Shamelessly plagiarised from another forum
Meldrew rides again !
" 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 50 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 irrespective of our religion, sang the national anthem and no one got upset.
Staying in detention after school caught all sorts of negative attention we wish we hadn’t got.
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 were the antibiotics and sterilisation kit when I got that bee sting? Could I 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???????????????:) "
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Without wanting to trample on anyone's halcyon memories, a quick look at the National Statistics around mortality rates in the twentieth century suggests that the 'we' who lived a rose tinted existence untouched by the dread hand of health and safety were just lucky. If you look on the ONS website you will see - to take a random year from our bucolic past - that in 1951 40% of the people who died in this country were under 40, many of those deaths would now be preventable . You might also notice that there were a lot more suicides in 1950 then now - suggesting that , unfettered as they were by political correctness, at least some of the population weren't deliriously happy.
You don't have to be deliriously happy. Who is deliriously happy in today's society, where people barricade themselves in their houses and fear walking the streets at night?
I was a child of the 50s, a latch-key kid who grew up largely unsupervised. Statistically, you may be right that there was much sadness, and it was survival of the fittest for some, but each of us who lived with deprivation received every good thing that happened as a wonderful and unexpected bonus. Nothing was taken for granted. It would do no harm if a small measure of that existed today.
There were no 'rights', only responsibilities, and we were the better for it.
Jumping off stacked up bales of hay onto thick piles of straw that could have concealed farm implements.
What Playstation can give you that sense of adventure ?
In my case, jumping into bomb sites that could have concealed unexploded bombs.
Chicken, eggs and butter !!! LUXURY!
It was strictly Mariane margerine and the only chicken we saw was Rosie and Florry, who gave up their lives for Christmas and Easter for the only taste of chicken for the entire year.
Wax paper? The only paper in our house were recycled brown bags that is apart form cut up squares of newspaper on a string until the grand days when Jeyes hard paper adorned the loo.
Dunlop sand shoes? An embarassment of riches! Strictly bare foot for games and PE at our school, with vest and pants even with a windchill of minus 10, followed by satisfying hours of scratching chilblains, not to mention getting your tongue stuck to the ice on the inside of the bedroom window after wondering if the frost patterns tasted good and the days spent on sick kids beds trying to catch measles, mumps, german measles etc while still young...
"We got the cane for doing something wrong at school", our headmaster would pick at random from those queing to get into schol and then line up ten kids at a time, hands out, and taking a run would cane the lot with the rest of the school looking on as a lesson for us all (?!?). And an education where girls were not allowed to study anything higher than simple maths, languages were for toffs, where physics and technical drawing were deemed lessons for boys only, needlework and cookery were mandatory as was working half day a week in the local clothing factory, and being told that the only reason girls were taught English was that they would at least be able to teach their kids to speak properly.
And as for 'dysfuntiontional families' the secret lives of women revealed stories and coping mechanisms in families before divorce was possible and domestic violence was common, after all the women had learnt to cope and grown strong with their men away and now had to buckle under. There were a lot of people living secret lives for all sorts of reasons and a lot simmering away, and sometimes exploding, behind closed doors.
I'm surprised you don't mention paedophiles; there were two 'Peeping Toms' on our street plus a 'kiddy fiddler', the advice from grown ups was "never get changed in your bedroom without the curtains being pulled" and "don't go near the bushes in the play park".
Ah the good old days...
Having said that I do think that kids now live more sedantry lives and should be out running across playing fields. That is once they have done the piles and piles of homework and we buy back their playing fileds that were sold off...
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