Food For Thought?

[nelliebee]

For those over 40.......





My mum used to cut chicken, chop eggs and spread butter on bread on the same wooden cutting board with the same knife and no bleach, but we didn't seem to get food poisoning.

Our school sandwiches were wrapped in greaseproof 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 wearing a pair of Dunlop plimsoles instead of having designer label athletic trainers 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 and we complained about it at the time, yet we all grew up to accept the rules and to honour & respect those older than us.

We had 30+ kids in our class and we all learned to read and write, do our multiplication tables and correctly spell almost all the words needed to write a grammatically correct letter......., FUNNY THAT!!

We all said prayers in school and sang the national anthem, and getting detention after school caused all sorts of negative attention.

We all thought that we were supposed to accomplish something before we were allowed to be proud of ourselves.

I just can't recall how bored we were without computers, Play Station, Nintendo, X-box or 270 digital stations on Sky TV. We weren't!!

Oh yeah ... and where was the antibiotics and sterilisation kit when I got that bee sting? I could have been killed!

We played “He” and “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 Dettol and then we got our backside spanked.

Now it's a trip to A&E, 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 and on-one had ever heard of such a thing as ADHD.

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 on earth did we ever survive?

LOVE TO ALL OF US WHO SHARED THIS ERA.

AND TO ALL WHO DIDN'T, SORRY FOR WHAT YOU MISSED.

I WOULDN'T TRADE IT FOR ANYTHING!

Pass this to someone and remember that life's most simple pleasures are very often the best.

AAAAh, those WERE the days!!!!

[craft1948]

I remember all of the above, unfortunately I also remember 3 of my class mates having polio.

[ummmm]

When did it actually become illegal to beat your wife?

[suechu]

you're right too, nomercy, wasn't entirely the 'good' old days for sure

[rockyracoon]

Every era has it's good and bad and always will do, it'd be nice if we could pick and choose bits from each but it doesn't work like that. For myself and my kids, I'm perfectly happy living in the now and not the back then.

[Prudie]

And people died on average at least 10 years earlier and many illnesses/cancers etc were a death sentence. The advancement in medical science pretty much wipes out all that nostalgia for me.

[AB Editor]

Umm - I think rape was not recognized in marriage until something like '72. It was "legal" for a husband to "rape" his wife before that point.

I put the quote marks on because it wasn't a law saying it was okay (just an absence of a law saying it wasn't) and it wasn't considered rape at the time.

[ummmm]

Scandalous....the year before I was born to think my dad could have got away with raping my mum (he wouldn't because she'd beat sugar out of him...but still) the good old days!!

[jno]

lol Canary, I think the young people of today would be none the worse for a good air raid or two, teach them manners.

[jeffa]

Air raids taught manners? "After you." "No, after you!"

I think not...

[nelliebee]

This was posted as a lighthearted subject,!! It seems to have opened a large can of worms, I apologise if this has offended anyone.

[ummmm]

Why would anyone be offended?

[NoMercy]

Ed, marital rape wasn't a crime in England until 1991 (I was 14 back then).

[lozzer50]

they were good times at school holidays my mum would give me and my friend a brown paper bag with jam butties in it and a bottle of pop, we were gone all day and it was great fun !! we even played out in the rain !