the good old days
Some of my best memories are from growing up in a house where winter meant wearing a sweater. Soft drinks were a Sunday dinner treat, and by treat,I mean exactly that, sometimes we were denied it. The one year I got a bike for Christmas, it was secondhand, but the exact type of bike I wanted, Yay. Most of my toys were chipped or broken, all were second hand.
TV had one channel and that started at 3 p.m. finishing at 11. Our TV took a few minutes to warm up, so I had to hold down the button for about 5 minutes to turn it on, no remote, remotes were for posh cunts.
Nobody ate at restaurants, at least nobody I knew. Everyone ate old fashioned home cooked meals for dinner, porridge for breakfast, bread and jam for supper. My mum knitted my school sweater to save money, quite a few mums did this. Schools were cold as fuck in winter, kids and teachers wore their coats.
If we wanted a little pocket money, we would do odd jobs for older neighbors, usually for a pittance, comics were cheap secondhand though. If you went on holidays, it was to rent a house in some rainy seaside shithole for a week, winter holidays were not invented yet.
Kids got lice, that was a normal thing to happen. Sticks were great toys. Dog shite turned white. Parks had porn.
Kids made things with their hands, learned how to use tools, got dirty. After school we built huts, stripped the wheels off old prams and made buggies, climbed trees, played football. Most kids hurt themselves at some point, but the scars were a badge of honour.
Mums and Dads knew how to fix things, or at least tried, replacing something was a last resort. I spent weeks holding a flashlight while my father swore at the washing machine he was trying to fix. I learned how to improvise and swear like a sailor in those weeks, I really got to know my parents, nowadays kids are stuck in front of a PSP or TV.

I guess what I'm trying to say is this, it's only money. Tighten the belt and live a simple life, turn down the thermostat and the TV. Chat with your loved ones, play cards or board games, play with your kids. This is going to be a rough ride for many of us, but over the past 25 years people have become greedy cunts who surround themselves with mass produced shit that they don't need, and it doesn't make them happy, so they buy more. Most of us forget what it was like to be without all this stuff, but it wasn't that bad at all, people were just as happy, I know I was.
(knackerz is skinning up, Tue 27 Jan 2009, 4:16, 15 replies)

Well said!!!
A bit of imagination costs nothing, at the end of the day. *click*
( SpankyHanky, Tue 27 Jan 2009, 8:01, closed)

Indeed.
I played Trivial Pursuit on the weekend due to having no elastictrickery. However, I think the Genus edition created in 1981 was not aimed at people born in 1980.
( M3rx likes the Asian ladies, Tue 27 Jan 2009, 9:42, closed)

Agreed.
My parents bought the 1981 Genus edition, and we've still got it. I can't get any of the sports questions (who won silver medal in the 1953 ferret-tossing championships in Sweden?), but the literature/history/science questions are all good. My brother bought the latest version recently: it's shit. Utterly, utterly awful. They've dumbed the questions down so much, and every other answer is "The Simpsons".
(The Empress it seems you CAN polish a turd!, Tue 27 Jan 2009, 10:29, closed)

click
I laughed my arse off at, "who won silver medal in the 1953 ferret-tossing championships in Sweden?"
(knackerz is skinning up, Tue 27 Jan 2009, 13:10, closed)

pssst...
the answer is: meeee!



not really, sadly
(The Empress it seems you CAN polish a turd!, Tue 27 Jan 2009, 14:09, closed)

dog shit
What ever happened to chalky crumblies?
( sandettie light vessel automatic New Twitter - @bollocksreally, Tue 27 Jan 2009, 8:27, closed)

I've read that white dog poo is mainly calcium from when dogs eat bones
so as most dogs don't have bones these days you don't see it.

My dogs are given bones and we have white dog poo galore.
(Juan Quar is clinging to her front teeth on, Tue 27 Jan 2009, 8:37, closed)

I never really looked for an explanation
but now I know.

Thanks.
(spent.fish flipping and gasping, Tue 27 Jan 2009, 11:29, closed)

I'd always thought
it was from the amount of ash they used to put in dog food.
(Harold's hip man!!, Tue 27 Jan 2009, 12:26, closed)

Yay for white poo
Also, did you ever see the stuff that grows white hair? that was a treat. One other thing I forgot to include, everyone back then had a vegetable garden, not many people had lawns. Think about it, roll up your sleeves and get busy.
(knackerz is skinning up, Tue 27 Jan 2009, 12:53, closed)

Juan is right
We feed our dog on lots of raw bones.

The lawn outside our house looks like a 1970's council estate.

we do pick it up, honest
( Davros' Granddad a voice of calm reason in a world of spastics., Tue 27 Jan 2009, 16:56, closed)

Winter Holidays...
Winter holidays had been invented, they were invented by my dad.

We took our summer holidays in late October, that way the sea side B&Bs were cheaper.

Imagine the same scottish crappy seaside resort in October.
We had the swimmng pool practically to ourselves, the beach was empty, mainly because most of the people had been blown away by the gale force winds.

I had that same holiday every year when I was a kid, funny thing is though, I loved every one of them.
(Andy-Bhoy I'm here all week, try the veal., Tue 27 Jan 2009, 11:49, closed)

'most of the people had been blown away by the gale force winds'
hahahahaha! Brilliant.

Years ago I scrabbled around for enough newspaper tokens to get cheap off-peak holidays at caravan parks in Wales.

We had brilliant times, with most attractions letting in the younger kids free, and the beaches to ourselves. Like a real holiday, only freezing cold. Happy times.
(Juan Quar is clinging to her front teeth on, Tue 27 Jan 2009, 13:32, closed)

So true!
Wonderfully written and truth in every word. I have a thought on white dog poo, this is my own theory.

Years ago dogs ate table scraps, basically anything we didn't want to eat, and that usually meant very little meat. Meat has a high iron content which turns your poo dark. So lack of meat would turn a dog's poo white. The reason why we don't see white dog poo any more is because we always feed them food with a high meat content. That's my theory and I'm sticking to it like dog poo to a shoe!
(Woofie, Tue 27 Jan 2009, 17:05, closed)

Not so.
The liver breaks down haemoglobin from the blood, producing bilirubin, which is excreted in bile from the liver. This is what gives mammals' poo its characteristic brown colour, rather than the diet itself, although as we know the colour can vary.

Incidentally, this important physiological process is referred to in 'The Silence Of The Lambs', where an imaginary character is named Billy Rubin.
(Juan Quar is clinging to her front teeth on, Tue 27 Jan 2009, 22:42, closed)