If Covid had hit in the 1980s

[wheretoyougonow]

I was a child/teenager in the 1980's an was thinking what challenges I would have faced as opposed to my children. So far I've come up with:

• Huge queues at the phone box to call your mates/boyfriend/girlfriend
• My dad reminding me how much it costs to make a call EVERY TIME I used the house phone
• No supermarket deliveries. I would have been dragged round the supermarket every week.
• No decent kids tv at the weekend bar Saturday morning.
• Waiting 6 million years (only slight exaggeration) for one computer game to load.
• No Amazon 😂😭😭😭😭

What have I missed?

Oh yes, and IF children were out of school there would definitely have been gainful labour for them to get stuck into without a day's break, or wages: mandatory paper rounds/snow clearing/babysitting/milk delivery/fruit picking...

All of the posters "confused" about the guidance/law would have to actually write and post a letter to the Old Codgers and await their reply.

I think some posters think it was something akin to the Dark Ages! In the 1980s teachers were striking and there were numerous times we were sent home for parts of lessons, etc. I don't think the govt of the day would have got very far insisting schools stay open. There was mass unemployment in the decade. I think the country could well have been absolutely crippled as it wasn't starting from the financial point we're at now.

@Ormally

Oh yes, and IF children were out of school there would definitely have been gainful labour for them to get stuck into without a day's break, or wages: mandatory paper rounds/snow clearing/babysitting/milk delivery/fruit picking...

Frankly that's ridiculous as there were laws restricting how many hours and what type of work children could do then. There were so many adults out of work that they would have been prioritised.

So true @Wowfudge I spent half of my first year in high school watching the same video over and over again due to teachers strikes .

In the school hall *

We were not allowed to stay on school premises as there was no one to supervise us. I would go home as it was a 10 min walk. Sometimes I walked home, spent ten minutes at home and walked back. There was one time we were sent home for half a split period - 15 mins. I literally had to just walk around the area the school was in.

For me one good thing came of the strikes - it put an end to me having to have school dinners and I was allowed to go home for lunch instead.

Homeschooling would be done using ceefax.

It would have been pretty much the same as school holidays usually were, with the addition of teachers either turning up once a week to drop off / collect work. We’d have been left alone if my mum was at work and expected to get on and finish it or be whacked if not. If my mum was at home I’d be reading, colouring or drawing or writing stories, occasionally going off on my bike, and glad that for once my mum couldn’t scream at me for not going out to play with other kids. If it happened when the youngest kids were born I’d have been expected to look after and sort them out as well as do my own (and probably get yelled at for not doing the ironing too).

I doubt they would have shut the schools, but if they had, I can imagine we’d be turfed out after breakfast and played out on our bikes all day. It’s outside and sort of socially distanced? Otherwise I’d be indoors watching my Sooty VHS on repeat and driving my mum mad. Although I suppose I might have made some arts and crafts with cereal boxes.

Luckily, my mum had Kay’s catalogue if we grow out of our clothes or have a lockdown birthday. You just fill in the form with your order, send it off and get your stuff in as little as two weeks.

We were expected to be a bit more independent then, and somehow we managed it!

And yes to catalogues. Goodness do people really think that nothing could be done remotely before computers? We had paper and writing and a working postal service. People have been sending messages remotely since before Roman times. It doesn’t take computers, just organisation.

I would have loved it!

Staying home alone all day watching Richard and Judy and Aussie soaps.

Weekly supermarket shop unchanged.

No awful social media.

Time to read books.

Only went to local area so wouldn’t miss travel etc.

'Homeschooling would be done using ceefax.'
@Cassie71 yeah but I would have been distracted by the Bamboozle Quiz

I’d have passed the entire lockdown waiting for the page I wanted on Ceefax to load. Remember how annoying it was when it skipped a page? Grrrr!

I left school in ‘84.

School age, no internet. No contact with friends due to father being tight fisted with money so not able to use the home phone.

Traipsing around supermarket doing the shopping as disabled mother couldn’t and abusive father wouldn’t.

After leaving school, and home, I would have accrued rent arrears due to no furlong and job disappearing. Then the council’s were less quick to evict tenants than now. If I was evicted I would have to moved back home.

I'd have loved not having to go to school

But would have really missed my friends.

I'm imagining being posted worksheets that teachers had written and then photocopied but they came out a sort of purplish colour.

@Fizbosshoes

I'm imagining being posted worksheets that teachers had written and then photocopied but they came out a sort of purplish colour.

Oh, yes, I remember those. You wrote on a sheet of purple ink, a bit like carbon paper, and then a machine duplicated it, with the ink getting fainter and fainter until it was barely readable.

At least we had second post in those days, so they had a chance of arriving the day after being sent.

Primary schools here in Germany are about that technologically sophisticated. They are still all using OHPs, mostly held together with duct tape!

In the last lockdown one of my friend's children had packets of work hand delivered by the teacher. She must have done the same for everyone in the class. The parents were then asked to bring the work back to the school and put it into the letterbox, labelled with the child's name and class. The teacher telephoned each household to speak to each child individually, once during the lockdown.

Kay’s Catalogue? You were lucky - it was granny knits and Clothkits round our neck of the woods.

@FlyingSquid my mum made a lot of my clothes too. She didn't use cloth kits very often but I remember a lot of stripey dungarees and those little skirts with vests attached to them, and hand knitted jumpers from my great aunt

The country wasn't half as overcrowded in the 80s; it would have been easier to do social diatancing.