My folks often used to say ‘it wasn’t like that in our day’ or such like. I can look back on my childhood with fond memories but the reality is that in my lifetime we have taken massive strides to achieve a better standard of living. Putting aside our propensity for war which unfortunately has never diminished I can think of these things that I certainly do not mourn the passing of:
Linoleum – dreadful stuff.
Outside toilets
Mangles – I remember putting my fingers in one, it was fucking painful.
Electric bar fires instead of central heating
Black and white TV’s with 3 channels that closed down every night around 10pm.
‘Snow’ on the tv just when you got to the critical part of a programme resulting in having to stand next to the tv tapping the side or moving the aerial around.
Blancmange – what were we thinking?
Evaporated milk – again what were we thinking?
Black and White Minstrel show
Cod Liver oil
The stick at school
Short trousers at school
Bastard teachers who took pleasure in giving you the slipper and had apparent homo erotic inclinations.
Belisha Beacons – did anyone take any notice of them?
Double decker buses with a cloud of cigarette fog on the top deck.
I am sure there are many other contenders.
.
Evaporated milk is an essential ingredient in morning-after festival chai, I’ll have you know, and has the restorative properties of green kryptonite when combined with the right mix of spices. I’ll brook no contradiction of its enduring excellence.
The real horror was sterilised milk. The very definition of disgusting.
Evaporated milk or “evap” is a topping I love on ice cream (when it freezes) or as an additive to custard, to this day in my 50s. Im dissalowing its inclusion in Room 101
Belisha beacons are a thing of the past because the cretins behind the wheel of at least half of all vehicles on the road paid no attention to them, necessitating their replacement with full fat traffic lights. Improved driver behaviour is unfortunately not one of our great strides forward.
I still see Belisha beacons quite a lot up here in the north…
They’re still around here in the East.
Cars that start on a cold morning with one turn of the key
Choke…i do not fondly remember my first car a nasty little hatchback.
1980 Vauxhall Chevette.
Sometimes the only way to start that f***er was to bash the starter motor with a hammer and a big squirt of wd40 in the distributor cap
Linoleum had one saving grace, in that infant vomit was easily removeable, whereas with laminate flooring there’s always a teensy shim of puke left behind, down in those narrow little cracks.
That’s where laminate on a roll comes in handy. All sorts of different styles too that would blend somewhat with the initial splatter, to lesson the visual shock.
I dont mind lino. Cheap , durable and many patterns and colours. And yeah vomit comes off it easily. Ditto bong water.
Couldn’t you just use the bong water to clean up the vomit?
You can still buy lino. It’s gone upmarket and is ruinously expensive now.
It’s called Vinyl Flooring these days. A vastly superior product to the old ’50s-’60s crap.
The company I used to work for installed loads of it in bathroom/wetrooms and kitchens of Housing Association properties.
Loads of it gets put in mess rooms and toilets of office blocks.
Old fashioned, grim, endless, existential crisis inducing, Sundays.
I miss the genuine week long building anticipation of such a thing as a Bond film on the telly on Saturday! Everything is on demand these days, which does have his benefits yes, but makes everything so much more ephemeral.
CGI is crap.
i can remember the excitement of getting the Christmas editions of the TV and Radio Times to see which recent release movies would be shown on tele over the period. I particularly remember “Butch Cassidy” and “West Side Story” which dates me somewhat.
I recall a family trip to a cinema in a nearby large town one Sunday in late 1970s – can’t recall the film we were hoping to see. The cinema was already turning people away when we got there, and so we decided to spend the rest of the afternoon wandering around the town centre as something else was bound to be open. Suffice to say the only other attraction open was a small wooden hut selling Sunday newspapers.
Stone me!
I remember fondly(ish) Sunday afternoons as a kid.
Rugby special, then I think Masterchef. Roast meal, and then whatever the family-oriented SUnday drama was on the Beeb.
‘Found my way upstairs and had a smoke’. Ah yes, and quite often a one skin jazz gasper if it was fairly empty (such a thing was frequently possible, young lurkers). These days I’d ban all smoking in public places though. Nothing worse than walking into a fug of someone else’s smoke.
