Nostalgia Corner

[biffvernon]

Our horse drawn rag-n-bone man shouted "Any old Iron?". Recycling was important before it became fashionable. I don't think he ever collected rags or bones.

The milkman had a horse-drawn cart too.

[RenewableCandy]

There really is a bloke who comes down our street fttt with a hoss and cart, and shouts "Rag-bone!" I saw him just last month.

[Aurora]

Does anyone else remember the Onion Johnny's who plied their trade on a bicycle in the fifties?

[RenewableCandy]

T'other side of Channel

[Aurora]

T'other side of Channel

No. In Wales of all places.

[syberberg]

Oh well, in for a penny...

Born March 1972, I remember, in no particular order of fondness:

Proper winters, with snow that stayed for weeks, even on the North Sea coast. Was even sent home from school a few times because of the snow (no, that did not mean I threw snowballs at the staff...we still had the slipper and the cane).

Spending most of my summers exploring the denes and surrounding countryside.

Getting conkers from horse chestnut trees by throwing sticks up at the chestnuts...no hard hats or safety goggles required.

Tatty-Picking week in October, which coincided with the half term holiday.

The arrival of MacDonald's. The opening of the Metro Centre.

Fishing with my dad, fishing holidays in Ireland.

The smoke plumes from stubble burning.

The huge flocks of lap-wings, crows and seagulls in the autumn.

Where have all the swallows gone?

Catching bees by the dozen in plastic sweetie jars from the corner shop (there were 4 shops in the village, now there's just one).

Saving glass pop bottles coz you got 5p for returning them.

Helping my dad with the weekly shop, going from the butcher, to the baker to the green grocer. All of whom were people not nameless drones in a supermarket (no offence meant to nameless drones who work in supermarkets, hopefully you know what I mean).

[lancasterlad]

Does anyone else remember the Onion Johnny's who plied their trade on a bicycle in the fifties?

I was born in 1960 and remember the onion sellers on bicycles, the local grocer who delivered on his bike and came in for a cup of tea, the rag n bone man, the chaps that came to wind up the clockwork timers on the street lamps, British Gas doing the conversion to North Sea gas, the Raleigh Chopper, the local tramp who came for a few pennies and a cup of tea, ice on the inside of the window in winter, our first colour TV, the anthracite boiler in the cellar, Double Diamond beer, Watneys Pale Ale, Party 7, cans without ring pulls.......

[2 As and a B]

Spending most of my summers exploring the denes and surrounding countryside.

Getting conkers from horse chestnut trees by throwing sticks up at the chestnuts...no hard hats or safety goggles required.

There was a huge horse chestnut tree in our garden, on a bank above the garage, that used to periodically drop whole branches. When finally taken down we found an enormous slug of concrete in its hollow trunk!

Used to get the nuts down with sticks also, and play conkers of course! And mess around in streams and ponds in the nearby wood (unsupervised), climb trees and was forever falling out or getting parts of the tree rammed into my eye.

Wasp, bee and nettle stings a frequent hazard in summer.

Styes and conjunctivitis were uncomfortable. Chilblains worse.

[adam2]

To counter the above notion of 'Happy Days', I was born in the first half of the last century! Rationing, housing shortage, no hot water in the house, outdoor WC, smog, poverty, poor schooling, log books & slide rule, hard work and a hard life. I never want to go back to those days.

Agree, the good old days were better in some respects, but in general especialy for the average worker, life has improved greatly in the last 50 years.
Railways were better, beer was cheaper, and I found log tables and slide rules useful, life was simpler.
But I certainly would not relish a return to the living standards of decades ago.
Life without indoor plumbing, heating, washing machines, and telephones would be unpleasant, it may be forced on us but is hardly to be welcomed.

[rightee]

There was an onion seller from France in our small welsh town this Spring. He said he was boarding temporarily in Cardiff and they sold door to door in the evenings there, so the tradition hasn't died out!

[kenneal - lagger]

I've got a book of 7 figure log tables somewhere which was used for surveying calculations as well as the 4 figure ones we used at school. A friend of ours has a collection of hundreds of different slide rules - they're a collectors item now.

I remember bread and milk deliveries to the house. They came by sled in the 1963 winter.

I vaguely remember the Coronation street party we had with all the rest of the children in the street and ration books lying around the house. You would need a street closure order now to do that but in those days there was hardly any traffic at all anyway so why bother. Most of the residents in the street were policce families so no one would have argued.

For some reason, my grandmother always had the little square bottles of orange juice seemingly for years after rationing ended. Don't know where she got it from. I don't remember anything about rationing itself, just the ration books which we used to play with.

We used to live on Barn Hill in Wembley and there was a pond in the park at the top of the hill with a stream flowing out which we used to dam. Great fun.

[Aurora]

There was an onion seller from France in our small welsh town this Spring. He said he was boarding temporarily in Cardiff and they sold door to door in the evenings there, so the tradition hasn't died out!

