You must have seen those posts on social networks where people pretend things were so much better in ‘the old days’. ‘Who remembers rolling around in dog shit and falling out of trees? The kids of today spend all their time on computer games and on mobile phones.’ It’s inevitably people from my generation who view the past through rose-coloured glasses and see something that I never remember seeing.
Perhaps it’s because we were quite poor that I don’t have a particular positive view of the old days. Supermarkets as we know them today didn’t exist and we didn’t even have a telephone in our house. We never ate out but then there was hardly anywhere to eat out for working class people. Restaurants existed for the better off, the middle and upper classes who lived in Clifton. Haute Cuisine for riff-raff like us was a Cod lot from Templars in Brislington if mum had had a good week or a free bag of ‘scrumps’, the left over fried batter at the side of the fish fryers, if she hadn’t.
Yes, we had 20 aside football matches at Victory Park on an evening when it wasn’t raining but entertainment was at a real premium in the late 1960s and early 1970s. For much of the time, I have vivid memories of being bored senseless, especially during the long winter nights that stretched, as I recall, from September to March. There was literally nothing to do, apart from scouts and cubs and given our local group was full of bullies and hard nuts, I soon said goodbye to that.
Seriously, I reckon I’d have loved it if computers games and mobile phones had existed. However, we had to make our own entertainment, as grumpy old folk always remind you, and given that most of us were not born entertainers, life could be very dull at times.
Were things better in the old days? It’s a matter of opinion, so here is mine: no it wasn’t. Look at the things I didn’t enjoy when I was a child:
- Supermarkets (including on line shopping)
- Mobile phones
- The internet
- Computers (including game consoles)
- A wide variety of affordable restaurants
- Colour TV
- DAB radio
- Having a car
- Central heating
- Foreign holidays (thanks to the likes of easyJet and Ryan Air)
- A shower in the bathroom
- BBC 6 Music
- Er…
- There’s so much more
My memories of childhood are of a far more austere and cheerless time and are certainly not clouded by a romantic, sepia-tinged nostalgia of an era that never really existed.
I do miss the wrestling on telly on a Saturday afternoon, crumpets toasted on an open fire, drinking a cheap bottle of cider and smoking a pack of five Park Drive in St Annes Woods but I wouldn’t want to go back there in a million years. It was good, but not that good.