Nope, nanny state in excelcis. Allow the owners of public businesses to allow smoking, or not, and let the public decide which ones they prefer. And I am a non-smoker.
All very well when you live in a town or city and can just stroll on down the road to the next boozer. When there’s only one pub in the village, you thank heaven for the wisdom of the ban, and throw a puzzled frown at the selfish short-sightedness of those who cry “nanny”.
I live in a village. The local town is the problem. Fag Fug Galore. I can be reasonable, but chugging by an ATM and/or on the way to and outside of OneStop and the likes (no probs – I pop in too) and sitting on benches in the square to fumigate away, is quite frankly…
… a risk, and they’re largely all either scruffy and/or fat. Let’s be honest.
Apart from an Australian in Bath years ago. That was weird. I’d been on a bender, was getting early morning cash out, and he had a mild deranged go at me, equally benderised, for smoking (he had run out of fags and I was ‘fugging’ him to use my terminology, and he was rather desperate). I translated this in my head and we went on to have a nice chat and chill on a bench with cigs. I remember his name to this day. Bill from Surfer’s Paradise.
In that case I would have thought if enought locals complain a suitable compromise could normally be reached. But that’s just me assuming people are rational I guess.
Even if you divide a place up between Smoking and Non-Smoking rooms and enforce it strictly, the staff still end up breathing smoke unless you have separate staff for each part.
Chilblains
Their second album was pretty good
Cod Liver oil is wonderful stuff for various ailments. Best taken in capsule form, but as for the very serious ethical side of things, flaxseed oil is a very good alternative, if not quite as efficacious in some areas, but excellent nonetheless.
The way vegetables were prepared for the table – ‘salad’ was a few leaves of limp lettuce with some watery sliced tomato, and maybe a radish if you were lucky. All other beg had to boiled into submission, and every scrap of nutrition carefully thrown down the sing with the water.
@Gatz I am a big fan of tomatoes – absolutely love them. However if I get one that is watery it puts me in a rage. Sadly there are watery ones about – do the growers try them before they send them to market? If they do and they still send them they should be flogged.
Mostly food and drink related – how soon we forget…
Vegetables cooked to utter mush (edit: while I was posting I see this is a familiar theme!)
Walls ice cream.
Watneys Red Barrel.
Double Diamond.
Camp coffee.
Dubonnet.
People smoking everywhere.
Cars that broke down all the time
Cars that rusted, I’m looking at you Fiat.
All cars rusted, but Fiat and Lancia rusted quicker than the rest.
Motorbikes with sidecars.
The Reliant Robin.
The Austin A30 (first car I ever owned – given to me mid-’70s) and the “sit up and beg” Ford Popular (my dad’s first ever car about 1960).
Lancias were basically made from rust and badly sellotaped together. The flapping of a wasps wings was enough to make the front wing fall off
Not only did cars always rust, you generally couldn’t change gear. I should know, I learnt to drive in an Austin Maci.
Was that a “feature” with Austin gearboxes?
I had my driving lessons and passed my test in 1984 in an Austin Metro. It seemed every driving school used them.
A horrid little car compared to my own old Ford Escort.
An Austin Maestro van owned by an employer a year or two later was just as bad to drive. Really clunky awkward gearchange compared to Fords or Vauxhalls.
Quite probably!
Learning to drive in a Maxi wasn’t enough to put me off unbelievably and I also ended up owning a Metro as a youngster., a GT . It only had 4 gears though, one less to crunch I guess.
Casual racism and sexism.
It’s much more nuanced nowadays.
Especially on here
Single glazing. Condensation running down the windows and pooling on the sills.
Evaporated milk though, lovely on tinned pears. Mmmmf!
Ice on the inside of sash windows in winter.
Evap on tinned pears – the wonderful taste of my childhood.
Had to have a few peach slices in there as well! Weekly treat at Sunday teatime.
Don’t worry, it’s all coming back once our glorious sovereignty is restored next March!
I hope the ration books are blue!
It’s awful. I can’t bear to think of what we’ll loose. Everything that makes life good is down to the EU, let’s face it, and they were in the 21st century when we were still in the 1970s.
Rationing….. I remember waiting weeks for my shellac coupon to come through.
How many 78s could you get with that? Or are we talking nails?
