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Things you need to explain to people younger than you

by 261 Comments

Blatantly ripped from a Twitter thread I got involved in.

Examples:

why people “dial” and “hang up” a phone.

What does a two or three bar heater mean.

Waiting for a TV to “warm up.”

Any more?

0

Comments

  1. Not in the spirit of your thread, but I constantly have to say to one of my step grandchildren that I am partially deaf & could she speak a little slower & a little louder.

    She hates me…

  2. Pubs had licensing hours. They closed at 2:00, opened at 5:00 and closed again at 10:30 or 11:00.

    You used to either buy tickets for a gig by going to the venue when tickets went on sale or you turned up on the night, if confident that it wasn’t sold out and bought a ticket on the door.

    Air travel used to be prohibitively expensive while train travel was fairly cheap.

  3. Take aways were fish & chips.

    TV had 3 channels (& you had to change channels by hand)

    You watched it on the night or you missed it.

    The top 40 (ALWAYS on Sunday) was essential listening.

    • I don’t think it’s quite possible for anyone even under 30 to understand what it was like to have only 3 TV channels, plus no way of recording them (let alone the fact that it was only on for a certain part of the day and that X amount of it was in black & white.)

      As Jack says, if you missed a programme, you really missed it, so there was huge currency in catching up with your friends at school, plus being jealous of those who were allowed to stay up and watch late programmes (especially Monty Python – not only shown late but on Sunday nights IIRC) I think this was also why ephemera like film novelisations, annuals, records, bubblegum cards and poster-magazines etc. were so popular – if you liked a movie or a TV series, your only way of “re-living” it between showings was via these spin-offs – nowadays you just pop in the disk or go to Netflix or YouTube…

    • I would guess that most teenagers wouldn’t have a clue what you mean by modem! The Internet has always been there for them and it comes into the house via a router. I find it hard to remember how we did certain things before the Internet, I would image for a teenager it’s like pre-history! I was recently trying to remember how I organised my pre-Internet road trips to the USA and couldn’t.

  5. A friend’s kids got a 17th birthday present in an envelope from their grandmother. When asked what it was one of them said “some kind of voucher from Westpac”. ”Twas, of course, a cheque

  6. The first “remote controls” were attached to the device via a long cable.

    To get your salary you had to go to the bank and cash a cheque. A cheque was a piece of paper that represented any amount of money that you wrote on it (this may still exist in some countries).

    TV started at 5 p.m. and ended before midnight (and that was only on the weekend), on two channels (first it was only one, then we had to put a small antenna on top of the TV to receive the second one as well).

    We all had to take typing lessons in fifth grade, on typewriters. The typewriter was like a combination of a printer and a computer keyboard, without the computer, and if you made a mistake you had to paint over it and type again.

    When you went to the dentist as a kid, they didn’t give you any kind of pain-relief when they drilled into your teeth (or maybe our particular school dentist was a sadist…)

    • A Great Aunt and Uncle of mine had a telly with a sonic remote control. It had a large leaf spring type thing in it that made a loud click when you pressed the button. That moved the telly up a channel. Wonder if that was the next step on from wired remotes.

      • My dad’s cousin had one with two such buttons – one to change up a channel, the other to change down one. A Nixie tube on the front of the TV set indicated the channel number.

  8. It’s cheaper to phone after 1pm.
    Post arrives before 9am – and then a second delivery by noon.
    Wednesday is early closing & shops shut at 1pm so they can do their banking.

  10. Remember to give a Xmas box to the paper boy, the milkman and the dustman. And the milkman’s horse will always be very happy if you give him a carrot.

    If you ask him discretely, your barber will always be able to supply you with some rubber johnies. It’s always handy to have something for the weekend.

    If you are going to the cinema, do remember to use the ash trays. And if you are only going there to have a snog, please sit in the back row, so as not to distract the other patrons who are there to see the film.

