General Chat

A friend just sent me this. It certainly makes you wonder! See below Sue

My Mom used to cut chicken, chop eggs and spread mayo on the same cutting board with the same knife and no bleach, but we didn't seem to get food poisoning. My Mom used to defrost hamburger on the counter AND I used to eat it raw sometimes too, but I can't remember getting E-coli. Almost all of us would have rather gone swimming in the lake instead of a pristine pool (talk about boring). The term cell phone would have conjured up a phone in a jail cell, and a pager was the school PA system. We all took gym, not PE... and risked permanent injury with a pair of high top Ked's (only worn in gym) instead of having cross-training athletic shoes with air cushion soles and built in light reflectors. I can't recall any injuries but they must have happened because they tell us how much safer we are now. Flunking gym was not an option... even for stupid kids! I guess PE must be much harder than gym. Every year, someone taught the whole school a lesson by running in the halls with leather soles on linoleum tile and hitting the wet spot. How much better off would we be today if we only knew we could have sued the school system. Speaking of school, we all sang the national anthem and staying in detention after school caught all sorts of negative attention. We must have had horribly damaged psyches. I can't understand it. Schools didn't offer 14 year olds an abortion or condoms (we wouldn't have known what either was anyway) but they did give us a couple of baby aspirin and cough syrup if we started getting the sniffles. What an archaic health system we had then. Remember school nurses? Ours wore a hat and everything. 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, PlayStation, Nintendo, X-box or 270 digital cable stations. I must be repressing that memory as I try to rationalize through the denial of the dangers could have befallen us as we trekked off each day about a mile down the road to some guy's vacant 20t, built forts out of branches and pieces of plywood, made trails, and fought over who got to be the Lone Ranger. What was that property owner thinking, letting us play on that lot? He should have been locked up for not putting up a fence around the property, complete with a self-closing gate and an infrared intruder alarm. Oh yeah... and where was the Benadryl and sterilization kit when I got that bee sting? I could have been killed! We played king of the hill on piles of gravel left on vacant construction sites and when we got hurt, Mom pulled out the 48 cent bottle of Mercurochrome and then we got our butt spanked. Now it's a trip to the emergency room, followed by a 10-day dose of a $49 bottle of antibiotics and then Mom calls the attorney to sue the contractor for leaving a horribly vicious pile of gravel where it was such a threat. We didn't act up at the neighbor's house either because if we did, we got our butt spanked (physical abuse) here too ... and then we got butt spanked again when we got home. Mom invited the door to door salesman inside for coffee. Kids choked down the dust from the gravel driveway while playing with Tonka trucks (Remember why Tonka trucks were made tough?... it wasn't so that they could take the rough Berber in the family room), and Dad drove a car with leaded gas. Our music had to be left inside when we went out to play and I am sure that I nearly exhausted my imagination a couple of times when we went on two week vacations. I should probably sue the folks now for the danger they put us in when we all slept in campgrounds in the family tent. Summers were spent behind the push lawn mower and I didn't even know that mowers came with motors until I was 13 and we got one without an automatic blade-stop or an auto- drive. How sick were my parents? Of course my parents weren't the only psychos. I recall Donny Reynolds from next door coming over and doing his tricks on the front stoop just before he fell off. Little did his Mom know that she could have owned our house. Instead she picked him up and swatted him for being such a goof. It was a neighborhood run amuck. 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 needed to get into group therapy and 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 survive?

Of course it raises the question of who let it happen? Couldn't have been us, could it?

This echos my thoughts, I keep saying, how did we survive? and now I have to contend with,(from my grandsons girlfriend) in Denmark we do it this way. Sometimes I feel like screaming. Yes but I'm British and I do it this way not as the EU or whoever dictates. What went wrong or right depending on you poimt of view?

Sue thats is a brilliant thread Im only 31 and so much of that is true well said my dear! They always laugh at me when I go round work saying you kids these days you dont know your born! Jan x

We used to play on some waste ground at the end of our road. We made a dirt track for our bikes (which we built ourselves from bits of old bikes and painted with gloss paint from Dad's shed) and happily spent the day there with our jam sandwiches and bottles of water or Corona if we were lucky! We built a camp fire in the garden and cooked sausages (if our Mums felt generous) and windfall apples for afters. Never had tummyache though! Sometimes we went fishing for tiddlers at Bluegates by Nonsuch Park in Cheam. Rumour had it that there was a giant pike in the pond, and it had bitten a boys hand off when he tried to catch it! We also went scrumping in a disused orchard. There was an open air swimming pool by the orchard, but it only had rainwater in it. Good for catching newts though! An old French lady lived in the big house, but it was so far from the orchard we were never caught! Ah happy days - where are you now, David Barnden, the Fry brothers, the Morrell cousins and my mate Julie Studd? Sue

We used to raid the bomb sites for a plank of floorboard and spend the morning making a scooter out of it and two old push chair wheels, and off out on it in the afternoon. That was when I wasn't exploring Wimbledon Common with the dog. The whole of the autumn up our pear tree munching almost ripe pears, or hiding in next doors garden raiding their Goosegog bushes. And all of that before I left junior school. I lost an eye, broke my arm and have two nice scars on my chin as a permanent reminder of the happiest and free-est days of my life. Jim

This has certainly got the old brain cells working. What memories. I can remember my brothers and friends looking for old bits of wood to make a gocart.Old prams wheels.If you were lucky,you found an old orange box,they seemed bigger then. What fun whizzing down the hills. We used to play cowboys and indians(wait for it) in the local graveyard.It was a really old one,hadnt been used for years. The boys used to go to the wood merchant and buy arrows for a penny.No one told us off. No one got sued when someone had nails up their foot for trodding on boxes left outside the greengrocers. Now I know why I like looking at gravestones,must have started off then unknowingly. Jam sandwiches and bottles of water,pretending to take babies out for a walk,me and my friends with our dolls prams. The list is endless,better sign off,give someone else a chance to put their memories. trish

My sisters and I said something similar only a few days ago,taking bottles of water and jam butties to the park and wandering all over the park,drinking lovelyy icy cold water fro the drinking fountain when ours had finshed. In the winter having mugs of Oxo from the little shop near the swimming baths ,walking home with wet hair(no driers). Bottles of milk delivered to the door step and they never went "OFF" no matter how long they sat there. Treats of chippy teas on a friday all wrapped in newspaer complete with inky/greasy fingers!!!.