Public phone boxes that had a second Life as a late night public convenience
We’ve still got a row of four phone boxes on our market square. The council gave them listed status in the mid 1980s to prevent BT from replacing them with more modern aluminium boxes, which means that we’re saddled with all four of them for eternity. I’ve not seen anyone use them for anything, even a late-night slash, for a long time.
@JQW in a nearby village the residents made very good use of their public phone box after it was no longer used as a phone box. They turned it into a library where you could deposit your no longer wanted books and take out books that other neighbours had left.
A splendid idea I would say.
We have that here. Madame Foxy regularly tops up the stash on the shelf where the directories used to go, in return for some abandoned Angela Carter or a Jilly Cooper for a giggle.
They took one all the way to Barga, Italy and did that too!
A redundant bulding repurposed for a
nearly redundant pursuit.
If we’re talking about England/Great Britain/UK, I’d argue that sending no (nil, zilch, zero) troops to Vietnam suggests at the very least a reluctance for war which was, sadly, only rekindled in 1982.
Fast forward to 2018, and the thought that we wouldn’t send soldiers at the drop of a hat, if required by America, to anywhere in the world seems highly unlikely.
Envy and grudge. As I remember it, people were always looking at their neighbours and aquaintances suspiciously and grudgingly, gossiping behind their backs – “How can they afford…”, “Who does’s she think she is, wearing that fur coat”, “Money can’t buy taste…” etc. And I grew up in an area where most people were pretty well off!
These days it seems like most people are happy for others when they do well. But perhaps they just get their frustrations out anonymously online instead!
And in the ballot box.
A quote from somewhere, don’t remember where, about those in the acting profession:
“They like to see their friends doing well. As long as their friends aren’t doing better than they are.”
I always quite liked ‘Living On The Ceiling’
That’s the sort of comic timing we’ve lost since Bob Monkhouse died..
Comic timing dead? Oh, I don’t think so….
“You could leave your door open and no-one would steal anything!” Yes, I think we know why, too.
I don’t miss
ubiquitous smoking
bad food and drink
greater tolerance of aggression, racism, and sexism
Izal
school corporal punishment/ tolerates child physical abuse
Benny Hill (he wasn’t funny, and I like rude things; his company were, though)
I DO miss
People reading more
Less TV and radio
decent public transport
food that wasn’t microwaved
Chocolate that tasted better (it did – I can’t be bothered now)
the lack of coverage of things meaning you didn’t have spoilers (e.g., before a gig re set and setlist)
kindness, competency, people knowing stuff rather than looking it up
generally, actually, “less is more”
a bit of an aside – but I’m not sure that people read less these days. Kids and teenagers particularly seem to read much more then me and my mates ever did, and certain books and authors are given the same reverence as we gave Pink Floyd and Genesis. YA literature is thriving like never before and I’ve not met a kid over 10 who hasn’t read Harry Potter (what a rotter).
Early closing days. Even the West End was deserted on a Saturday afternoon.
Christmas trees were pathetic spindly things in a tub on a table to get them to a reasonable altitude – I have pictures from my childhood and I cannot believe how small they were.
I drove into The City Of London yesterday (Sunday). Years ago, the area around the Barbican, London Wall and Moorgate would have been deserted. Not any more.
The Prudential Ride London was on yesterday…
True but I’m often there on a Sunday and it’s not the ghost town of 30 years ago.
Can’t we just have exaggerated apparent racism and sexism with exaggerated apparent neo lib bullshit, slamming it out canvas style on a Saturday afternoon, with a big man/woman who looks like a rescued badger with erotic microphone intentions?
Listened to Gambo’s run-down of a chart from ’68 the other day.
The Rolling Stones, “This Guy’s In Love With You,” Crazy World of Arthur Brown, “Mrs. Robinson,” The Small Faces, Dusty, “MacArthur Park,” Equals …
Granted, you ain’t gonna get Beefheart, Buffalo Springfield, “Astral Weeks,” Zappa, VU, “Village Green Preservation Society” represented in a ’68 Top 20, but I kinda miss (a) a pop chart, and (b) pop (as in “popular,” remember that?) music not being utterly shite.
It’s popular dude, just not with you.
