Years Ago

[tommy.irene]

.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 was 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?

[not_for_sale2024]

All good points. But we also gave our Mums and Dads a lot of bad headaches which they took Bex and Vincents to cure while not knowing they contained Phenacetin. Or at least they didn't understand the dangers. And some of the remedies to cure common ailments were a bit rough. I still cringe when I recall the tastes. Although I do have fond memories of the chocolate I was given afterwards.

[wide-world-of-stamps]

Yes, and playgrounds had old-fashioned swings, slippery dips & monkey bars, with no soft fall.

And no-one picked up their dog's mess & we stepped in it when running around the park (not the reserve as they all seem to be called these days!) - I don't miss that at all!

We could probably keep going on all night, but that'll do for now.

By the way, I'm in my 50's and still remember many of those things. It's all changed in the quite recent past.

[zanadoo_56]

I remember school sandwiches with really hard crusts by lunchtime though - especially in the corners.  Cling wrap is a modern convenience I like.

Remember riding a bike without a helmet?  I had a few falls but mostly ended up with gravel rash on my hands and legs.  Never hit my head on anything.  Also we would come home from school, get changed our of the hated school uniform then go out on the bike again to visit friends or ride around the suburbs...all OK as long as you were home before it got dark.

[travlyn2012]

Years Ago.  

1. All the girls at school had ugly uniforms

2. It took 5 minutes for the Tv to warm up.

3. You got your windscreen cleaned, oil checked and petrol served every time you went to the servo,    and it was free. 

4. They threatened to keep children back a year if they failed the school year.

And they did!!!!

5. No one ever asked where the car keys were because they were always in the ignition,

and the doors were never locked.

6. Bottles came from the corner shop without safety caps and hermetic seals, because no one had yet tried to poison a perfect stranger.

7. When being sent to the headmaster's office was nothing compared to the fate that awaited you at home.

8. When you could go to shop and come home with a big bag of lollies, cant do it these days, too many surveillance cameras.

9. When you went to the barber, he would give you a lollie after you had your hair cut, these days the barber would be arrested.

10. Mum cooked every night and nearly every meal was meat and 3 Veg with a Roast on Sunday.

11. You would reach into a muddy gutter to pick up a penny.

12. If you were at the beach and got into trouble, people would rescue you, now they stand there with a smart phone, filming you drowning and upload it Youtube.  

[kopenhagen5]

And licorice blocks were 3 for a cent.

[not_for_sale2024]

And I remember going to school and along the way I would stop at the corner shop and  buy 10c of really tiny musk lollies. They cost 1c per spoonful and the shop owner hated me because he didn't like dishing out 10 spoonfuls when I rolled up. I didn't care because I would eat them all day at school.

[zanadoo_56]

3. You got your windscreen cleaned, oil checked and petrol served every time you went to the servo, and it was free. 

I know a country town place that still does it - and they check your tyre pressure too.

[not_for_sale2024]

I remember I went to a primary school fancy dress party all excited because my friend lent me a cowboy outfit. My teacher told me I was an embarrassment because I was too fat to be a cowboy. I was shattered and that's where my memory ends.

[travlyn2012]

A teacher would probably be fired for that now, or have to attend councelling.

It is surprising what things are forever imprinted in our minds.