It's getting like a war zone in the main forum.....I ain't going back in without me 'elmet an' flak jacket!
Indalo
Indalo
I felt safer in Beirut!
- Thread starter indalo
- Start date
Don't worry, I've seen it far worse!
In fact I've been out of the picture for the second time recently, first time four days, second time eight days up to yesterday, each time offline and no phones, due to theft of the 600 line cables that feed my area. They run through remote woodlands which makes it very easy to use a 4 x 4 to tow the cables out of the underground tubes that house them. Since there's no mobile phone signal on any network in my immediate home area, it's like going back to the 19th century.
In fact I've been out of the picture for the second time recently, first time four days, second time eight days up to yesterday, each time offline and no phones, due to theft of the 600 line cables that feed my area. They run through remote woodlands which makes it very easy to use a 4 x 4 to tow the cables out of the underground tubes that house them. Since there's no mobile phone signal on any network in my immediate home area, it's like going back to the 19th century.
C
Cyclezee
Guest
Firstly Tony, congratulations on reaching 19,000 posts, an amazing achievement
Sorry to hear that you have been offline, I feel like I have had a limb removed without an internet connection of some sort, how sad am I
Oh, what was it like in the 19th century, do tell
Regards,
I don't have first hand experience but much familiarity with some of it's circumstances!Oh, what was it like in the 19th century, do tell
I grew up in a world with plenty of horse drawn transport, even the milk floats powered by horse. Companies like Bass delivered their beer on Sentinel and Foden steam lorries. Trains local and distant were all drawn by steam locomotives. I spent two years in one English village where the only communication with the outside world was one bus a week on Wednesdays. Our wireless set was powered by an accumulator that had to go back to the local electrical shop for a day each week to be recharged. Some of our light bulbs were rated and marked in candlepowers and our wall sockets were 2 amp 2 pin. No fridge, vacuum cleaner or washing machine, just daily shopping, brooms and a scrubbing board in a butler sink. Only one room in a typical house heated with a coal fire that had to be cleaned out, laid and lit every morning.
Plastics didn't exist, the alternatives to wood or steel being brittle bakelite or hard white asbestos. TV was more an idea than a reality, just wireless sets and gramophones with 78 rpm records for entertainment. Today's youngsters would have a fit if dumped back at that time!
C
Cyclezee
Guest
Ah, but were we not happier and more content back then without all the gadgets and so called labour saving devices we have today? Of course there were the downsides, rickets, polio, back breaking hard work, no electric bikes etc., etc.
Yes, we certainly were happier, working more with a harder life but getting more fulfillment from that.
The obesity problem scarcely existed, nobody suffered from PTSD, it hadn't been invented, neither was there hyperactivity disorder. We were born, we lived, we died. Simples!
The obesity problem scarcely existed, nobody suffered from PTSD, it hadn't been invented, neither was there hyperactivity disorder. We were born, we lived, we died. Simples!
You're absolutely right Scotty, but I wasn't saying it was a golden age, it was just different with advantages and disadvantages as I've briefly shown.
We can never go back and I wouldn't want to, but that doesn't stop me from recognising those ways in which it was better, as well as the ways in which it was worse.
We can never go back and I wouldn't want to, but that doesn't stop me from recognising those ways in which it was better, as well as the ways in which it was worse.
Certainly is. Although I liked reading about some of the differences listed above.
I can't imagine doing things like the washing manually. You'd never get any down time. But at least you'd all be pretty fit from all the physical activities.
I wonder what it will be like in 40 years time...
I can't imagine doing things like the washing manually. You'd never get any down time. But at least you'd all be pretty fit from all the physical activities.
I wonder what it will be like in 40 years time...
Mondays was the nation's wash day. On a monday my mother would spend the whole day scrubbing clothes on the washboard in the butler sink, while boiling whites in a copper gas heated boiler. The moment I got home from school my immediate job was winding the mangle for the major items like sheets etc, my mother feeding them through while I did the hard work of turning the handle to give her some relief. Then it was helping her to fill the washing lines. After doing an hour or two of that from about 8 years old onwards, fitness was assured, and with food rationing added there was no chance of becoming obese. I was nick-named "tin-ribs" in the family since they all clearly showed like a skin covered skeleton!