  11. 1. Adele’s song has her phoning up someone at home, and he never seems to be there. My 13 year old daughter commented “why doesn’t she just text him or something?”.

    2. The idea of seeing a bank manager as if it’s an oldish man behind a desk, keeping tabs on your spending and getting cross when you’re overdrawn. People still say “I am not sure my bank manager will be too happy…” when buying something extravagant. Actually, they are over the moon, because it means more lending.

    • Having to explain that not only did no one have a phone in their pocket at all times, it was not a given that that even had one attached to the wall in their homes. The upshot being that if you planed to meet someone in the pub they actually had to turn up, you sometimes had to walk across town to see if they were in (with no guarantee that they would be), for more distant acquaintances you sometimes had to put things in writing and send them off in a stamped envelope, the phrase ‘if you see so and so can you tell him …?’

        • Also: prank calls seems to have died out since caller ID became the norm. And ever so often in the past you’d answer your phone and hear someone breathing hard etc – those idiots have moved to the internet today.
          Is it still possible to reverse the charges?

  13. Waiting for a newsagent to clear and then actually paying for a magazine before being able to view pornography.

    Only being able to view two league football matches on TV per week.

    Whole days of BBC TV being given over to cricket.

    Sing Something Simple.

    Frost on the inside of a bedroom window.

    Noel Edmonds.

  14. Hitchhiking: a cheap and effective way of travelling round both the UK and the rest of Europe. If you stand by the side of the road and wave your thumb( preferably with a piece of cardboard stating your destination), kind people ( who are not raving psychos) will stop and give you a lift.

    • Just to go off at a tangent, in the days when I hitchhiked I promised myself I would always give other hitchhikers lifts when I had a car.
      Little did I realise that I was part of a dying breed. I’ve only ever given hitchhikers lifts twice, because they were the only ones I’ve ever seen, when I’ve had space in the car to give a lift.

  16. At the third stroke it will be 10 am precisely.

    The little white dot on the TV screen as it closed down for the night.

    Interference on the radio.

    Going to a garage and the mechanic knowing exactly what is wrong with your car without having to wait 2 days for the computer diagnostics.

      • My car is a lease car and the services have to be undertaken by the main garage. In November I booked my car into the Audi Dealership because the heater want working. After 4 days of diagnosis they called me to tell me what the problem was – ‘the heater isn’t working”.
        Its been in twice more since that first visit and they still haven’t fixed the problem completely.
        My old man was a mechanic all his life – I know what his comments would have been.

        • I had the same thing with a van last year. Four attempts by two VW dealers to fix the air con. When I told my regular mechanic the saga he diagnosed the problem instantly. I swear, once it’s out of warranty, I’m not going near a main dealer again.

      • 21st century cars are so full of sensors and servo-operated wotnots, mainly to keep the exhaust emissions legal, that faults which could cause an MOT failure often can’t be found without plugging a diagnostic machine in.
        I take my car to an independent for services and repairs and he uses diagnostic machines.
        In the days of my old ford Cortina and my MkII Escort I did all my own servicing and repairs. Now I just check the oil, water and tyre pressures and whether the local Ferals have keyed or kicked dents in it again.

    • At the surgery where I’m registered, you can choose which doctor you want to see when you make your appointment (if available). Of course making an appointment with one of the more popular Docs often means a longer wait. Swings and roundabouts.

  18. The first electric calculators were the size of small suitcases. They replaced manual calculators that rang a bell inside when you were doing division and comptometers. I worked in places that employed comptometer operators.

    Photocopiers that took forever to print on paper that resembled Izal toilet paper.

    Places of work where you would only be given a replacement biro if you could prove your old one had run out of ink. Also, asking your boss for permission to go to the toilet.

      • I did my entire engineering Honours degree on one 5.25″ floppy – and there was plenty of space left on it. My kids think this is the funniest thing I’ve ever told them.

