Congratulations to all who were born in the 1940s, 50s and 60s.

[internetcynic]

First, we survived being born to mothers who smoked and/or drank sherry while they carried us and lived in houses made of asbestos.

They took aspirin, ate blue cheese, bread and dripping, raw egg products, loads of bacon and processed meat, and didn’t get tested for diabetes or cervical cancer.

Then, after that trauma, our baby cots were covered with bright coloured lead-based paints.

We had no childproof lids on medicine bottles, or locks on 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 seatbelts or air bags.

We drank water from the garden hose, not from a bottle.

Takeaway food was limited to fish and chips, there were no pizza shops, McDonald’s, KFC, Subway or Nando’s.

Even though all the shops closed at 6pm and didn’t open on a Sunday, somehow we didn’t starve to death!

We shared one soft drink with four friends from one bottle and no one died from this. We could collect old drink bottles and cash them in at the corner store and buy toffees, gobstoppers and bubble gum.

We ate white bread and real butter, drank cow’s milk and soft drinks with sugar, 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, but we were OK. We would spend hours building go-karts out of old prams and then ride down the hill, only to find out we forgot the brakes.

We built treehouses and dens and played in riverbeds with Matchbox cars.

We did not have PlayStations, Nintendo Wii and Xboxes, or video games, DVDs, or colour TV.

There were no mobiles, computers, internet or chatrooms. 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. And we ate worms and mud pies made from dirt, too.

Only girls had pierced ears.

You could buy Easter eggs and hot cross buns only at Easter time.

We were given air guns and catapults for our tenth birthdays, we rode bikes or walked to a friend’s house and knocked on the door or just yelled for them.

Not everyone made the school rugby, football, cricket or netball teams. Those who didn’t had to learn to deal with disappointment. Imagine that. Getting into the team was based on merit.

Our teachers hit us with canes, gym shoes and threw the blackboard rubber at us if they thought we weren’t concentrating.

We can string sentences together, spell and have proper conversations now because of a solid three Rs education.

Our parents would tell us to ask a stranger to help us cross the road.

Mum didn’t have to go to work to help Dad make ends meet because we didn’t need to keep up with the Joneses!

The idea of a parent bailing us out if we broke the law was unheard of. They actually sided with the law!

Parents didn’t invent stupid names for their kids like Kiora, Blade, Ridge and Vanilla.

We had freedom, failure, success and responsibility, and we learned how to deal with it all.

You might want to share this with others who grew up in an era before the lawyers and the government regulated our lives.

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

[Patman Post]

On the other hand they've really f****d up over the 50 to 60 years they've been running things. So it possibly explains why the World is as it is today...

Some are OK though, eh? Mum, Dad.......

[flamingreen]

On the other hand they've really f****d up over the 50 to 60 years they've been running things. So it possibly explains why the World is as it is today.

Never a truer word!
What kind of generation gives away its children's inheritance!

[BCG Jason]

Reply to post #1, tried repping almost like poetry and resonates well. Good post.

[Steve Morson]

On the other hand they've really f****d up over the 50 to 60 years they've been running things. So it possibly explains why the World is as it is today...

Some are OK though, eh? Mum, Dad.......

Wrong on any number of levels, young Pat

I was one of those people so heroically cited by brother Cynic - for which, gratitude - but the people who've really, really ****ed up the country have lived a life far removed from the suburban or bucolic idyll placed above. They were (to my recall) largely people from the upper-middle and upper classes, who hadn't a clue about the life experiences of the likes of me (born in a council house) or my kind, or, judging by where we are, how to deal with communist trade unions. In fact look at them: Eden, Macmillan, Douglas-Home, Wilson, Heath, 'Clueless' Callaghan - only Maggie saved our country from a fate worse than Greece, then she went and signed the SEA.

When she saw the light about the EU, she was stabbed in the back by Heseltine, Clarke and other traitorous, EUrophile filth, and since then we've had Major (mother and father were trapeze artists!) , Blair and Brown. Hardly inspires, does it? Only we could elect someone who ran away from the circus to become an accountant.

Fiscal incompetence, catastrophically damaging immigration levels as part of a social engineering programme, rampant EUrophillia, overmanning and over-reliance on the public sector.....recipe for - well -where we are now!

We get the government we deserve - and vote for. Worth remembering on the next visit to the ballot box.

[Dee-Dee]

Thank you for that internetcyncic. My parents were a lot older than me and came from the War generation. I was born in 1955 and I can say that my generation was a good one, held high ideals for humanity and were almost all revolutionaries. We stopped children being almost beaten to death in the classroom, we broke the long hair code that had made Europeans hate their ancestral heritage and themselves, we freed sex from its shroud in guilt and sin and we allowed gay people to exist as free individuals. We drew attention to the plight of the earth in endless protests against pollution, the A-bomb and overpopulation. We stopped people being reviled on account of their ethnicity and race. We made some of the most amazing music in the history of the human race. It was scary, exciting and often sad to be alive during that time. My parents bequeathed to me their wisdom from the thirties and forties and I have taken this as a legacy along with everything that made skirts short and faces break out in smiles.