Edit: Had a quick look at the chart for july 1968, just to be sure. Yep, roughly the same pap/gold ratio. The past gets filtered and the shite gets forgotten.
http://www.everyhit.com/retrocharts/1968-July.html
I’d perfectly happily listen to a good three-quarters of that chart. Today’s, I couldn’t do with any of it.
But it does appeal to lots of people and is therefore by definition popular. Just not with you!
Absolute and complete tosh, MC E, you know it and I know it.
I quoted half of the Top 20 in that given week!
Also, in ’68 we’re talking in 100s of thousands/millions, not 10s of thousands (if lucky) … and it is now, of course, utterly shite.
Deram… have you considered that most people, people who used to buy singles, consume their music in different ways today? Ways that might not be reflected on an “official” chart?
The shite part is of course down to personal taste. I really like most of what I hear on the charts.
I prefer it in fact to what used to be called “real”, authentic music. Y’know, made by people who can actually play their own instruments. Like that has ever actually mattered.
Being a 50 something I don’t do much “new” of any stripe, so only tend to hear the better songs. The ones I do hear I like, because I like the genres that they are based on – hip hop, R&B, soul,latin and so on.
And since when has popular guaranteed quality? As we’ve covered elsewhere, wasn’t the top-selling song of the Sixties by Engleburt Humpertruck?
Apart from that – spot on! 😉
And for trivia fans, Sue Nicholls ‘Where Will You Be’ at number 22, is your actual Audrey Roberts off Corrie.
Some bizarre entries in that chart.
Were there really two versions of Here Comes The Judge in the top 40 in the same week? What was all that about?
And Bobby Goldsboro did Sunny, didn’t he? Was he trying to trick his way into the charts by releasing a song called Honey, thinking people would absent mindedly just buy it?
From wikipedia…”Long’s song is completely different from Markham’s, however it was inspired by Markham’s comic act involving a judge, which Markham performed on Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In. ”
And ’twas Bobby Hebb what had a hit with “Sunny'”
Aaaaaah….. I went and mixed up my bobbies, didn’t I?
Bobby Hebb did “Sunny.”
Strewth!!! The rest of the Top 40 – I only heard the Top 20 – has …
… The Nice – “America.”
“Do You Know The Way To San Jose.”
“Dance to the Music.”
“This Wheel’s On Fire.”
The Kinks – “Days.”
“What a Wonderful World.”
What are you on MC E???????
I’m not sure if I want a lot of it, or none of it.
I’ll answer that question myself … I want f****** none of it!
Ah! You say that now, but in 50 years’ time I bet you’ll be going all gooey reminiscing about Solo by Clean Bandit..
Coca-cola Spangles, Butterscotch Angel Delight, those chewy sweets (black jacks and fruit salad?) that were 16 for 1p and then got slightly bigger but became 8 for 1p in 1973/4.
All rubbish.
Bazooka Joe bubble gum was at a slightly more expensive price point (1p) and featured an unfunny cartoon strip in the wrapper. It was also impossible to blow a bubble.
Only the arrival of Bubble Yum and Bubblicious did we get that full bubble gum experience. Only then could you convincingly pretend to be a waitress at a mid-western US diner and say “what can I getcha?” (pop!).
Bazooka Joe! Wow. Whooooosh. Nostalgia rush…
He was excellent in Twin Peaks.
There was also “Bubbly” bubble gum which was quite hard to start with and had an odd dry texture until it had been chewed for a while.
Nobody back then used the horrific phrase ‘price point’. It was just the price.
Bazooka Joe still available (and oft-purchased)
When I landed in the USA, I made a point of trying all the types of chewing and bubble gum that I could.
Bazooka Joe ain’t the best. But the Tropical Fruit flavours that Hubba Bubba and Bubblicious put out are execrable. I will make my stand on the fact that good bubble gum has some prerequisites:
1. Able to blow a decent bubble with one or two pieces.
2. Able to make a “smacking” noise as you crack it backwards in your mouth.
3. Designated flavor is “bubble gum”. Not apple. Not strawberry. Not tropical melon. Bubble gum. Like Bazooka Joe X 5; or Dubble Bubble; or Big League Chew.
(I have done my research)
Spangles were okay just not the old English ones that had flavours such as nail varnish, oven cleaner and the bottom of a babies pram.