        • I did my Physics PhD on a PDP 11/40 with removable hard drives capable of storing 5Mb of data (according to wikipedia). I do remember that we eventually connected it to a display with more storage capacity than the machine. Impossible to imagine that we would later be walking around with half a terrabyte in my pocket (and more on the portable computer in my bag)

      • I actually had that discussion with the product managers at Microsoft in the Office team – but I can’t think of a more intuitive picture for ‘save’, let alone 20 pixels square, and it would appear they can’t either…how about a goalie diving for a ball? a bank note into a piggy bank?

  20. Clubs used to WANT to win the F.A. Cup.
    They’d pick a full strength side for a 3rd Round match at home to Mansfield Town.
    The cup match would normally draw a bigger crowd than the league match the following week.

  21. Sending someone a telegram for their birthday, wedding etc.

    Companies using telex to communicate. (I still remember making those strange tapes thingies that one had to feed into the machine).

    • My Dad was a Telegraphist for 32 years. When you phoned up to send a telegram, he typed it up and sent it on its way. He was made redundant by the fax machine which was, in turn, made obsolete by email. I was asked to supply a trade reference recently by a client who said that the company needing the reference was insisting on faxing the information but no one he had approached still had a fax. We got rid of ours about 10 years ago.

  23. When recording something off TV, I still say “I’m videoing something…”, when I’m told by the kids I should be saying “I’m Sky plusing…”

    • We got rid of Virgin TV last year and the only thing we missed was being able to pause and rewind live tv. Because of this, I just bought a new tv which, with the addition of a USB hard drive, allows us to pause and rewind. It will allow recording but as most things are available on catch up, I don’t see us using it to record.

    • Going to the cinema at the start of the day’s programme in Screen 1, seeing the film in there. Then moving to screen 2 and then screen 3. Used to be a cinch at Middlesbrough ABC when it first went multi screen. One ticket, 6 films (there was usually a supporting feature, something else that has disappeared.)

  25. Manual choke in the car

    TV programmes (unless Open University) not starting till 9am and closing down again during the day

    Old style train seating with the corridor down one side and separate compartments of two facing rows behind their own internal windows and door

    • Stop me if I’ve told this one before.

      I spent the weekend hiking in the peak district, leaving Cambridge after work on Friday. My best man, living at the time in Berkshire, was driving up separately to meet me there. He got lost somewhere outside Hathersage, so popped into a pub to ask for directions (this was the early ’90s).

      Him: “Excuse me, I’m looking for directions to Edale. It’s near Hope.”
      Old man at bar: “There’s no Hope round here, son”

      My best man bought him a pint.

  27. Buying and listening to entire albums – not just cherry-picking the favourites or the bits you know.
    The ritual is that you must sit through 15 or 20 minutes of un-familiar (and possibly un-interesting) music before arriving at the bit you know.
    Cassettes re-inforced this behaviour – as it was hit & miss fast-forwarding and stopping

  31. Writing to a PO Box address (usually in Tring, Saffron Walden or Lowestoft) for information on your favourite band (and enclosing a Stamped Addressed Enveope, and/or a Postal Order)

    All Football matches took place at 3:00 on Saturday, and 7:45 on Wednesday evening, and the only Live matches were the FA Cup Final and International Tournaments

    • The International Standard of Crisp Bag Identification.

      KP were the first to try and be different – Yellow for Cheese and Onion? What were they thinking, but the Blue and Green standard (and dark blue for Ready Salted) won out.

      And then Walkers came along with their new colour scheme.
      At least they had the sense to recognise the Brown = Beef standard

  33. Things at football… letters around the pitch, The Football Review, rosettes, chestnuts, profiles of the players (Clint Eastwood, steak and chips, my dad, Ron Harris, Ford cortina, Michelle).

  34. Picking up the telephone receiver at home to make a call and hearing someone else talking on the line. Actually that could be quite interesting.

    The only street food being roasted chestnuts, and anyway it was drummed into you that it was bad manners to eat on the street.