Then somethig terrible happened.

In 1979 the eighties generation took the reigns and the world fell into a hole. Tony Blair appeared. America went off its head and people forgot about the creed of earth consciousness and all that wonderful music and faith in making the world a better place. The eighties bonked, drugged, drank and consumed their way to oblivion and their children are bereft. Happily, some are starting to look to Youtube and finding our music again. Others are beginning to read books again and understand that heroism and honour are the cornerstones of survival and integrity, not something to be avoided. Young souls, wandering in a wasteland of junk and technology. May they survive the legacy of the eighties as my generation had to survive the legacy of the War generation.

[Road_Hog]

On the other hand they've really f****d up over the 50 to 60 years they've been running things. So it possibly explains why the World is as it is today...

Some are OK though, eh? Mum, Dad.......

You truly are a knob.

Pratmanpost just loves to disagree with anything and be argumentative. I'm going to start a thread entitled, black is black. I expect Pratman to join in and explain to me, that I'm wrong and that black is actually white.

[flamingreen]

Then somethig terrible happened.

In 1979 the eighties generation took the reigns and the world fell into a hole. Tony Blair appeared.

Tony Blair was born in the fifties too.

[Patman Post]

Wrong on any number of levels, young Pat

I was one of those people so heroically cited by brother Cynic - for which, gratitude - but the people who've really, really ****ed up the country have lived a life far removed from the suburban or bucolic idyll placed above. They were (to my recall) largely people from the upper-middle and upper classes, who hadn't a clue about the life experiences of the likes of me (born in a council house) or my kind, or, judging by where we are, how to deal with communist trade unions. In fact look at them: Eden, Macmillan, Douglas-Home, Wilson, Heath, 'Clueless' Callaghan - only Maggie saved our country from a fate worse than Greece, then she went and signed the SEA.

When she saw the light about the EU, she was stabbed in the back by Heseltine, Clarke and other traitorous, EUrophile filth, and since then we've had Major (mother and father were trapeze artists!) , Blair and Brown. Hardly inspires, does it? Only we could elect someone who ran away from the circus to become an accountant.

Fiscal incompetence, catastrophically damaging immigration levels as part of a social engineering programme, rampant EUrophillia, overmanning and over-reliance on the public sector.....recipe for - well -where we are now!

We get the government we deserve - and vote for. Worth remembering on the next visit to the ballot box.

All you say is probably true. But there were other ingredients too (and thanks to Zoe in Courier for reminding me)...Britain was still licking its wounds over the ignominy of Suez, and the days of the closed shop were reaching their peak; unions decided who got which job, while Vic Feather, Len Murray, Joe Gormley, Hugh Scanlon, Jack Jones, Ray Buckton and Clive Jenkins as well as smaller figures on the shop floor like Derek “Red Robbo” Robinson, and an up-and-coming NUM leader in Yorkshire called Arthur Scargill, encouraged them.

Every word these reactionary dinosaurs uttered was treated as if it had been personally passed down by Moses. Bosses caved in to threats, but strikes still became the norm in the late '60s and throughout the ’70s as Britain teetered on the edge of economic disaster. And voters ran away from it all in the two General Elections of 1974. That’s when Ted Heath asked the question, “Who runs Britain?” on the back of the Three Day Week and the showdown with the miners.

Plus there was KBW scrawled even in the posher areas as my parents, like others in victimised communities, had to run the gauntlets of (colourfully termed in the low end press as) n****r baiting and queer and p**i bashing...

Maggie may have been the antidote. But the medicine was too strong for too long and she ended up by being too focused on the Tory vendetta that had been simmering against the miners who had struck during WWII (they weren't the only strikers during that time, and they included the Bevin Boys, but the festering sore had clouded the Tory mind). This ended in the unseemly scrabble to sell of the family silver to both balance the books and offload debt.

Yes, glorious times indeed. And look what they have led us to...

[Dee-Dee]

Tony Blair was born in the fifties too.

Tony Blair is the antithesis of myself and my generation. He was a yuppie and embraced this materialistic culture and lied to the people, destroyed the party of the working class, indulged in warfare, created a false relationship with America to do so and uses religion to get away with what he believes in and does. My entire existence and worldview is different from anything that manifested itself in the eighties. I am not a liberal, not a lefty, not a socialist, not a globalist and I will die as I have always been - myself. Nobody's lies or assumptions can alter the truth. Hatred will always be what keeps British people from uniting. Marxist class hatred has divided ancient nations in the British Isles in a way that has allowed the infiltration of something that will destroy Britain for good. I can do nothing about Blair's political class or that legacy. I can do nothing about people who hate one another on the instructions from ideologies that are based on changing things for the sake of changing them and I am not responsible for people who mistakenly believe that rules are there to be broken.