Things where you look back and think "that really was a different world"

[StealthPolarBear]

I am only in my early 40s so young and sprightly.
When I was even younger I had a job in a dentists office. Basically sending reminder letters out, printjng the letters, and addressing the envelopes. The dental records didn't have title on them so I asked what I should do. The response was i a woman's husband is also registered at the practice, she's a Mrs.
So I did that. Mrs for those respectable married women, and using my teenage innovation I decided any where I was unsure would be 'Ms'.
I got such a telling off. Apparently people complained as it looked like they were divorced.
There are times when the 90s seem only yesterday, and times like remembering that when they seem to have more in common with the victorian era than the present day!

@DinosApple

And yes to directions. I started driving in 2001, and didn't have a mobile or Satnav. I used to get the road map out, write a list of roads out, then go onto Google, get a map up, zoom in and print screen. Very handy when visiting friends at university, but tricky to do on your own!

Dont know if you can still do it, but you used to be able to ring the AA and they'd give you the directions to write down before you went on a big trip. My mum got me an A-Z when I got my first car, to keep in the glove box. Now I just tell the car where I want to go and it gives me directions 😂

When booking our honeymoon (2000) - we wanted tickets to a certain event in USA. A relative who owned a credit card (we didn't) called in the middle of the night to book it (USA time) and we paid him back with a cheque, and money for the expensive phone call. And I had been to the library to find out the phone number first!
Now- just click click click!

I often think that the early 2000s were just a couple of years ago. In my head it goes. Born (late 70s). 80s lasted forever. 90s even longer. Millennium and then yesterday. I have to keep reminding myself that it was 20 years ago and that so much has changed in that time.

I'm the same. I've mentioned on here before dd making me feel ancient when I recommend a film to her and she says "that an old film" and I go "nah it's quite a new one" then she looks it up and goes "mum it's older than me!" - she's 20!

If you REALLY wanna feel old do those comparisons between the same years for your parents experience.

Eg the above example if that were me so my mum recommending me a film in 1992 and me going is that old etc and she's meaning a film made in late 60's! That was old to me then!

On job applications - now applicants get rejected by Fucking bots! If you check the "wrong" box it basically stops the form!

My children can't quite understand that I was born in the 1900s. That seems like Dickensian times to them!

My dd struggles to get her head around the fact I had a lovely close relationship with my great gran who was born in the 1880's! She was still alive albeit bedridden when I was born and when I was wee we chattered away in gaelic to each other most of which I have now sadly forgotten since her passing. I'd love to learn it again.

@HambletonSquare that's insane even though it was before Suzy

I still don't really trust sat nav having lived at several addresses not covered by them! I definitely remember sitting with an a4 a-z and working out the directions for a long trip and noting them down for then husband as he was the driver I didn't learn until my 30's for various reasons, he'd been able to get free lessons and test with his job. Then he'd take a wrong bloody turn at some point or miss an exit and blame me!!

Waking up on winter mornings with ice on the inside of your bedroom window
Milk delivered in glass pint bottles that the blue tits pecked holes in the tops of . You washed them & left them on the step to be collected by the milkman. You returned beer bottles to the off licence to get money back in them....and they think recycling is new.
Everyone walked to school no matter how far unaccompanied, even infants
At high school being out in detention if you were seen on the street going home not wearing your school hat.
Going to uni on the train, steam trains as they all were.
Going to uni dances where the music was provided by groups playing live...The Hollies, Freddie & the Dreamers, Gerry & the Pacemakers etc before they became famous.
Pound & ten shilling paper notes.
Very few house phones & no mobiles or computers.
Everyone feeling ripped off when decimalisation came in & prices were rounded up.
No MOTs or seat belts, garages having staff who filled up your car. Knowing hand signals being part of the driving test

Sitting on my mum's knee on car journeys is a happy memory..and when we had 'guests' in the car she would swap to the back, which seems bizarre now.
Guests who were free to smoke wherever they wanted in your home ( kept ashtrays for this very purpose )even when you are a non-smoking smoking household. This event on until very recently..
Heavily pregnant women in 70's, 80's smocks openly smokin too.

wednesdayweather

You could think about having sex with a man you'd been dating without reckoning that you should tell him that you don't do anal, like being choked, or want to wanked on, slapped in the face or spat on.

Those were the good old days!

This is quite depressing. So much for feminism. We seem to have regressed big time if those things are the norm now.

When you used to travel on long journeys we would note down the reg numbers of cars and look up in a book which part of the country they were from - WTF 😂

My first trip to Canada in 1974 - had to go to the travel agent who got a massive book out and had to look it up then make calls to arrange it 🙄

Went on a school trip skiing holiday to Switzerland for 10 days - 48 Pounds and we saved up week by week taking money into the teacher .

My dd struggles to get her head around the fact I had a lovely close relationship with my great gran who was born in the 1880's!