    Writing to an address in Finland to get matched up with international pen-pals (in my case a boy in New York called Kevin but that’s a whole different story).

    Having to sit through a tedious 15 minutes of a man reading out football scores on Saturday afternoon before Dr Who came on the telly.

  36. Things taking 28 days to arrive by “mail order”. Twang Jr was disgusted when something we’d ordered at 8pm on Monday didn’t arrive the following afternoon.

    Mind you “the catalogue” had a large section dedicated to ladies underwear which was always worth a look.

  38. Singles slowly climbing to number one & slowly slipping down the charts.

    Records entering at number one were very rare. IIRC, when Going underground entered the charts at number one in 1980, it was the first record to do that since Merry christmas everybody by the Mighty Slade in 1973. (Happy to be corrected).

    Corrie on twice a week (& not on Christmas day).

    Christmas day television being good.

      • Knowledge like knowing all the cars in Wacky Races or the words to Stop The Pigeon. Once, such things earned respect. Now, a mere tap on a screen away.

        I remember when all this was just empty pixels. Pardon?

    • I remember going to the middle school library to look up the 50th US state, writing it on a sealed-down envelope and sending it in to Saturday Superstore to try and win a copy of ‘Infected’. Them were the days, etc.

      • Did you know that my current avatar comes from the Infected film?

        It’s amazing what you can find out looking at a computer.

        Like, do you know that if you…

        …. no I’d better keep that to meself.

    • We even had a separate library in Croydon called the Reference library just for that purpose. Complete silence in there of course, apart from the turning of pages.

      At home people often had a set of encyclopaedias, the Wikipedia of their day, apart from the fact they would get more out of date with every passing year.

  40. Black and White televisions.
    Tellys with Cathode Ray tubes.
    Right up into the late ’80s you could buy cheap B&W portable CRT sets.

    Referring to TVs as “sets”.

    • Renting a telly from Radio Rentals rather than buying one – extra kudos if it was a pay-per-view where you had to put coins into an attached box rather than pay every week in the shop.

  41. Walking into a pub and just asking for a pint of bitter, not choosing between half a dozen near identical over hopped numbers with tasting notes attached to the pump (always assuming our young friends aren’t ordering a jug of something sweet and neon-coloured instead).

        • I still refuse to recognise establishments who do that kind of thing as pubs. They’ve become licensed restaurants.
          I don’t mind menus on tables if it’s a pub that sells decent food. As long as they’re not too huge. Condiments etc. should be brought with the food and taken away after.

      • In the ’60s pretty much all the pubs around here just had the brewery’s own Mild (only drunk by grandads), Bitter and Best Bitter (if the brewery did one) on pumps, plus a Lager (Carling or Skol) and perhaps Guinness if they had any Irish clientele.
        Two, maybe 3 whiskies (Bells and/or Teachers & Vat 69), 1 gin (Gordons or Beefeater), 1 rum (Captain Morgan), 1 vodka (Smirnoff).
        Light Ale, Brown Ale, Mackeson and/or Guinness and Barley Wine were the bottle options.
        Babycham for the laydeez, who almost never entered the public bar.

  43. That toilets were often located OUTSIDE. When I told my children that, as a kid, I had to put a coat and shoes on, take a torch, and walk to the bottom of the garden at night to use t’facilities, they simply refused to believe me. There are lots of modern developments of questionable value, but nobody ( surely?) bemoans the passing of the outside lav.

    • Or the tin bath. I remember, just once, having a bath in a tin bath in front of the fire in an elderly relative’s house in the Rhondda Valley. I would have been about 4 at the time so around 1968.

      • I have a friend in his late 60s who still insists on going to the end of the garden to have a wee. (I don’t know if he does this when he visits other people’s houses).

