The Golden Age #1

 My reading of the prologue and first chapter of Kenneth Grahame's children's book "The Golden Age" (1895). Grahame is, of course, most famous for the fabulous "Wind in the Willows" - which I would love to record when time and the world allows. This reflective work shares much with Willows, particularly the love of the natural world and the sense of a simplistic age lost to modern readers. It is a mix of Grahame's own boyhood recollections of larks and games fused with fictional imaginings of what a group of orphans get up to on their holidays.

The children are looked after by aunts and uncles who seem on a par with the ones that Saki describes in his works - vaguely well-meaning bores and domestic tyrants. The children, doubtless benefitting from an expensive classical education, refer to them as the Olympians because they are as distant and arbitrary as the Gods themselves. The children's lives are much more taken up with the kinds of rustic deities (like the wind spirit in chapter one) who would never have been allowed into the hallowed halls of Olympus itself. I do not know if 21st century children have similar experiences of imaginative games or could identify with Harold, Charlotte and the rest. If some modern day Grahame put pen to paper maybe it would all be about computer games, climate change hysteria, and cyber bullying on mobile phones (or am I being cynical?).

The title also comes straight from Greek mythology, of course, with the passage of the Great Ages - the Golden one having been the best. As the nameless narrator wonders at the end of the prologue, it maybe that within our own lifetimes we move through a series of Eras and often find adulthood much more like the Age of Iron than of Gold or Silver.