congrats to the oldies

[0iD]

CONGRATULATIONS TO ALL THE KIDS WHO WERE BORN IN THE 1920's, 30's 40's, 50's, 60's and 70’s!!

First, we survived being born to mothers who smoked and/or drank while they carried us and lived in houses made of asbestos.
They took aspirin, ate blue cheese, 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 cribs were covered with bright colored 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.
Riding in the back of a utility vehicle on a warm day was always a special treat.
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, Wendy's, Subway.

Even though all the shops closed at 6.00pm and didn't open on the weekends, 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 fruit tingles, fruit drops, Wilson's Toffees, Bubble Gum and some crackers to blow up frogs with.
We ate cupcakes, white bread and real butter 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 scraps and then ride down the hill, only to find out we forgot the brakes. We built tree houses and cubby houses and played in river beds with matchbox cars.

We did not have Playstations, Nintendo's, X-boxes, no video games at all, no 99 channels on cable, no video tape movies, no surround sound, 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.......no really!
And in December, there was only one festive holiday....... CHRISTMAS ...... and everyone wished each other MERRY CHRISTMAS!
And NOT.... HAPPY HOLIDAYS .....
Take it or leave it!

We were given BB guns and sling shots for our 10th birthdays,
We drank milk laced with Strontium 90 from cows that had eaten grass covered in nuclear fallout from the atomic testing at Maralinga in 1956.
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!
RUGBY and CRICKET had tryouts and not everyone made the team. Those who didn't had to learn to deal with disappointment. Imagine that!! Getting into the team was based on MERIT AND NOT DUE TO BLACKMAIL, CORRUPTION, THREATS AND GUILT FROM THE PAST..... Strange but true!
Our teachers used to belt us with big sticks and leather straps and bully's always ruled the playground at school.
The idea of a parent bailing us out if we broke the law was unheard of. They actually sided with the law!
Our parents got married before they had children and didn't invent stupid names for their kids like "Kiora" and "Blade" and "Ridge" and "Vanilla"

This generation has produced some of the best risk-takers, problem solvers and inventors ever!
The past 70 years have been an explosion of innovation and new ideas.
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.

Kind of makes you want to run through the house with scissors, doesn't it?!

[IBM]

You're just rolling around in this cr@p now, aren't you?



Couldn't keep it to Banter, could you? No, you had to go and pour this miserable stuff over the rest of us.

I can understand something like this when it does the rounds of the mySpacers 30+ club, making everyone feeling all warm and cuddley reliving their youth, but do you really have to dump it in here too?

[chicken]

80's kid here and a lot of that still applies to me.

The thing I think kids miss out on the most these days is that freedom of being able to spend the day a mile away larking about in some woods with no contact, without parents freaking out that a Gary Glitter might be hiding in a tree. Now many kids can barely go down the park on their own

[Optical668]

Yeh that sucks i remember when i used to go down to a nearby stream and build dams with my friends when i was a young lad specialy on a hot summers day theres a spring water pond which we used to build a dam and make the water go higher in the pond sorta bit so we could sit in it and cool off my friend had a dog called Mischief a big golden retriever that used to jump in the pond we just made and paddle about cooling off. Now the pond is gone after the council decided to turn it into some kind of garden by coundnt be borthered and left it looking like a construction site.

[Lucio]

I think it's a bit of a misnomer to say that things were "better" or "worse" when everything was very different.

Then again, this is just a joke thread so who cares?

[pauldarkside]

making everyone feeling all warm and cuddley reliving their youth, but do you really have to dump it in here too?

Hey it worked for me ... got my chipped tooth from falling off a witch's hat

I'd certainly not want to relive it - remember it yes - there are some ignorances I'm glad we've overcome. I do feel sorry for the new generations who've missed out on the freedoms we once enjoyed

[Sprite]

No forums...

[Oobie-]

80's kid here and a lot of that still applies to me.

The thing I think kids miss out on the most these days is that freedom of being able to spend the day a mile away larking about in some woods with no contact, without parents freaking out that a Gary Glitter might be hiding in a tree. Now many kids can barely go down the park on their own

same!

and I also agree on the latter.

[Gerrard]

80's kid here and a lot of that still applies to me.

Ditto.
However, I also had the luxury of an Amiga when I was about 8, so best of both worlds!

[chicken]

Ditto.
However, I also had the luxury of an Amiga when I was about 8, so best of both worlds!

Oh yes, and the Amiga... Kids these days don't know what they're missing!

[Lee H]

Pfft - I had an Atari STE1024 instead of the Amiga.

I also did all the listed things like climbed trees, feel out of a few as well banging my noggin a few times, once quite badly

[Dareos]

we would never have guessed Lee

[99Flake]

Pfft - I had an Atari STE1024 instead of the Amiga.

You have no idea how sorry I am feeling for you at the moment. I can sense your pain and denial due to the deprivation.

A500 every time.

[Rave]

This isn't a personal attack on you OiD, rather on the original authors of the email. Anyway, this has been doing the rounds for ages, although predictably some even more distasteful rubbish has been added to it by various illiterates recently; examples:

Only girls had pierced ears!

And in December, there was only one festive holiday....... CHRISTMAS ...... and everyone wished each other MERRY CHRISTMAS!
And NOT.... HAPPY HOLIDAYS .....
Take it or leave it!

Mum didn't have to go to work to help dad make ends meet!

Our teachers used to belt us with big sticks and leather straps and bully's always ruled the playground at school.

Our parents got married before they had children and didn't invent stupid names for their kids like "Kiora" and "Blade" and "Ridge" and "Vanilla"

Nice.