    • I used to stop at my cousin’s house in the holidays as a kid.
      they once lived in a very dilapidated two up/two down in Radford Nottingham (long cleared in the 70s).
      this erm hovel featured a large toilet block for at least 10 houses at the bottom of a very dark and dingy alleyway.
      the first time I stopped over was a particularly cold xmas…and as a 8 year old I positively DID NOT want to go out there alone.
      needing to go quite badly, I woke my older cousin……three to a room of course!!
      “oh just use the en suite” was his suggestion….”here, i’ll show you”

      he then proceded to lift the sash window and pissed all over the kitchen roof…..

      a bit common my cousins!!!

      FISH.

  49. When I started working in my first shop there was no scanner for the prices, you had to learn most of them by heart. Cans and bags had price stickers, but all of the dairy products, all beers and sodas, the frozen items, plus the fruit and veg prices were all committed to memory. Also all of the meat, sausages, cheese etc (this was a mainly butcher’s shop, with added groceries) that you weighed behind the counter. You could have woken me up in the middle of the night and asked me what a pot of cottage cheese cost, and I would have told you instantly.

    Then when I changed to a slightly more modern shop, and got a scanner, I would programme the bar codes directly into the cash register. I’d turn a key to get to programming mode, scan the bars, and then use a number code to programme (IIRC it started at 401 for A) the text for the item on the receipt and then another number code for the digits of the price. Soon that code was so familiar that it only took ten seconds to programme a new item, no thinking required, all in the fingers. I would do it in the middle of a receipt while the customer was waiting, when something unscannable showed up at the check-out. It takes a lot longer now with computers!

    (Of course everything isn’t scanned now either, you still have to know all of the four or five digit codes for fruit and veg and baked goods…still in the fingers and very difficult to respond when someone ask you “what number is zucchini” etc)

    Also we closed at six in the evening and were closed on Sundays…that’s what young people can’t believe! (On Saturdays in the butcher’s shop, after closing time – two or three in the afternoon I believe it was – we had lunch together, all of the staff. Shop’s own sausages!)

      • There was a chain of supermarkets in the UK called Kwik-Save. Cheap and nasty. One of the things they did to keep prices down was not to put price stickers on their goods. Prices on the shelf, but the till staff were expected to know all the prices to ring through. This was when barcode readers were not almost ubiquitous, even though the items may have had a code on them.

        • 20 years ago, I worked on a Kwik Save roadshow. The biggest complaint from the managers was that they had to go to the local newsagent to send a fax as the company was too mean to provide a fax machine.

  50. I’ve had conversations recently in the office with new graduates who really struggle with the concept that people used to be allowed to smoke at their desks.

  52. Has anyone mentioned catching the last post yet? Sometimes I would have to go to Trafalgar Square to post letters on my way home* because the last post time there was 9pm.

    *it wasn’t on my way home but my skinflint narcoleptic boss knew I had an all-zones travelcard and used me as a courier quite frequently, breaking up my commute home with little detours like that. He would have narcoleptic episodes every now and then which meant he would shut down, wake again at about 5pm and be thrown into a panic because he’d just lost several hours of work time.

    • Don’t forget buying something from overseas – go down to the bank or post office, get an international money order, pop it into an envelope with your order, mail it (not forgetting the extra for air mail) and hope to get something in the letter box weeks later.

  53. Shops closed early on Thursday.
    Most shops were closed by 6
    Most shops closed on Sunday.

    Telegrams were read out at weddings

    Smoking carriages on trains
    Smoking allowed in cinemas (on one side of theatre)
    Smoking allowed at the back of planes.

    No TV shows on weekday afternoons. Just a test card until the children’s shows began around 3.30.

    • Wednesdays were half-day closing here, and it was also the day that the local cinema put on matinee showings of children’s films during the school holidays. Consequentially you’d come out of the cinema at about 4pm and nothing was open, other than a chap sat outside Boots selling the evening paper.

  55. Going to Boots to drop off your film and going back a week later for your prints. Then finding half of them were blurred or had your finger in them. Going on holiday for two weeks and taking precisely 24 photos.

    Doing something, like watching TV or eating a meal, without feeling the need to give everyone in the entire world a live commentary about it.

