I read John Guillaumier’s letter, ‘The good old days’ (June 7), with a degree of amusement but also an equal degree of bemusement.

Guillaumier says, about the 1950s and 1960s: “How carefree, exciting, idealistic and forward-looking were those two decades compared to today’s world threatened by terrorism on city streets and marred with a sense of impending crisis and doom.”

I am not quite sure which planet Guillaumier is referring to. The 1950s and 1960s on planet earth were characterised by the fear of nuclear war, the fear of communism and the fear of the population explosion.

People built fallout shelters, McCarthyism ruined many lives and, to borrow the words of a 2015 article published by The New York Times called ‘The Unrealised horrors of population explosion’, Paul Ehrlich’s 1968 book, The Population Bomb, sold in the millions with a jeremiad that “humankind stood on the brink of apocalypse because there were simply too many of us”.