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We Was Brung Up Proper
WE WAS BRUNG UP PROPER !!
"And we never had a whole Mars bar until 1993"!!!
CONGRATULATIONS TO ALL MY FRIENDS WHO WERE BORN IN THE
1930-39 & 1940's to 1950's
First, we survived being born to mothers who smoked and/or drank sherry while they carried us and lived in houses made of asbestos...
They took aspirin, ate blue cheese, bread and dripping, raw egg products, loads of bacon and processed meat, tuna from a can, and didn't get tested for diabetes or cervical cancer.
Then after that trauma, our baby cots were covered with bright coloured lead-based paints.
We had no childproof lids on medicine bottles, doors or cabinets and when we rode our bikes, we had no helmets or shoes, not to mention, the risks we took hitchhiking.
As children, we would ride in cars with no seat belts or air bags.
We drank water from the garden hose and NOT from a bottle.
Take away food was limited to fish and chips, no pizza shops, McDonalds , KFC, Subway or Nandos.
Even though all the shops closed at 6.00pm and didn't open on a Sunday, somehow we didn't starve to death!
We shared one soft drink with four friends, from one bottle and NO ONE actually died from this.
We could collect old drink bottles and cash them in at the corner store and buy Toffees, Gobstoppers and Bubble Gum.
We ate cupcakes, white bread and real butter,milk from the cow,and drank soft drinks with sugar in it, but we weren't overweight because......
WE WERE ALWAYS OUTSIDE PLAYING!!
We would leave home in the morning and play all day, as long as we were back when the streetlights came on.
No one was able to reach us all day. And we were O..K.
We would spend hours building our go-carts out of old prams and then ride down the hill, only to find out we forgot the brakes. We built tree houses and dens and played in river beds with matchbox cars.
We did not have Playstations, Nintendo Wii , X-boxes, no video games at all, no 999 channels on SKY ,
no video/dvd films, or colour TV
no mobile phones, no personal computers, no Internet or Internet chat rooms..........WE HAD FRIENDS and we went outside and found them!
We fell out of trees, got cut, broke bones and teeth and there were no
Lawsuits from these accidents.
Only girls had pierced ears!
We ate worms and mud pies made from dirt, and the worms did not live in us forever.
You could only buy Easter Eggs and Hot Cross Buns at Easter time....
We were given air guns and catapults for our 10th birthdays,
We rode bikes or walked to a friend's house and knocked on the door or rang the bell, or just yelled for them!
Mum didn't have to go to work to help dad make ends meet because we didn't need to keep up with the Jones's!
Not everyone made the rugby/football/cricket/netball team. Those who didn't had to learn to deal with disappointment. Imagine that!! Getting into the team was based on
MERIT
Our teachers used to hit us with canes and gym shoes and throw the blackboard rubber at us if they thought we weren't concentrating ...
We can string sentences together and spell and have proper conversations because of a good, solid three R's education.
Our parents would tell us to ask a stranger to help us cross the road.
The idea of a parent bailing us out if we broke the law was unheard of.
They actually sided with the law!
Our parents didn't invent stupid names for their kids like 'Kiora' and 'Blade' and 'Ridge' and 'Vanilla'
We had freedom, failure, success and responsibility, and we learned HOW TO
DEAL WITH IT ALL !
And YOU are one of them!
CONGRATULATIONS!
You might want to share this with others who have had the luck to grow up as kids, before the lawyers and the government regulated our lives for our own good.
And while you are at it, forward it to your kids so they will know how brave their parents were.
PS -The big type is because your eyes are not too good at your age anymore
Sue, what if I post my next blog as an audio link. Promise I'll turn the audio up. Pardon?
Gaynor I always remember my old headmaster used to dab childrens cuts and grazes with neat iodine. Today teachers aren't allowed to administer anything. Sadly this is mainly because of the possibility of litigation by parents hoping to make a fast buck. the real world is more like Monty Python than Monty Python was!
This is heading towards the Monty Python "Yorkshiremen" sketch ("I got up in the morning at half-past ten at night, half an hour before I went to bed....").
In those days, a couple of Brazil nuts and a few oranges in our Xmas stockings were riches. When we went out to play, we got grazed knees and so on but that was normal.
We use to play on an old aerodrome , a relic from WW2, and we were gone from morn til night. There use to be tramps ( now homeless people ) who lived in the old aircraft hangers, that never bothered us, They use to have big concrete holding tanks that held water for the fire trucks to come and fill their tanks and we would balance on the edge of these things and pretend it was a balance beam and do gymnastics, none of use knew how to swim and CPR What was that? I guess when we fell off we always fell onto the dirt and not the water!
The whole neighborhood played there and as far as I know we are still all alive and kicking.
PS I had to still read your piece with my glasses on!
I used to tell my children all I got for Christmas was a lump of coal in my stocking. I was allowed to play with it for ten minutes before it was needed for the fire. I'm not sure if they believed me or not.