    • “Going on holiday for two weeks and taking precisely 24 photos”

      or, as was often the case, taking 19 photos and then filling up the remainder of the film with photos of your dog, your car, your foot and your garden

      • Using up a roll of film over several months until by the time you got the prints back from boots you had completely forgotten where and when most of the photos were taken. In any case they would all have little stickers on them saying “Learn how to use a camera, asshole!”

  56. I’m sure I remember that if you went to the West End in that there London on a Saturday afternoon in the 60s it was deserted as all the shops were closed. Even I’m wondering if this was true as it seems so unbelievable!

    No one went to school in a car.

    We kept our school books in desks that were open to everyone and things didn’t get stolen.

    We had never eaten the following until adulthood:
    Curry (except Vesta)
    Chinese (except Vesta)
    Pizza (Dean Martin had sung about a pizza pie but we had no idea)
    Spaghetti (except from a tin)
    Fish that wasn’t in batter
    French beans, squash, broccoli, peppers, cherry tomatoes, kiwi fruit, blueberries, lettuce that wasn’t green and floppy, sweet potatoes, mangoes, herbs (except mint), courgettes, chillies, nectarines, mangetout, sugarsnap peas, fancy carrots, limes.
    Salad dressing other than salad cream
    Fruit juice

    • In the 80s I and all of my friends walked the mile or so to our school unaccompanied. Clearly all of our parents were psychotic and wanted us to die, because we all got murdered and I am writing this from beyond the grave.

      WOOOOO-WOOOOO!!!!

      • I had a conversation just last night about walking a mile to primary school every day. My friend’s kids, 15 and 16, found it incredible. They’re used to being driven by their dad every day. OK, my mum did give me bus fare every morning, but I walked and spent the money on sweets.

        • Used to walk about half a mile to my primary school every morning from when I first started. My mum walked with me for the first few weeks and thereafter I was taken by some older kids who lived in my road.
          Secondary school was a 3-mile bus ride to the town centre and then a half-mile walk.
          I had a free bus pass, it being more than the minimum qualifying distance, so no opportunity to spend the bus fare on anything.
          My dad didn’t own a car until I was about 9 or 10. He used to ride his bike to work before that and for our 2-week seaside holidays every summer, we either went by coach or by train. My mum refused to even consider learning to drive.

    • The first time I had pizza would have been in 1980 or so and it was a deep-fried half pizza from the chip van (Yes, I’m Scottish). It was like my mouth had gone from black and white to colour.

  57. Ok I’ll bite as we’ve not yet covered the world of tickets. One of the things that is potentially (not done it for a while) the same is queuing up at the venue box office. But apart from that everything is different. I worked for a ticketing seller in the mid 80s (yes bizarrely a physical place -with a desk, a phone or two, a till and oodles of paperwork, this was in Oxford but similar ones were sited in tourist infos or record shops up and down the country). When a big tour was put on sale – I remember Simple Minds at the peak of their 80s bluster playing Wembley – we would have a long queue of people at the desk at 9am. We would ask how many tickets they wanted, then pick the phone and ring the industry-only number to Keith Prowse (the 80s equivalent to a bot). Tickets secured from the KP staff member we would take their payment, write out a receipt and they would come back a few weeks later to collect their tickets.

  59. Show jumping being considered prime time entertainment on the TV.
    Ditto Beauty Contests
    Ditto people skiing down mountains.

    Foreign holidays had to be booked at a travel agents and you nearly always went on a package holiday. The only trip advisor then was the travel agent saying her sister and family had been at the same resort last year and said it was nice. You only had one tiny photo and a paragraph in a brochure to try and work out what the hotel was like and it was really no guarantee you wouldn’t turn up and find out it was next to an abattoir.

    • On Swedish TV it was the circus, every Friday (or was it Saturday?) evening you’d have to* suffer through yet another hour of clowns, horses running one way then turning and running the other way, some “funny” guy spinning plates and a family of Mexicans in the flying trapeeze, to continuous shouts of “Hep!”
      As a result, to this day I break out in hives just thinking about the circus!

