Black and White? (Under the age of 40? You won't understand.)

General Discussion
1

A friend has just sent me this - how true :


My mum used to cut chicken, chop eggs and spread butter on bread on the same cutting board with the same knife and no bleach, but we didn't seem to get food poisoning.

Our school sandwiches were wrapped in wax paper in a brown paper bag, not in ice pack coolers, but I can't remember getting e. coli

Almost all of us would have rather gone swimming in the lake or at the beach instead of a pristine pool (talk about boring), no beach closures then.





We all took PE ..... and risked permanent injury with a pair of Dunlop sandshoes instead of having cross-training athletic shoes with air cushion soles and built in light reflectors that cost as much as a small car. I can't recall any injuries but they must have happened because they tell us how much safer we are now.
We got the cane for doing something wrong at school, they used to call it discipline yet we all grew up to accept the rules and to honour & respect those older than us.

We had 30+ kids in our class and we all learned to read and write, do maths and spell almost all the words needed to write a grammatically correct letter......., FUNNY THAT!!

We all said prayers in school and sang the national anthem, and staying in detention after school caught all sorts of negative attention.

I thought that I was supposed to accomplish something before I was allowed to be proud of myself.

I just can't recall how bored we were without computers, Play Station, Nintendo, X-box or 270 digital TV cable stations. We weren't!!

Oh yeah ... and where was the antibiotics and sterilisation kit when I got that bee sting? I could have been killed!

We played “King of the Hill” on piles of gravel left on vacant building sites and when we got hurt, mum pulled out the 2/6p bottle of iodine and then we got our backside spanked.


Now it's a trip to the emergency room, followed by a 10 day dose of antibiotics and then mum calls the lawyer to sue the contractor for leaving a horribly vicious pile of gravel where it was such a threat.



To top it off, not a single person I knew had ever been told that they were from a dysfunctional family.

How could we possibly have known that?

We never needed to get into group therapy and/or anger management classes.

We were obviously so duped by so many societal ills, that we didn't even notice that the entire country wasn't taking Prozac!

How did we ever survive?

2

There were good things about the past, just as there are good things in the present.
To dismiss peoples lives is not polite.

3

I quite agree Doreen. Simon I think you should apologise.

4

a couple of things of interest - one is that we had no gym shoes - at school in NZ most kids ran bare feet! stones and all (ouch at the memory!) The second is that I recall both my mother and grandmother reminiscing about how things were 'in their day'. Truth is from a certain age we will all have memories of the good old days (or bad old days) and no doubt the kids who have everything now and computers, cell phones and smart phones, etc, will be wondering why their children and grandchildren are so engrossed in the space age stuff that will no doubt come along.

The last 50 years has seen some of the most incredible changes in technology and I am enjoying being part of that. I enjoy it more because it means I can keep in touch with some special people in my life - some who happen to live 20,000km away - and keep up with what my son is doing (a little less far away but still not next door).

What I don't like is that some people would rather use devices to entertain themselves rather than communicate with friends and family, like sitting down with someone or going out together for a walk or a coffee.

5

AH THE GOOD OLD DAYS, WE ALL MISS THEM.

Just think in the good old days you never traveled too far from your home, and a telephone was a luxury.

How I miss them days -NOT.

this is the 21st century, looking back is bad for you, you must look forward, if you want those days, back your bags and bugger off back to England. Your home now is over here.

There was nothing good about them days, just as there is nothing good about the current days. YOU HAVE TO MAKE THE MOST OF THE PRESENT.

6

IRST YORKSHIREMAN:Aye, very passable, that, very passable bit of risotto.

SECOND YORKSHIREMAN:Nothing like a good glass of Château de Chasselas, eh, Josiah?

THIRD YORKSHIREMAN:You're right there, Obadiah.

FOURTH YORKSHIREMAN:Who'd have thought thirty year ago we'd all be sittin' here drinking Château de Chasselas, eh?

