The Lemon Fool

Lessons to be learnt here for the younger folk

As children, we would ride in cars with no seat belts or air bags.

Our baby cots were covered with bright coloured lead-based paint.

We had no childproof locks on medicine bottles, doors, or cabinets, and when we rode our bikes, we had no helmets.

If you lived in the country it meant hitchhiking to town as a young kid

We drank water from the garden hose and not from a bottle. Horrors!

We would spend hours building our go-carts out of scraps and then rode down the hill, only to find out we forgot the brakes. After running into the bushes a few times we learned to solve the problem.

We would leave home in the morning and play all day, as long as we were back when the streetlights came on. No one was able to reach us all day.

No mobile phones. Unthinkable.

We played dodgeball and sometimes the ball would really hurt.

We got cut and broke bones and broke teeth and there were no lawsuits from these accidents. They were accidents. No one was to blame but us.

Remember, accidents?

We had fights and punched each other and got black and blue and learn to get over it. (And mammies never got involved!)

We ate bread and butter, and drank sugary pop but we were never overweight, cos we were always outside playing.

We shared one bottle of lemonade with four friends, from one bottle and no one died from this?

We did not have Playstations, Nintendo 64, X Boxes, video games and all 99 channels on Sky Digital TV, video tape movies, surround sound personal mobile phones, Personal Computers, Internet chat rooms... we had friends.
We went outside and found them.

We rode bikes or walked to a friend's home and knocked on the door, or rung the bell or just walked in and talked to them. Imagine such a thing.
Without asking a parent! By ourselves! Out there in the cold cruel world!
Without a guardian. How did we do it?

We made up games with sticks and tennis balls and ate worms and although we were told it would happen, we did not put out very many eyes, nor did the worms live inside us forever.

Our actions were our own. Consequences were expected. No one to hide behind.

The idea of a parent bailing us out if we broke a law was unheard of. They actually sided with the law, imagine that! This generation has produced some of the best risk-takers and problem solvers and inventors, ever. The past 50 years has been an explosion of innovation and new ideas. We had freedom, failure, success and responsibility, and we learned how to. And you're one of them.

...Big girl's blouse!

Now, if you lived as a child in the 50s or the 60s - I could tell you things that could make your hair fall out (and possibly did...).

It has already
Please post and give us all a laugh

We had blue asbestos on tap in our kitchens.

Drank lovely soft water supplied via nice lead pipes.

Had hot water heaters in our bathrooms that routinely 'exploded'.

Had great fun X-Raying our own feet outside shoe shops.

Were given watches as presents that glowed in the dark from Curium.

Were given metallic mercury and cyanide compounds to play with.

That's before we come to the enriched uranium...

Thanks

XFool wrote:Were given metallic mercury and cyanide compounds to play with.

Yes my dad often used to cite this, how he used to pour it from hand to hand in the lab at school. He often felt it was all safety gone mad and would happily go on about it.

He died of Motor Neurone Disease, which has since been linked to handling mercury.

C.

Remarkably attracted to gold nibbled pens not your own of course

TVs. Three (part time) channels, BBC1, BBC2, Granada. No remote controls.

Schools. Regular verbal/physical abuse from sociopathic teachers.

We lived for three months in a brown paper bag in a septic tank. We used to have to get up at six o'clock in the morning, clean the bag, eat a crust of stale bread, go to work down mill for fourteen hours a day week in-week out. When we got home, our Dad would thrash us to sleep with his belt!

moorfield wrote:We lived for three months in a brown paper bag in a septic tank. We used to have to get up at six o'clock in the morning, clean the bag, eat a crust of stale bread, go to work down mill for fourteen hours a day week in-week out. When we got home, our Dad would thrash us to sleep with his belt!

And yet when you try and explain that to the kid's today they don't believe you!

moorfield wrote:We lived for three months in a brown paper bag in a septic tank. We used to have to get up at six o'clock in the morning, clean the bag, eat a crust of stale bread, go to work down mill for fourteen hours a day week in-week out. When we got home, our Dad would thrash us to sleep with his belt!

You were lucky
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ue7wM0QC5LE

pje16 wrote:We ate bread and butter.