      * When I say “have to” I mean that there were so little TV to watch that as a kid you’d feel obligated to watch exactly everything your parents would allow you to see, even if you couldn’t stand a particular program! The endless hours we’ve spent watching awful TV, unbelievable really… 🙂

  60. Suitcases weighed quite a lot even when they were empty.

    And when they were full they weighed an absolute bloody ton. And you knew all about it, too, because you ACTUALLY HAD TO CARRY THEM. You couldn’t just saunter along, casually pulling the case on a convenient set of smooth wheels via a nice long handle. Oh no. You had to totter forward, with this thing that weighed as much as an elephant pulling your arm out of its shoulder joint. Not nice.

    • Except in films where, after wads of cash were spent replicating the San Francisco earthquake, the verisimilitude was shattered by characters swinging (what viewers knew would be arm-achingly heavy) suitcases around like balloons at a children’s party..

    • The funny thing is that it took so long to realise that adding wheels (not exactly a recently developed technology) to suitcases would make them easier to transport. We may have put people on the Moon before we had that idea.

  61. Screensavers were not just to express your love for a particular football team or band. Early PCs in the eighties would have the desktop layout burnt into the screen as they were completely fixed and were left like that for hours, hence their invention.

  62. In the olden days, if you were stuck at roadworks you would keep an eye on the lights to see when they changed, possibly exhaling heavily occasionally and complaining about the lack of activity and/or oncoming traffic in the other lane, not pick up your phone and start telling Facebook about it. That’s just based on a quick non-scientific survey conducted in Henley this morning.

  63. Walking down the street it was normal to see white dogsh*t but unusual to encounter someone carrying a cup of coffee. If you decided to sit upstairs on the bus for “the view”, after five minutes your eyes would sting from trying to peer through cigarette smoke…

    • Wasn’t the white dogsh*t a result of something that the pet food manufacturers put in the food? I’m sure it was some kind of highly nutritious grain or dried fruit rather than some cheap mineral filler that scoured their insides, eh readers?

  64. The F.A. Youth Cup used to be a prestigious competition where you were likely to see players (e.g. The Busby Babes) who would ultimately play in the first teams of Chelsea, Arsenal, Man. City etc.
    No, really.

  65. Computer mice (devices attached to a computer to move a pointer (an arrow-head shaped tool) on the screen) used to have a rubber ball and small wheels inside them. After a while, the mice started behaving erratically, and had to be taken apart to have gunk and hair scraped off the wheels.

      • …also bizarrely satisfying was using a sheath knife (attached to Boy Scout belt) for whittling sticks and then using said stick for removing dried dog poo from your shoes. I can’t even begin to think what the modern equivalent might be!

  68. Doing a history degree, when I cited a reference it meant I had read the whole book and not just copied and pasted a paragraph that Google suggested.

    And it was written by hand too.

    • When I completed my degree in 1979, a much sought after commodity was a fellow student, preferably a first or second year, who not only had a typewriter, but could touch type. I spent hours and hours typing my final year project report out on a portable manual typewriter back at home over the easter break. I then had to queue up in the library to feed 5p coins into the photocopier before it could be handed in. I must dig it out of the loft and see quite how rubbish it was.

  69. Not only could you get milk delivered (and orange juice in milk bottles), but coal, too, brought right to your coal shed by cheerful whistling Stanley Holloway lookalikes.

    • Celebrities were the odd film star, TV star, sports figure or occasional musician. You might read of their exploits occasionally in a newspaper (in the women’s pages) or magazines devoted to the subject – the only way they would get a mention in TV news broadcasts was if they died in odd circumstances.

  72. Thursday AM in the post office meant queues because the old biddies had to get their books stamped to collect their pension cash payments. Also see same marlaky for UB40 wielding aspiring musos.

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