From 11 years old I was doing a double paper round in the morning, leaving home at 6 am, then after an after school snack it was a double round in the evening delivering the Bournemouth Daily Eco as it was at that time. By 7 pm I was home after a 13 hour day. After the Saturday morning rounds, I crossed the road to Ralphs the butchers and spent to about 1 pm delivering weekend joints all over north Bournemouth on a trade bike, collecting the money for them as I went. Then in the afternoon I helped Sid the assistant butcher in making the stock of sausages for the coming week, a bit like the mangle job really, winding the screw driven compressor to press the mix we'd made into the skins. After that it was the end of day scrubdown, washing down the blocks, counters and window platforms, cleaning the windows and scattering fresh sawdust over the shop floor ready for the Monday. I had Sundays off.
Today's kids would have a fit if asked to do a fraction of that, but the sad thing is that they would love the chance if they had it. Kids love entering into the adult world of work, and as recently as the 1970s they still could, being seen on market stalls everywhere. But then into the 1980s the nanny state crowd started to interfere and now the restrictions make it almost impossible, maximum number of hours, earliest and latest start times, plus health and safety measures. Most of what I did would be banned today.
What will it be like in 40 years time? It could go one of two ways. We could continue on the present path of increasing flab and multiplying number of neuroses and inadequacies. On the other hand, if we believe the gloom-mongers, we could go backwards to an impoverished future of greater hardship.
I won't be around to find out.
.
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We run a small Third World (sub-Saharan) charity. The kids there lead the same sort of hard life that we lived during the Second World War - though of course they battle wirh even greater problems than we ever had to. Disease, lack of fresh water, very poor sanitation and no electricity. Yet we have to have the greatest respect for these children - and their parents - because they work hard in appalling conditions trying to better themselves. They manage with great dignity, astonishing good humour and are very forgiving of our crass ignorance. The youngsters are very mature - I've had an eight year old take me shopping in the fish market - she selected the fish, haggled over the price and was quite upset when her mum insisted on doing the cleaning & cooking. They treasure education. I honestly feel regret that some of my teenaged relatives don't have half the coping skills of some of my young African friends. I feel even more regret that all of my young African friends don't have 1% of the chances we in the west throw away. Sorry. Rant over.
Tom
Brilliant posts Flecc, fascinating insight into not-so-recent history.
I worked in a cotton mill in the North for a couple of years in my late teens (mid-1980's) and I believe that I may have been one of the last to work in such an traditional industry. All the textile industries in my home town of Stockport have disappeared, although the mills still stand, mainly converted into swanky flats. We used to work 6 days a week, 5 days production and 1 day (Saturday) for mill cleaning in preparation for the following week's production. It was hard labour and I used to think I got paid well (how little did I know then).
As a teenager I used to enjoy the hard work, cycling to work, building muscle operating heavy machinery and carrying heavy weights around for 8 hours a day, I used to hate the cleaning on a Saturday, cotton dust everywhere, oil, dirt, fixing things and I couldn't wait to escape to blow my hard earned cash on Saturday night. I'm sure lots more teenagers would jump at that if they weren't all brainwashed into thinking that a degree is the only way to go straight from school.
A degree can come later and cheaper
You are right that the yoof of today would have a shock at having to work hard manual labour 6 days a week for a relative pittance and I think that about the youth in my mid-40's so I am only a couple of generations removed from the youth, social and industrial change certainly happens quickly in the modern 'digital' era!
I worked in a cotton mill in the North for a couple of years in my late teens (mid-1980's) and I believe that I may have been one of the last to work in such an traditional industry. All the textile industries in my home town of Stockport have disappeared, although the mills still stand, mainly converted into swanky flats. We used to work 6 days a week, 5 days production and 1 day (Saturday) for mill cleaning in preparation for the following week's production. It was hard labour and I used to think I got paid well (how little did I know then).
As a teenager I used to enjoy the hard work, cycling to work, building muscle operating heavy machinery and carrying heavy weights around for 8 hours a day, I used to hate the cleaning on a Saturday, cotton dust everywhere, oil, dirt, fixing things and I couldn't wait to escape to blow my hard earned cash on Saturday night. I'm sure lots more teenagers would jump at that if they weren't all brainwashed into thinking that a degree is the only way to go straight from school.
