Re: What percentage take-up for a 1950s lifestyle?

On 7 Mar, 20:22, "Ivan" <Ivan'H'ol...@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Maria wrote:
On 7 Mar, 11:10, "Gaz" <gaz...@xxxxxxx> wrote:
Dirk Bruere at NeoPax wrote:

Ivan wrote:
Gaz wrote:
Get yourself some bread and dripping, something that was
considered a treat and see how awful it tastes. Our society was
financially significantly worse off, things we take for granted,
such as fruit, clothing and meat, where often luxeries. Meat
especially, we think nothing now of having meat with every meal,
steak isnt a treat, chicken isnt something you only have once a
week....

But then Gaz, do you similarly welcome the cheap and easy
availability of alcohol? (which no one could possibly deny has
'always' represented a very
major curse in society).

However when I was a kid it was a very tightly controlled, a
bottle of spirit was for most people usually only affordable for
special celebratory
occasions, such as Christmas and New year, off-licences only sold
alcohol from around 7:30pm to 10pm and one of the only other few
available outlets
was the public house, again usually under every strictly imposed
and tightly-controlled licensing conditions.

Nowadays even spirits are dirt-cheap enough to drink on a daily
basis :o) and alcohol can now be purchased from so many different
outlets, virtually
around the clock.

What's your take on present day alcohol related problems such as
Friday and
Saturday night binge drinking, gangs of 13 year-olds smashed out
their heads
almost any evening in shopping precincts around the country, along
with an
alarming increase in serious related medical conditions, do you
think that
because of more affluence and liberalisation that these things are
now better or much worse than they were 50 years ago?

Overall the good outweighs the bad.

Of course it does, rose tinted specs, thats all.. Who here would be
willing to go down to the bottom of the garden to have a shit in the
outside toilet, in all weathers, remember to take the coal poker
with you to break through the ice...

Me - I had that and even ice on the inside of my bedroom windows in
the winter!
(60's not 50's)

I like it that we all talked to one another in the street - everywhere
I have lived in the past 20 years, the neighbours hardly speak to one
another at all.
I liked it that all our stuff was bought from small traders, so if one
pissed you off, there were plenty more where he came from.
I liked the corner shop because it was handy
I liked the idea that I could leave school and walk into a job even
though I was not A level material
I liked the Jubilee street party, and that all of us young'uns played
in the street together.
I liked it that I could ride my bike all over St Albans, all day long,
and nobody would worry where I was.
I liked it that I walked 2 miles to school and saved my bus money for
sweeties
I liked my four paper rounds and the wages I got, and my all day
saturday job
I liked it that the streets were clean

Yes I would go back to that, even with the outside toilet and Aladdin
heater. I felt alive and free and able to achieve things without
having to meet impossibly high standards or by being curbed by
restriction. (and no, I didn't even know what 'benefits' were - we
were poor but made do, and you could afford to then).

I would certainly return to the days when we paid our rates and our roads
and pavements were regularly resurfaced, and not full of dangerous and even
life threatening pot holes as they are nowadays.

When those same roads and pavements were swept on a regular basis by a local
street cleaner, and not only occasionally by a useless machine which can't
achieve anything due to parked vehicles.

Makes you wonder how the Spanish manage to not only collect the
rubbish *every day* but hose down the pavements to clean them too!

When our local police station was fully manned 24/7 and is now occupied by
what I take to be a couple of civilians working behind locked doors and even
then only during office hours!

Where I last lived, the police station was sold off as private housing
years ago, witht the main police station being 10 miles away.

When council workers would come round and tidy up any patches of local
authority owned land and spray the weeds with weedkiller, and to add insult
to injury there is now even a suggestion that we may have to have our refuse
collected fortnightly instead on a weekly basis.

We already have that - we aren't manageing - other councils do a
bigger bin for large familes, but ours doesn't - I have to pay for
commercial refuse collection now.


Just a few gripes about modern-day Britain to keep you all going, no doubt
myself and many of the rest of the year could think of pages more!

I wonder, is this sort of shit happens (or would even be tolerated) in other
countries, or is it only happening here in Britain?

We are still deferential and benign - this would probably be one of
the easiest countries in the world for a fascist dictatorship to be
installed with less than ten arrests. I'm surprised nobody has done it
- perhaps they are too benign too!

.

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