alliances between tribes and warlords seemed to shift like the sands and the homelands of these mostly nomadic peoples.

Our soldiers, our boys, were caught up in the middle of all those shifting alliances and shifting sands, lost in a shifting landscape where this morning’s allies became this evening’s enemies and yesterday’s brave warriors today’s forces of evil.

Mostly, though, the war did not touch us. There were, though, sporadic terrorist outrages and this led to suspicion and fear.

The foreign was no longer a land of romance and mystery, a place of possibility. Now, the foreign was a land of death and those that we came across in our daily lies were regarded with suspicion and fear as everything we’d ever known and taken for granted fell apart around us.