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When I was a kid, adults used to bore me to tears with their tedious diatribes about how hard things were when they were growing up; what with walking twenty-five miles to school every morning .. uphill BOTH ways through year ’round blizzards. Carrying their younger siblings on their backs … to their one-room schoolhouse, where they maintained a Straight-A average, despite their full-time, after-school job at the local textile mill …. where they worked for 35 cents an hour just to help keep their family from starving to death!

And I remember promising myself that when I grew up, there was no wayin hell I was going to lay a bunch of crap like that on kids about how hard I had it and how easy they’ve got it!

But now that I’m over the ripe old age of thirty, I can’t help but look around and notice the youth of today. You’ve got it so easy! I mean, compared to my childhood, you live in a damn Utopia! And I hate to say it but you kids today you don’t know how good you’ve got it!

I mean, when I was a kid we didn’t have The Internet. If we wanted to know something, we had to go to the damn library and look it up ourselves, in the card catalog!!

There was no email! We had to actually write somebody a letter .. with a Pen! Then you had to walk all the way across the street and put it in the mailbox and it would take like a week to get there! There were no MP3’s or Napsters! You wanted to steal music, you had to hitchhike to the damn record store and shoplift it yourself! Or you had to wait around all day! to tape it off the radio and the DJ’d usually talk over the beginning and @#*% it all up! And talk of about hardship?

You couldn’t just download porn! You had to steal it from your brother or bribe some homeless dude to buy you a copy of “Hustler” at the 7-11! Those were your options!

We didn’t have fancy crap like Call Waiting! If you were on the phone and somebody else called they got a busy signal, that’s it! And we didn’t have fancy Caller ID Boxes either! When the phone rang, you had no idea who it was! It could be your school, your mom, your boss, your bookie, your drug dealer, a collections agent, you just didn’t know!!! You had to pick it up and take your chances, mister!

We didn’t have any fancy Sony Playstation video games with high-resolution 3-D graphics! We had the Atari 2600! With games like “Space Invaders” and “Asteroids” and the graphics sucked! Your guy was a little square! You actually had to use your imagination! And there were no multiple levels or screens, it was just one screen forever! And you could never win. The game just kept getting harder and harder and fast er and faster until you died! … Just like LIFE!

When you went to the movie theater there no such thing as stadium seating! All the seats were the same height! If a tall guy or some old broad with a hat sat in front of you and you couldn’t see, you were just screwed!

Sure, we had cable television, but back then that was only like 15 channels and there was no onscreen menu and no remote control! You had to use a little book called a TV Guide to find out what was on! You were screwed when it came to channel surfing! You had to get off your butt and walk over to the TV to change the channel and there was no Cartoon Network either! You could only get cartoons on Saturday Morning. Do you hear what I’m saying!?! We had to wait ALL WEEK for cartoons, you spoiled little brats!

And we didn’t have microwaves, if we wanted to heat something up .. we had to use the stove or go build a frigging fire . imagine that! If we wanted popcorn, we had to use that stupid JiffyPop thing and shake it over the stove forever like an idiot.

That’s exactly what I’m talking about! You kids today have got it too easy.

You’re spoiled!

You guys wouldn’t have lasted five minutes back in 1980.

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I used to work at Starbucks, and long ago when the nutty old woman sued McDonald’s for the fact she spilled hot coffee all over her ladyparts, an edict came down from the corporate lawyers. From that point on, every time we handed out a beverage (of ANY sort, even the bottled ones) we were required to say, “be careful, that’s hot.” Even, if you can believe this, for the frappucchinos, which are frozen. People were honestly disciplined for NOT saying it when handing out cold drinks. It was a perfect moment of lawyer-driven corporate idiocy. We used to get around it by handing out the cold drinks and saying, “Be careful. That’s really cold. Don’t … freeze yourself.”

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Ginger beer tastes like ginger, whereas root beer tastes like fizzy sweetened TCP.

And i recall pop rocks were called Space Dust…until the elf and safety decided kids might choke on it, blah, blah, usual story.

How long until anything small enough to be put in a mouth has the legend “Warning! Possible choking hazard!” inscribed upon it?

Is there any truth in the rumour that the shape of Earth’s continents spells out “Contains Nuts” in Galactispeak?

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I can be your gobstopper connection. There’s a store on Granville Island that sells them in all sizes from 1/2″ diameter to something an ostrich would have trouble with. And they do change colours and they have gum in the middle.

Pop rocks (you might have had Bottle Caps, which were much the same) were a kind of candy that fizzled and sort of exploded in your mouth. I think it was some kind of acid/base reaction like baking soda and vinegar. They tasted like different kinds of fruit, and the Bottle Caps tasted like different flavours of pop. Root beer is like ginger beer, only darker. So when you put the two together in your mouth your face sort of exploded in artificially-flavoured foam. It was cool.

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But I’m a bit puzzled. If your father got one penny of pocket money, that was four farthings. And a farthing must have gone a long way. Was there once a still smaller unit of currency than the farthing? A groat? (Unlikely, as that seems to have been four pennies.)

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Quite so. They were enormous things, and fully lived up to their name: you could hardly speak a word for an hour with one of those things in your mouth. And they’re probably illegal now.

It was long before my time (and perhaps beyond yours), but I used to know an old gentleman who told me that in 1914 you could catch a tram from the outskirts to Bristol city centre, have a pint of beer, see a show, catch the tram back, and still have change from sixpence.

I recall the house we lived in, at the time, was sold for 960 quid (Joe M)

The same old gent once pointed out a large five-storey house in Bristol, and told me that it had been sold, shortly after the war (the second one, not the first) for 100 pounds. I think the last time it changed hands, some 10 years ago, it was for something more like 300,000 pounds.

No wonder nobody saves these days, given money depreciates at such a rate.

Speaking of money, it used to be an occasional prank of my school chums to put a penny on a railway line, wait for a steam train to go over it, and collect the warm flattened disc afterwards. That would probably fall under the Prevention of Terrorism Act, these days.

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My pocket money was 6d per week, and with this largesse, I could buy a Halls Lucky Bag, (1d), which not only had a miscellany of sweets inside; there was always some little gimcrack gewgaw included, for example, a miniature scales, stamped out of the thinnest tin plate imaginable.

I could then visit to the Odeon cinema (earlier called the Astoria), to the Saturday morning Mickey Mouse Club matinee, (2d), and would still have money left. There was always 1d for the Sunday school collection, and the rest was wasted during the week.

I would be sent, by my mother, (now, today, that would not only be illegal, it would be tantamount to child abuse), across the road to the cigarette machine on the church annexe wall to put in a shilling and pull 20 Players Medium out of the drawer, complete with a penny piece stuck down the cellophane covering.

Later, after the war started, with the “abundant” sweet coupons available, I used to waste my ration in one go: 2 ounces of the cheapest boiled sweets were 1 1/2 d. As the war progressed, I used to sell my sweet coupons, and doubled my pocket money. Gobstoppers were out of the question, you couldn’t trade with them , they were too big,

Cigarettes became at best scarce, and at worst non-existent to non-regulars. Even to their regulars, some shops would only sell 5 cigarettes per person at one time: 2 Pasha (some Turkish, oval, evil smelling things), and 3 Virginia cigarettes. They
, the tobacconists, would decide what cigarettes you would receive, dependent entirely on what they had left. Notvthat I smoked, but you can’t help noticing things.

Under-counter along with other black market dealings flourished, and some people never went without.

One thing was however certain; Britons have never been so healthy as they were at that time.

I will not say how old I am, but Jack R: you are a mere youth.

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