Then there was Spanish Gold which was chewy pretend tobacco in the shape of worms.
On the clothing front we had pathfinder shoes and balaclavas. Nice
Balaclavas had to be knitted by an elderly relative from wool rated as “quite itchy.” It was the law, post war, until 1976.
Knitted from the salvaged wool from old cardigans that had shrunk after being accidentally machine washed.
I seem to recall a smoking accoutrements box with sweet cigarettes, tobacco, licquorice pipes. Can’t seem to find it on t’internet so here’s a small selection.
Spanish gold.’coconut strands dipped in chocolate powder’
I remember that Spanish Gold stuff.
There were the White sweet cigarettes of course (which you just crunched) but there was also one which involved a hollow tube of edible sugar paper (?) and a red foil end to resemble a glowing fag. You blew the sherbet contained therein to replicate a plume of smoke. Not convincing.
Not ‘sugar’ but rice paper although not actually from rice.
The ‘rice’ paper one was wrapped round a tube of chocolate as I recall.
IIRC The foil one was just a trick one so you could pretend to be smoking.
Chocolate tools – waxy lumps of awful tasting chocolate moulded into the shape of a saw, screwdriver, pliers and so on. Always the second last of the Christmas sweets to be eaten – even these were preferable to Bluebird toffees.
In Finland, they tried to ban licourice pipes. I remember this video going viral (before going viral had been invented).
People looking old, when they were, in fact, quite young. 70s and 80s footballers who were early-20s looked about 40 in today’s money. I saw an episode of Bullseye (from the late 80s) on TV last night – everyone looked really grey and ill.
Susan George (68) and Stephanie Beacham (71) were on the One Show last week, and they both looked bloody gorgeous.
To be fair, I doubt Susan and Stephanie spent their youth in smoke-filled pubs, knocking back ten pints of Red Barrel a night while they practiced those tricky doubles around the bottom of the board.
I’ll have you know that Susan George was on the darts team at the Town Hall Tavern in Stockport, where she’d knock back 8 pints of Ruddles Shin Wrestler a night, plus the occasional pickled ostrich.
In reality, Gatz: that’s fair point. I do think, however, women in general look a lot better as they age these days.
Women learn how to make the best of themselves while ageing.
Men mostly remain completely clueless.
That’s because we naturally get better with age. Like fine wine. Or cheese. Women have to (in your charming phrase) “learn how to make the best of themselves while ageing”, while age makes the best of a man with no effort on his part.
Old Jamaica rum & raisin flavour chocolate. Much better than actual rum.
I have yet to discover “rum-flavoured” toffees that don’t taste like a dog has vomited in the mixture.
Yer bog-standard dark rums (Captain Morgan or Lamb’s, anyone?) are indeed foul concoctions.
Kraken Black Spiced Rum is quite dangerously delicious.
Old Jamaica chocolate.
Tinterweb says its still made but I haven’t seen a bar in years.
Also, toast and beef dripping with added salt.
Still a thing in my house….from the Sunday roast, a couple of bottles of Newcastle Brown and Nascar on the TV.
Perfect Sunday night.
Cannot abide Newky Broon since an overindulgence incident in the very early ’70s that resulted in me heaving up and passing out in the local college common room toilets and getting locked in for the night.
Additionally, the girl I’d been trying to chat up earlier wouldn’t even give me the time of day afterwards.
Had the same experience with Colt 45 Mike.
In my early drinking years (mid to late 70’s), I could quite happily spend whole evenings on nothing but Newcy Brown. These days it is a foul, gassy, horridly chemical-tasting concoction that is good for nothing but use as a disinfectant. Of course, it isn’t actually manufactured (I won’t dignify it with the word ‘brewed’) in Newcastle anymore (apparently it is now made in the Netherlands by Heineken – say no more).
I tell you what I don’t miss, and that’s old suitcases.
Even empty they were pretty damned heavy, and when they were full, they weighed an absolutely bloody ton. All leathery. With extra straps round them, so they didn’t come apart.