FIRST YORKSHIREMAN:In them days we was glad to have the price of a cup o' tea.

SECOND YORKSHIREMAN:A cup o' cold tea.

FOURTH YORKSHIREMAN:Without milk or sugar.

THIRD YORKSHIREMAN:Or tea.

FIRST YORKSHIREMAN:In a cracked cup, an' all.

FOURTH YORKSHIREMAN:Oh, we never had a cup. We used to have to drink out of a rolled up newspaper.

SECOND YORKSHIREMAN:The best we could manage was to suck on a piece of damp cloth.

THIRD YORKSHIREMAN:But you know, we were happy in those days, though we were poor.

FIRST YORKSHIREMAN:Because we were poor. My old Dad used to say to me, "Money doesn't buy you happiness, son"

.FOURTH YORKSHIREMAN:Aye, 'e was right

.FIRST YORKSHIREMAN:Aye, 'e was.

FOURTH YORKSHIREMAN:I was happier then and I had nothin'. We used to live in this tiny old house with great big holes in the roof.

SECOND YORKSHIREMAN:House! You were lucky to live in a house! We used to live in one room, all twenty-six of us, no furniture, 'alf the floor was missing, and we were all 'uddled together in one corner for fear of falling.

THIRD YORKSHIREMAN:Eh, you were lucky to have a room! We used to have to live in t' corridor!

FIRST YORKSHIREMAN:Oh, we used to dream of livin' in a corridor! Would ha' been a palace to us. We used to live in an old water tank on a rubbish tip. We got woke up every morning by having a load of rotting fish dumped all over us! House? Huh.

FOURTH YORKSHIREMAN:Well, when I say 'house' it was only a hole in the ground covered by a sheet of tarpaulin, but it was a house to us.

SECOND YORKSHIREMAN:We were evicted from our 'ole in the ground; we 'ad to go and live in a lake.

THIRD YORKSHIREMAN:You were lucky to have a lake! There were a hundred and fifty of us living in t' shoebox in t' middle o' road.

FIRST YORKSHIREMAN:Cardboard box?

THIRD YORKSHIREMAN:Aye.

FIRST YORKSHIREMAN:You were lucky. We lived for three months in a paper bag in a septic tank. We used to have to get up at six in the morning, clean the paper bag, eat a crust of stale bread, go to work down t' mill, fourteen hours a day, week-in week-out, for sixpence a week, and when we got home our Dad would thrash us to sleep wi' his belt.

SECOND YORKSHIREMAN:Luxury. We used to have to get out of the lake at six o'clock in the morning, clean the lake, eat a handful of 'ot gravel, work twenty hour day at mill for tuppence a month, come home, and Dad would thrash us to sleep with a broken bottle, if we were lucky!

THIRD YORKSHIREMAN:Well, of course, we had it tough. We used to 'ave to get up out of shoebox at twelve o'clock at night and lick road clean wit' tongue. We had two bits of cold gravel, worked twenty-four hours a day at mill for sixpence every four years, and when we got home our Dad would slice us in two wit' bread knife.

FOURTH YORKSHIREMAN:Right. I had to get up in the morning at ten o'clock at night half an hour before I went to bed, drink a cup of sulphuric acid, work twenty-nine hours a day down mill, and pay mill owner for permission to come to work, and when we got home, our Dad and our mother would kill us and dance about on our graves singing Hallelujah.

FIRST YORKSHIREMAN:And you try and tell the young people of today that ..... they won't believe you.

ALL:They won't!

7

We had 52 in our eleven plus class and we were taught by a teacher who had done the shortened course for war returnees.We could always distract him by referring to the war in whatever lesson we were having.

Despite this he knew almost to the child who would pass the eleven plus, actually he got it wrong because one boy passed that thee thought wouldn't!

We also had board dusters and chalk thrown at us and were told to bring out the necessary equipment if we were not paying attention. That was one of the plimsolls that we used for gym and which we were kept in our desks. Our classroom was in the church hall.