ON REACHING my 80th year I must confess that I sometimes walk into a room and wonder what I went in for, more often than not I also struggle to remember what happened yesterday.

The strange thing is I can still remember most of my life and this comes in very handy especially at election time because I can look back and remember who did what for our country.

I remember growing up in the London blitz and the amazing sense of community when the front door key was left hanging inside the letter box so that the kids could get in while mum and dad were still at work.

I remember when most school boys carried a pen knife, this was for sharpening pencils, whittling wood and cutting string. Oh, how things have changed.

I remember the days before knife crime, gangs and drugs and I remember when these first came on the scene, as a youth the nearest thing we had to drugs then was ten Woodbines and a pint of Watney’s Red Barrel.

I remember when the Marxist unions took control of the major industries and in my opinion helped destroy our car industry. British Leyland who became an infamous monument to the industrial turmoil that plagued Britain in the 1970s instigated by militant shop stewards who frequently brought BL’s manufacturing to its knees. I remember when my father could not get a job in the docks or the print industry unless he had friends or family in there. In my plumbing days I worked in one union closed shop job but never again, that was a pretty disgusting experience.

It took years to break the stranglehold of the communist-led unions and return to some kind of sanity. Now incredibly they are back and saying ‘vote for me’. Well, no thank you, definitely not for me because I still have my memory bank mostly intact.

So as the elections approach I feel fortunate to still have my memories to fall back on and vote accordingly but I am not surprised that some political parties want to encourage the younger generation to vote and even to have the voting age lowered. You see they know they don’t have the same memory banks.

Ron Howse

Redcliff View

Weymouth