And could you roll them along on a nice, smooth set of wheels? You most certainly could not. You had to actually CARRY the damned things. Physically carry them. Off the ground. Up in the air. You’d only manage a few steps before you’d have to change hands. And after about 30 seconds, your arm would be actually coming out of you shoulder joint, due to the sheer WEIGHT of the bloody thing.
Every time I pack a modern luggage item, I give thanks…
Funny that. They never looked that heavy in the films…
He’s talking about posh suitcases, I think. Them wot was called luggage, even in those days.
All leather things were hard as rock and thick and heavy in those days. Children’s shoes, for instance.
Poor people’s suitcases were made of cardboard-y stuff, half way between cereal packet and hardboard in strength, with a thin tan-coloured coating on the outside, hard plastic handles that hurt your hands and cheap tin-plate catches that burst open if you looked at them too long.
Those old leather suitcases are now found in antiques shops and seen in photo spreads of fancy magazines where they are used as chic interior decorations, stacked on top of each other as a most impractical storage space/bedside table/hip and quirky dust collectors.
The smell of a fresh Beano!
The smell of rotting garbage as the bin men go on strike again. See also: every other branch of the public sector.
Red fire engines replaced by Green Godesses operated by squaddies.
Reading by candlelight and listening to battery-powered wireless sets when the leccy board walk out.
Riots in Toxteth, Brixton, etc.
My brother was one of those squaddies. They only went out on a couple of minor calls.
During my service in the Royal Navy, I was on the green goddesses during the 1977 firemans strike.
The first night we were on shift (in Dunfermline) we were called out. A man had gone out & had a skinful then when he got home put the chip pan on then fell asleep.
The whole house went up in flames, when we arrived & I first saw it I don’t mind admitting that I almost shit my pants.
Things I DON’T miss:
Having to linseed oil my cricket bat
Having to rub Dubbin on my football boots
Algebra – never used it once, post school
Sunday afternoon homework, after The Big Match, because I’d left it all as long as possible
The dread of Sunday nights, with the school week ahead
School rice pudding with skin
Rope climbing in the school gym
Cross country runs
Wearing my brother’s hand me downs
The fucking Black and fucking White fucking Minstrels
Slide rules
Being altar-boy at 7.30am mass. The 2 priests always came in while I was changing.
Cycling home in the winter to get breakfast, after morning mass, knowing I’d have to cycle back half an hour later, for school
Going a deeper shade of crimson when talking to girls
Being beaten up once a week
Being called Spaz, every school day, for 10 years
Sharing a tiny bedroom – for 14 years
Being the younger brother of the best all round sportsman the school ever had
The smell of burning skin during radiation therapy for severe acne (I’ve had skin cancer, twice now)
The first hay fever of the cricket season – four months of eye-streaming misery during my favourite time of year
Severe winters of the early 1960’s
Early morning smog when walking to school
The bastard Alsatian at the end of the road. I avoid dogs whenever possible now. Tough on Mrs B
Watching brilliant players like Jimmy Greaves, Bobby Moore and George Best having to play on muddy shit-heaps
No central heating
Rented, coin-operated televisions
Televisions the size of a small shed
Radio that faded in and out
Dad’s radiogram that he wouldn’t change for years after stereo albums came out. Listening to Greeny’s Fleetwood Mac when his solo is coming out of ‘the other’ speaker killed me
Having buck teeth
Helping Dad haul the coal sacks up from the coal hole
Coal
Not being old enough to go to gigs
Having to cover your school books in wallpaper
Bikes with no gears
Exams
Sticking plasters that made you scream when Mum ripped them off
Having to put Meltonian Whitener on school plimsolls every Sunday
Forgetting my P.E kit
Swimming lessons
Crap cars that broke down every 2 trips. The dread of driving, wondering if I’d get home, still haunts me
Mum’s fresh quinces
Dad’s rhubarb (I’d kill for Rhubarb Crumble these days)
Socks with holes in
Shoes with holes in
Dad’s screams as his kidney stone moved
School liver
No street lighting during the 3 Day Week
The lack of choice in cheese. There was about 6 variants of cheese, all crap
Smoke filled rooms. Everywhere.
Smoked filled double decker buses, with condensation streaming down the windows
Dad not being there after my 24th year
Yes, I am in therapy.
Urk! If, like me, you spent your childhood being told by adults that your schooldays would be the happiest of your life, you must have wanted to kick them all in the shins!
