Laudator Temporis Acti

A.L. Rowse (1903-1997), A Cornish Childhood (London: Jonathan Cape, 1942), p. 51:

But these old people had plenty of time on their hands: no cinemas, no wireless, no gadding about by bus and car. They had to provide their own amusements, and this they did heartily and with vivacity and inventiveness. I daresay they were the last generation in which the fullness of old Cornish customs and ways was maintained. For all these same songs were sung by my mother's parents, Granny and Grandfather Vanson; while the next generation, their children, were incapable of singing them. There was an unconscious change of taste and habit going on which let these old things die, so that by the next generation again, mine, they had practically completely gone and we never heard them.

So with the games and dressing-up and practical jokes, we did not find them so funny as they had: they derived amusement from them over years and would laugh till tears ran from their eyes when the old folk who remembered them got together and recalled the 'old days'. But then we had never taken part in them, and, I suppose, were affected unconsciously by the change of taste. The jokes were very elementary; we did not find them so amusing. But I have no doubt now that there was infinitely greater value, more character, variety and fun in the amusement which they provided for themselves and of their own inventiveness — genuine folk-creativeness in its own way — than in all the passive, provided amusements of cinemas, jazz-dancing, swing-music, theatre-organs (the most horrible invention of the human mind), in our own doped, decadent and rather despicable age.