Live life for tomorrow

When I was growing up in the 1970s I loved visiting my grandparents house, which always seemed huge compared to our own and full of curiosities, which I now know to just have been an accumulation of junk.

However, one room always intrigued me: Grandad's 'secret room'. This room always had the door closed and the curtain was always drawn. Inside the air was filled with a sweet and musty aroma and there was a gentle hum of electric motors. This was of course nothing sinister it was simply a spare room converted into a larder. Fridges and freezers had been installed, cupboards overflowed with tins and packets and bubbling away on an old side-board was the latest attempt at nettle or plum wine.

This was a room 'just in case'. And my grandparents weren't alone in being prepared for tomorrow, they were part of a generation of people that saved 'for a rainy day' and never threw anything away because 'it might come in handy one day'.

My grandparents were also the people that bought me my first pair of binoculars, my membership to the YOC and introduced me to their relatives in Sussex who worked on farms and were able to show me a completely different view of the world.

They had different values from my parents. Money wasn't a barrier to having a day out when all you needed was a flask, a packet of biscuits and river to walk along. They were a generation that lived life by the seasons of the year and always looked forward to the next.

My grandparents weren't business people, weren't educated at university and weren't very well read but to me they were more visionary than most people who have studied how to write a vision statement.

"Live life for today" is the motto of the 21st century. But what about tomorrow? Is it right that we should live our lives by such a selfish philosophy?

We are actually pretty good at surviving and all the evidence suggests we will continue to live longer, so maybe we should start thinking about our tomorrow and the tomorrow of others.

Maybe we should all start our own larder.