From Simon Le Bon to Oppenheimer
Sometimes when we’re about to sit down to dinner, one of the boys will choose a music CD to play while we eat. I like it when this happens; it has a positive effect on the atmosphere. This evening, Barney chose a CD of songs from the 1980s. One of the songs was from Duran Duran and contained the line, “You’re about as easy as a nuclear war.”
Cue question from Barney: “What’s a nuclear war?”
Oh, how different things are now to how they were when I was 12 years old… none of us had to ask what a nuclear war was. Children now certainly have much to concern them, but at least that’s not on their list.
Barney’s question started a lengthy conversation which ranged through nuclear weapons, the short and long-term consequences of the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, nuclear power, Chernobyl (Barney had heard about that - I’ve no idea where), the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, the Cold War, war in general, the attitudes of the superpowers to war and peace, terrorism and its effects, growing up in Northern Ireland in the 1970s and 1980s, people leaving their homes to escape violence, how many countries we’d visited, the split between East and West Germany, the Berlin Wall and its fall…
All from one line in a Duran Duran song.
In: conversations, education, family, life
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ROFL, that’s what I like about home ed, you can cover so much “stuff” just by conversations at the table without ever needing to open a text book!