[the_lyniezian]

I'm rather a young 'un for here. I was born in 1985. Yet even then I can remember a little of life as it might have been before, and quite a few changes.

I suppose my early years were at the tail end of the era when home computers, CD players and video recorders were still exciting new technology and not commonplace, so naturally I was somewhat excited by these things. Until at least around 1990-91, we had none of these, though my aunts and grandma had some, and I can recall my aunt (a teacher) bringing home those one of those old BBC Micros over the holidays and mucking around with the educational software. I don't think we even got a car 'til around '89, and I remember my aunts or grandma giving us lifts, or walking to the shops or all the way out to my aunts' (my mother said she did it to tire me out so I'd sleep and stay out of trouble...)

20 years ago, we still had a butcher's and greengrocer's down our road- both are now a vetinary surgery. Even the newsagent's/post office has merged with the general store, the empty shop space being a beauty salon of all things (there are already 2 within easy walking distance). The shop still used to do soft drinks in returnable glass bottles, now onl found at the farm shop we get our fruit and veg from. Even the milkman sems to have gone.

Yes, I probably did spend a lot of time watching TV or playing on the computer. I was a bit of a loner, did have friends at primary school though, and did used to pplay silly games with my sister occasionally (a habit continuing into my teenage years) or mucking about with water guns (another habit that persisted even into student days, having water fights with the other folks on the corridor once and inventing trick with empty mineral water bottles with a hole bored in the top with a compass point- good practical joke to try if you can be bothered!) I did recall getting out a lot more- my aunts and grandma took us out places, sometims for a picnc tea after school to an out-of-tow ncountrypark or up on the moors, and I used to like mucking about in the water or whacking tennis balls around. Also, went out on my bike a lot, either round the block (and paying my grandma surprise visits) or all over the place with my Dad (as far out as Leyburn rond about my 14th birthday, on which I remember getting horrendous sunburn).

Yet sadly the technology has taken over. The first computer wan't up to much- an already-ancient Apple II+ with twin 5.25" floppy drives and a tiny black-and-white monitor- used mainly for games, simple programming and general mucking about. (There was a primitive text editor (Apple Writer) and a spreadsheet program (Visicalc) but it really wasn't worth the bother.) Then came the Acorn A4000, same as at school, which was capable of rather more- graphics programs, proper word processing, better games, and still the built-in BASIC interpreter for programming.

I confess to being not much of an avid gamer* until getting addicted to Tekken 3 on a ferry back from the continent in '97, which led me to get a Playstation and it was all downhill from there. We didn't get the Net 'til '99 not long after getting the first Windows-based PC, only a rather slow dial-up connection and downloading an MP3 could take half an hour! Started to go on the sliding scale down towards internet addiction round about 17, which only got worse at uni. where I first experienced an always-on, fast internet conection. Partly responsible for the decline in my studies, sadly, and possible lack of major employment 'til now. Something I have yet to curb on a serious level, important not only for the sake of reducig my carbon footprint and energy usage (and my mother's electricity bill...) Methinks it's time to apply for more jobs, do more round the house and garden and get a certain 2-wheeled contraption out for a spin...

*EDIT: I did still play some games on the Apple and later the Acorn, but it was all the other kids who had the Nintendos, Sega Megadrives, Gameboys and so on. I preferred the wider mucking-about possibilities a real computer could offer.[/u]

[the_lyniezian]

I was born in the early fifties and can vividly remember:

Hand made, ill-fitting, woolly jumpers.

Still handhand-knit woolly jumpers, as knit by my aunts and grandma (see above) in the '90s. Used to have them at primary school, where they didn't care if you didn't wear the school logo, as long as the colour was right. Secondary school was more finnekey.

Still have an old gansey my grandma knit me (she died, sadly, of cancer in '05) and still put in my winter order to my aunts occasionally- got some gloves somewhere too, and have had scarves (uncomfortable) and even hats!

One wonders when the old folks go, how many people will still have the old skills like knitting. I know a couple of girls from the SPEAK group at my old uni., which I still am involved with, who knit, so it can't all be bad. And I amadvised men knit and have knitted too (my elder aunt is always going on about the lead miners of Swaledale knitting socks of 4 needles after a hard 15-hour shift, so it's definitely not that girly! Then, knitting was a cottage indutry there too...)

[the_lyniezian]

I suppose ultimately there'll have to be something of a return to the past, though not quite. I suppose the days of too much plenty, too many gadgets will go (recall back in '88-ish when we had no computer (now we have 3 in regularish use and another 2 not so), 2 TVs (now we have 4), no video recorders, no mobile phones and no car). And I don't see why, when so many things in the past were made without plastic, that we can't even now go back to that- more wood, metal, glass (with returnable, not just recylable, bottles!) and cellulose-based substances.