(I actually enjoyed school – maybe a bit too much)
Many of your points resonate.
However bikes with no gears for a number of years now have been regarded (for reasons I fail to understand) by a certain sector of society as superior to a bike with a derailleur system.
It’s perverse and bizarre.
I don’t know if I had a particularly harsh upbringing but I had no lights on my bike when I went to and from school when I was about 10 – in the winter gloom. I wanted them but couldn’t afford them. My parents saw that as something I deal with somehow and got cross with me if I was told off by a policeman. Why didn’t they get them for me? Not that I’m bitter (seethe…).
“Being altar-boy at 7.30am mass. The 2 priests always came in while I was changing.”
Have you read Graham Caveney’s “The Boy with the Perpetual nervousness”, Niall?
I’m half-way through it at the moment.
It’s Caveney’s memoirs of his awkward teenage years, growing up in Accrington in the 1970s. Much of the book is light, charming, witty and well-observed. The rest of the book details the sexual abuse from his priest/school headmaster of which he was a victim over a period of many years. It’s a horrifying story, told in a couple of hundred pages of controlled, white-hot anger. I find I sometimes have to stop reading….
It’s rather a glib thing to say, but I hope that the act of writing the book has given Caveney some form of catharsis.
@duco01 I used to serve mass with my brother. We’ve never spoken about it but, a few years ago, we found ourselves on our own in a pub, (a rarity these days, sadly) and I asked him if he remembered anything untoward happening. He said he has thought about it a lot but can only remember priests smoothing down our cassocks, the odd hand on the shoulder, but never anything more. However, he revealed that the Head Master, a Father Freed, was later removed from another school, arrested for several counts of sexual assault and, from what Kev could remember (this was over 40 years ago, after all, 50 years for the days we were involved) he killed himself before it came to court. I can’t find any record of that on the internet but, it happened in 1978 so……
In the intervening years my therapy and experience, plus the growing number of cases here, in Ireland and the U.S, has led me to detest the Catholic Church and all it stands for. The guilt, piled on, day after the day, the dogma and the sheer hypocrisy of the institution make me sick and have ruined large chunks of my life. Fuck them all.
Sunday afternoons spent cleaning out the distributor cap and setting the tappets.
I should redress the balance from my downbeat post.
Things I DO miss:
Living in a loving, madhouse of a family, 6 kids and two parents who worked so hard to lift our heads up to the stars.
Riding my bike everywhere, especially in the summer.
Endless days at Guildford Lido in the school holidays.
Family holidays in Ireland with loads of cousins.
Sitting with my Irish Dad, Saturday afternoons, watching Arkle or Himself, as Dad called him.
Sitting with Dad watching the Five Nations, and his hero, Dr. Mike Gibson, run rings around the opposition. I have a memory of Gibson breaking through the English ranks and running half the pitch, chased down by two white shirts. Dad dropped on all fours and pounded the carpet, yelling “C’maarn Gibson, c’maarn.” And the joy as he hugged me when the good doctor placed the ball beneath the English posts.
Mum’s roast beef dinner.
Dad’s smile.
Watching the money tubes go through the system on the wall in Kinch & Lack’s School Uniform outfitters.
Teaching myself to play drums, using Mum’s knitting needles on two pillows, to Mick Fleetwood on the Mac’s Looking for Somebody, and the joy when I got my left hand to work independently of my right leg.
Living in Guildford in the 1970’s. Live music at the Civic Hall, Surrey Uni, The Technical College and several pubs, 4 or 5 nights a week – we were so lucky.
Being in a band with my brothers and best friends.
The buzz in the town on a Friday night when the squaddies came in on the train from Aldershot. The pubs were packed, they were generally good fun and the craic was good. That was until 5th October 1974 when the IRA blew up The Horse & Groom and The Seven Stars, killing 5 people, including 4 soldiers ( 2 men and 2 women.)
5 record shops in the town.
Buying gig tickets from the local department store.
Watching Surrey play cricket at the local Woodbridge Road Ground, once a year.
A happy childhood.
Kinch & Lack! I haven’t heard that name for years.
Here it is, my drum teacher. It still sounds so evocative.