A degree can come later and cheaper
You are right that the yoof of today would have a shock at having to work hard manual labour 6 days a week for a relative pittance and I think that about the youth in my mid-40's so I am only a couple of generations removed from the youth, social and industrial change certainly happens quickly in the modern 'digital' era!
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Tony missed your posts good now your back, you took me back to childhood in Coventry all those things i recall today what would they do about rationing using a coupon for food, remember as a toddler going past pub and they were drinking out of jars, and sometimes we went to local shop where you bought penny lolly, ( a lump of ice with juice in it ) and you put in handkerchief so it must have protein added by then ? lol .
local Bobby would give you a clip if caught scrumping, People were more neighborly and help one another.
I am not so sure, and wonder if they were they good old days. ?
local Bobby would give you a clip if caught scrumping, People were more neighborly and help one another.
I am not so sure, and wonder if they were they good old days. ?
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Indeed, the transformation has been incredibly quick Tom. Those past wages which we thought of as reasonable or good were little more than basic life sustaining, those immediately after WW2 having much in common with today's benefit levels.
Certainly the work and life in general was much harder, but that brought with it more sense of daily achievement and satisfaction than is present in so many softer modern lives. The greater happiness that was more present then resulted in part from that and in part from the simplicity and stability of life then. Today for many, life seems to feel unsatisfactory, unfulfilling, uncertain, insecure, none of which do anything for contentment, let alone happiness.
Now we've swapped the centuries old ways of achieving satisfaction for the new ones based on consumerism and looking forward to the next big thing, but the benefits from those have proved to be very transient and make for community disharmony through gross inequalities.
You are absolutely right that many of today's teenagers would love the old ways of work and satisfaction if given the chance to experience them, increasingly denied by the one track future they are being straight jacketed into. For most of my life I've been preaching against the Victorian academic education that is the only one offered to our kids, it's a disastrous mistake. A large proportion cannot benefit from, of even cope with academia, so they drop out early, either mentally or physically, and become dissatified and disruptive in society.
Germany has got it right, a streamed education system that enables craft as well as academic futures, and I've no doubt that has been a major element in the huge success of that nation in the post-war world. It produces a population which satisfies all levels of need, giving almost all the chance of a satisfying life of work which they are suited to. They self evidently have less drop-outs and greater social harmony.
I can see no hope for our changing though, while we are largely run by the results of the academic only approach, emanating from Eton, Harrow, Oxford and Cambridge etc. They have no real breadth of vision.
Certainly the work and life in general was much harder, but that brought with it more sense of daily achievement and satisfaction than is present in so many softer modern lives. The greater happiness that was more present then resulted in part from that and in part from the simplicity and stability of life then. Today for many, life seems to feel unsatisfactory, unfulfilling, uncertain, insecure, none of which do anything for contentment, let alone happiness.
Now we've swapped the centuries old ways of achieving satisfaction for the new ones based on consumerism and looking forward to the next big thing, but the benefits from those have proved to be very transient and make for community disharmony through gross inequalities.
You are absolutely right that many of today's teenagers would love the old ways of work and satisfaction if given the chance to experience them, increasingly denied by the one track future they are being straight jacketed into. For most of my life I've been preaching against the Victorian academic education that is the only one offered to our kids, it's a disastrous mistake. A large proportion cannot benefit from, of even cope with academia, so they drop out early, either mentally or physically, and become dissatified and disruptive in society.
Germany has got it right, a streamed education system that enables craft as well as academic futures, and I've no doubt that has been a major element in the huge success of that nation in the post-war world. It produces a population which satisfies all levels of need, giving almost all the chance of a satisfying life of work which they are suited to. They self evidently have less drop-outs and greater social harmony.
I can see no hope for our changing though, while we are largely run by the results of the academic only approach, emanating from Eton, Harrow, Oxford and Cambridge etc. They have no real breadth of vision.
I think both good and bad as I said earlier, but as I've replied to Tom above, the satisfactions that did come from those age old ways were more lasting. All the signs are that we are very definitely on a bad path now and we urgently need to make some major changes if it's not to get worse.