Philip, you're so right! My wife and I laughed our heads off reading your blog.
As a kid, the one and only admonition I heeded from my grandfather was "stay away from the old coal mines!" His restrictions even included the slag heaps which, to me, looked like a kid's version of Mt. Everest begging to be conquered. But on everything else I plea guilty!
In July we used to buy real cherry bombs and real M-80's at the fireworks stand before they were banned. Back then they carried the explosive power of 1/3 and 1/4 sticks of dynamite respectively. We'd light them, drop them inside a knot hole of a hollow tree, then run for cover because sometimes it brought down the entire tree. But more exciting than that was to go down to the river and light one then toss it off the bridge. The short fuse would burn under water and when it went off the fish came floating to the top--not dead just stunned. We'd run to the other side of the bridge and count the fish in sort of a "Dirty Harry" version of pooh sticks. I shudder when I think about it today! But we survived.
I sometimes wonder how my generation survived childhood! Building shantys in the quarry and getting someone to roll stones on top of them to see if they were safe. Exploring old colliery levels that hadn't been sealed, sliding down the mountain through the ferns on a chunk of hardboard, fighting mountain fires we started when camping!v Probably the most exciting activity was throwing stones at the rats down by the river - we couldn't afford pets!
Health and safety hadn't been invented then!
One of my favourite memories though is the cinema, the old magic 'silver screen'. Before everyone even had a tv this was a truly special experience, For years I believed the actors changed in the attic above the stalls. Tonypandy had three cinemas and we often lied about our age to see a horror movie that would probably be PG rated these days.
Big on type and big on content. Great article, Philip. I related to it big time! http://www.maggielyons.yolasite.com
Reposting the converso from Bill Feagins status update:-
Stop Following Don't email me when people comment
OK well this was a setup . And I now have to buy a copy of Skyrim for PC but OUCH ......I guess we've been put in our place
As a member of the "Wii Generation" I would like to question the appeal of going out and getting shitfaced every night of the week over sitting back at home, relaxing with a brutal match of Halo, World of Warcraft, or Wii Sports. Why should I go out to some smelly bar and get blasted when I can do any of that in a video game, except without the liver failure? And, I do get exercise. I walk to and from the hobby shop or video game store every day! That's at least 4 miles a day. And why go outside and get dirty and smelly to play with friends when I can play with millions of people online, and not break a sweat.
Sarcastically Yours,
Heron Bratschi
What we really need right now is someone from the Wii Generation to come on here and contradict and confound the crap out of us old timers
Any takers?
Exactly, Ceri. I made my mistakes and I've lived to tell (if anyone really wants to hear - more often than not, they don't, but that's OK). Many of the hippie-types I've seen of late have an altruistic worldview, and while that can't hurt, it's not very realistic, either. Eventually, you have to grow up and face reality!
Great rant Bill
And I know exactly what you mean. Seems those of us brought up in the 60's and 70's were the last generation to feel the call of the wild. I know when I was 13 I saw 'hippies' on TV and couldn't wait to drop out. I figured living a sleazy hedonistic lifestyle must be the coolest thing on earth. So I tried it and it was crap. Soon got over it. It seems most Generation X parents don't want their kids to make the same mistakes they did BUT without making mistakes how do you really learn anything?
Parents today are what happened - many of our contemporaries seem to feel their parents (and ours) were "too strict," etc., so they demanded that our playground toys be made safer - remember what we had? Yes, monkey bars set in concrete and rising 8 feet high! Oh, and Lawn Darts, remember those?
And then there's the whole self-esteem thing - we've coddled these kids too much. Merit? Skill? Nooooo, just let little Tyler on the team so he won't feel left out. There are no losers anymore, everybody gets a medal or a ribbon even if they finish in last place. And of course, because the standards and the costs of living have changed, now Mom and Dad both need to work, so the kids are babysat by the 1,000+ channels of rubbish on the TV, or by their Xboxes, Playstations, Wiis, or what have you.
And we've given them all cell phones so we can keep in touch with them - "For emergencies only," we say, but let's face it: When you're young, you can justify anything as an emergency. "OMG, what's Kayla doing?" So they text each other long, meaningless conversations: "Hey what r u doin" "Nothin u" "OMG i was like..." Ugh. Just like giving a young'un just going off to uni a credit card - again, "Only for emergencies." "OMG, we need pizza/beer/tunes/etc." And soon, they're in debt with no idea how to pay it off because they haven't been taught the value of money and earning it. (I only wish I wasn't speaking from experience...but I did learn my lesson.)
Anyway, all of this is why my wife and I don't have children, among other reasons. [/rant]
Interestingly, here is an excerpt from my ( short ) review of Lloyd Robson's Oh Dad: A Search For Robert Mitchum :-
Guess he turned out ok though