Stress.

Now there’s a generational thing.

I mean, whoever heard of stress 50 years ago? 

Perhaps they didn’t have the highly pressurised lives we lead today.

I’d look well telling my grandad that in Heaven.

“Oh, you did?” he’d say.  “Was it from the Bosch trying to shoot your bollocks off?”

No. Their generation and others before them ( and, come to think of it, today’s societies less emotionally fragile than ours) just got on with it.

We, on the other hand, mither over work-related stress.  During the Depression there wasn’t work to get stressed about.

But we, we expect our lives to be lived in some namby-pamby land where “happiness reigns all around and music plays ever so loudly”.

WELL WE DON’T.

DH Lawrence had it right about that frozen bird.

Bill Bryson saw it as a positive national characteristic when he first came to England – “Mustn’t Grumble”.

He wouldn’t hear it now, of course.  He’d be told “She’s off work with stress”.