But what really pisses me right off is this crap:

This generation has produced some of the best risk-takers, problem solvers and inventors ever!
The past 70 years have been an explosion of innovation and new ideas.
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.

Right, who makes up about 98% of current governments around the world? PEOPLE BORN 1940-1970. YOUR GENERATION IS THE ONE THAT HAS COCKED EVERYTHING UP, YOU BLOODY RETARDS.

And while you are at it, forward it to your kids so they will know how brave their parents were.

Brave? BRAVE?

I'd like to find whoever added that line and ram it down their bloody throat. The absolute cheek of it!

[acrobat]

hehe take no prisoners Rave.

I kind of like the gist of what it is meant to "mean"... And some of it is important! To be fair though, it is largely rubbish

We had no childproof lids on medicine bottles, doors or cabinets and when we rode our bikes, we had no helmets

Is that supposed to be something to be proud of or what??? They only added childproof lids because countless kids died... Is it suggesting it would be better to not have those lids?

As children, we would ride in cars with no seat belts or air bags.

Oh woohoo.... what a marvellous carefree time it was, to be able to have a head on collision and fly head first through a pane of glass at 70mph and then have our skulls smashed open on the road.

Take away food was limited to fish and chips, no pizza shops, McDonalds, KFC, Wendy's, Subway.

Since when is limited choice something to look fondly upon? Also, fast food was proper crap back then! Fish and chips are basically just crappy carbohydrate, drenched in gallons of fat.. nice work Britain on your fabulous national dish.. you dumbasses. Makkies and stuff get so much stick, but really... its about 5 billion times better than how it was before. Before the yanks invaded and rescued us from ourselves, fast food was "greasy spoon cafes" and they where bad. They where filled with ciggy smoke, and you got a rubbish luke warm cup of tea with far too much milk, in a cup that was far too small, and there would be a layer of grease floating on the top like an oil slick, because the spoon used to stir it had been resting on a plate which had earlier served their one and only meal...... "Egg and chips". Oh, and they all used to bloody close at stupid hours. What a pathetic situation that was.

Even though all the shops closed at 6.00pm and didn't open on the weekends, somehow we didn't starve to death!

Nobody starves to death today. People just have more fulfilling lives If you've been to the cinema on a Friday night, you can then go and get a Pizza! Or a maccies! Or a KFC, or a Chinese! Or an Indian! Etc. Hmm, what would I prefer? That huge choice, or the old way..... of just going back home to your freezing terraced house to listen to the smiths with a pack of ready salted crisps.

We shared one soft drink with four friends, from one bottle and NO ONE actually died from this.

Nobody died, but loads of people got cold sores... Hurrah for herpes.

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.

That is always said as an implied attack on young people, like they are all fat lazy buggers. It's true in some ways, but as mentioned, its not wholly fair because half the time, they can't go out. My mate's dad is 64 years old, with white hair, and isn't very well. His wife (also late 60s) is dying from Parkinson's disease, so he spends all his time caring for her. His only social outlet is the occasional trip to his local. Last time I spoke to him he said he hasn't been for a while, because on his way back, he has started getting hassled by hoodies. I said, "You mean kids calling you names and stuff?", and he said, "No, I mean 6 foot 4 skin heads shoulder barging me as I walk past and telling me they are going to'&$£! me". If people are doing that to a frail old man... then things are really seriously bad.

I don't have to walk far from my house until I come across some kind of confrontation, and im in my 20's. If I wandered around all over the place as a kid today, like I did when I was a little kid, I probably would have been killed about 100 times by now.

We did not have Playstations, Nintendo's, X-boxes, no video games at all, no 99 channels on cable, no video tape movies, no surround sound, no mobile phones, no personal computers, no Internet or Internet chat rooms..........

.... and it was bloody boring!!
And it forced half the young people to try to escape their pathetic reality through drugs.

You could only buy Easter Eggs and Hot Cross Buns at Easter time.......no really!

Ahh yes.. those fond old memories of a time when there was a severe lack of choice in absolutely everything.

MERRY CHRISTMAS!
And NOT.... HAPPY HOLIDAYS .....

Yes! Damn our multicultural society for allowing these other people with other religions! Go back to your own countries and leave us with our old phrase for this holiday! It is so very important!

We drank milk laced with Strontium 90

yeah.. and gave Thalidomide to pregnant women. Nice work!

Our teachers used to belt us with big sticks and leather straps

Ahh yes, teach young people that inflicting pain is the best way of getting what you want!

and bully's always ruled the playground at school.

Yes! They provided the valuable service of beating the crap out of intelligent people and people who had to wear glasses.

Our parents got married before they had children

No not all of them. There were plenty of mothers who had children out of marriage, but they where shamed and hidden away and often their children where taken away from them.. Nice eh?
No doubt they would have preferred to just send them all off to death camps, but that was probably too costly.

This generation has produced some of the best risk-takers,

It was just as well really wasn't it? Because they put so little thought and effort and money and science into things, it took some real nut cases to try things out. The moon landing for example... That was so close to a catastrophe, they may as well have just loaded 3 blokes into phone box, and shot them at the moon from a cannon.

[Jimmy.H]

Yeh that sucks i remember when i used to go down to a nearby stream and build dams with my friends when i was a young lad specialy on a hot summers day theres a spring water pond which we used to build a dam and make the water go higher in the pond sorta bit so we could sit in it and cool off my friend had a dog called Mischief a big golden retriever that used to jump in the pond we just made and paddle about cooling off. Now the pond is gone after the council decided to turn it into some kind of garden by coundnt be borthered and left it looking like a construction site.

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Some memories are more powerful than others, mainly from childhood, or happy and traumatic events, and yet it's difficult to remember what one did two or three weeks ago. The mind is very selective when it comes to memory mode.