Luxury. Cardboad and lard in our day

--kiloran
edit...with acknowledgements to moorfield for quoting Monty Python first

Sixpences as legal tender (2.5p) -two would get you a top-of-the-range ice lolly. Coke was 5.5p ....
Beano and Dandy, and later Warlord and Bullet
That summer of '76
The first skateboard craze
Punk
My first encounter with a computer - Commodore PET
My first computer , Sinclair ZX81
Star Wars Ep IV, at the cinema
Seaside Special
The Likely Lads
Holiday 7? with Cliff Michelmore - theme by G Giltrap
Ski Sunday
James Hunt
Colditz, on a Sunday night
The Professionals
Listening to the Top 20 rundown on a Sunday night, at my gran's , on the stairs with a portable Decca tranny
Swap Shop and Tiswas
'The Spy who Loved Me', and Lotus Esprits

An optimism about the future...I've got all the time in the world (going back to a Bond theme)..

AleisterCrowley wrote:An optimism about the future...I've got all the time in the world (going back to a Bond theme)..

Not if you are like the last dude who said that!

I have since discovered that time doesn't flow at a constant rate. It accelerates as one gets older.
20 to 30 takes ten years, 30 to 40 is gone in about 5 or 6 years, and so on. I turned 50 a year or so back and I'm apparently 56 now

AleisterCrowley wrote:My first encounter with a computer - Commodore PET

Ooooh, mine too. My radio ham mate in 1978/9 was into tracking amateur radio satellites across the sky with an array or Yagis that were on motorised servos (including polarisation). My job on the PET (in his radio shack in Chadwell Heath) at the tender age of 18 was to use an equation he provided to send pulses to his transceiver to decrement the frequency progressively during each pass to keep the thing in tune (Doppler). Vaguely understood the Doppler effect, had self taught myself BASIC, and figured the rest out with the help of the equation he provided. (I suspect he'd be disappointed in my career progression.) C.

AleisterCrowley wrote:I have since discovered that time doesn't flow at a constant rate. It accelerates as one gets older.
20 to 30 takes ten years, 30 to 40 is gone in about 5 or 6 years, and so on. I turned 50 a year or so back and I'm apparently 56 now

God help my dad who's is 91, so by next week he should get a telegram from the queen

moorfield wrote:TVs. Three (part time) channels, BBC1, BBC2, Granada. No remote controls.

Schools. Regular verbal/physical abuse from sociopathic teachers.

We lived for three months in a brown paper bag in a septic tank. We used to have to get up at six o'clock in the morning, clean the bag, eat a crust of stale bread, go to work down mill for fourteen hours a day week in-week out. When we got home, our Dad would thrash us to sleep with his belt!

Leather belt?

You were lucky!

PS Re. sado/sexually frustrated teachers, our neighbours sent their boys to a local private school. It was K....., but I don't want to give the full name cos apparently it still exists. Even in the 70s, some people called it 'Kinky K....' due to all the stories. I learned many years later that the school nurse was known as the circumciser because she had so many 1st years circumcised when they arrived. Over the years, I met other people who'd been there and the stories would make your hair stand on end.

But it was long ago and the trains ran on time, and there was always honey for tea....etc.

Steve

csearle wrote:

AleisterCrowley wrote:My first encounter with a computer - Commodore PET

Ooooh, mine too. My radio ham mate in 1978/9 was into tracking amateur radio satellites across the sky with an array or Yagis that were on motorised servos (including polarisation). My job on the PET (in his radio shack in Chadwell Heath) at the tender age of 18 was to use an equation he provided to send pulses to his transceiver to decrement the frequency progressively during each pass to keep the thing in tune (Doppler). Vaguely understood the Doppler effect, had self taught myself BASIC, and figured the rest out with the help of the equation he provided. (I suspect he'd be disappointed in my career progression.) C.

I can remember listening to the digital speech from UoSAT (1 or 2?) on 2m, just using a Slim Jim as base antenna

To return to the 1950s. I always treasured the memory of how I picked up Sputnik 1 on short waves on our home radio, confirmed by timing its orbital period. Recently I eventually came across a recognisable picture online of the remembered radio receiver, it was an HMV.

Sadly, looking at it closely, I saw the short wave band didn't go far enough to pick up signals from Sputnik. So bang goes yet another happy childhood memory.

pje16 wrote:We made up games with sticks and tennis balls and ate worms and although we were told it would happen, we did not put out very many eyes, nor did the worms live inside us forever.

I remember hearing a story about a kid who got convinced it was OK to eat worms. I thought it was made up.