When I was a child in the late 1950s/early 1960s we used to occasionally visit my father’s auntie (though really a cousin) in Northern Ireland. He lived with them for some years after his father died when he was three, leaving his mother single-handedly running a lodging house in the north of England. Auntie was surprisingly sprightly when we visited - she was born in the 1870s. She had no electricity, one tap for running water, cooked on an old fashioned range and had an outside “long drop” toilet. Essentially she still lived a nineteenth -century life.

The current thread on here about the elderly man picking up a dropped toy and touching a 1 year old's cheek in a cafe.
Apparently that is weird and grosses many people out.
I look back at my youth and remember both the range of people of all generations I knew and interacted with regularly, and all the little children I knew and played with as a young adult. Seems such a different world now - smaller, less connected and more fearful.

@FinallyHere

people used to take pride in their front gardens and general appearance of their house. Now most people just have a concrete car park covered in weeds and litter. Again, people would not have accepted having litter all over their street let alone on their own property.

@Tilltheend99 generalising much?

Our village has organised litter picking patrol Sedo along the main traffic routes through the village to pick up litter.

Some, maybe not all, people do take pride in their surroundings

I'm going to agree here. Where I lived , in the early 70's mist properties were council houses. Every morning, women usually, would be sweeping their front doorsteps, bashing their front doormats or tending to the front of their houses. Men would do their bit of the front garden when they got home or at weekends. Almost like in a Carry On film.

@Taytocrisps

Afterschool activities weren't a thing back then. A lot of the boys played soccer or GAA (Gaelic football or hurling). They made their own way to training and a bus might be hired to take them to play their matches. Some girls went to Irish dancing or girl guides and I knew one girl who did piano lessons. But lots of kids didn't do any activities at all. Parents didn't beat themselves up over it like they do nowadays. In fact, they didn't give it much thought at all. Birthdays were celebrated with your immediate family and a birthday cake. Parties were few and far between.

I’m probably the same age as you and remember doing lots of after school activities, ballet, tap, modern, gymnastics, drama, music lessons, brownies & guides plus various youth clubs

I also had big parties with entertainers in halls and several parties where we went to an activity and then to McDonalds with about 6 or seven friends.

@fluffedup

And speaking of slapping ... my 20 year old DD didn't know what a 'slapper' was. I told her and she said it sounded like Victorian slang.

This had me proper laughing!

@Travielkapelka I live in Ireland and grew up in a working class area. Definitely no ballet, tap, gymnastics, drama etc. where I lived. Some (not all) of my friends' parents had cars but only the men drove. Even if those activities had been available, the mothers couldn't just pack the kids into a car and drop them off because the family only had one car and the father had driven it to work. The women would have had to walk all the kids there (if it was near enough) or bring them on the bus. People tended to have bigger families back then (no contraception) so cost would have been a factor also. Imagine paying for after school activities for five or six kids? Plus paying bus fares for the whole family to get them to those activities.

I can only remember one or two birthday parties and they were held in a house. We played old fashioned games like blind man's buff. Party food consisted of sandwiches (were savoury sandwiches at thing in the UK - egg, onion and chopped tomatoes?) and birthday cake. No party entertainers or party bags.

There may be some cultural factors at play. Or perhaps you lived in a more affluent area? Or you may be younger than me. I was born in the early '70s.

Born in the early 60 and had children in the 80s. Trying to catch a bus with a baby and a toddler with no pushchair (or wheelchair) spaces. The bus couldn't lower itself to kerb level either. On the other hand generally someone would take your baby and the conductor would give you a hand getting your pushchair, or in my case carrycot on wheels, on to the luggage rack. Drivers would also pick you up before you reached the stop if they saw you running. They aren't allowed now or at least not where I live.

It wasn't normal to see youths of sound mind and sober walking around with their trousers falling down and their hands in their underwear fondling their genitals in public.

It was deemed acceptable to be asked questions like how will you manage childcare and don't you think an hr post would suit you better when being interviewed for a technical job by 4 men. I didn't get the job.

Heavily pregnant women in 70's, 80's smocks openly smokin too

You can’t say that on Mumsnet. Women are allowed to do whatever the hell they want. The health of the baby doesn’t matter.

@FuckPilledLatteplus

Heavily pregnant women in 70's, 80's smocks openly smokin too

You can’t say that on Mumsnet. Women are allowed to do whatever the hell they want. The health of the baby doesn’t matter.

I remember when loads of people smoked including pregnant women, nobody thought much of it. People smoked at work, in offices, in restaurants, the cinema, on trains, even in hospital! My dad smoked all evening in front of the television with my mum and I in the room; I'd go to school the next day with my hair and uniform stinking of stale smoke because mum wouldn't let me change into civvies when I got home. Strange that, I never knew why (I used to smoke though gave up many years ago).

There were no after school activities when I was at school unless you were in brownies or something like that (I wasn't allowed to be). Things like dancing lessons were usually on Saturday mornings.

I was born in the 1950s, in London. Abortion was illegal, tv was black and white and only had 2 channels, BBC and ITV. Women had to get a male guarantor to sign credit agreements. It was legal to pay women less than men doing the same job. Men could legally rape their wives. There were no women’s refuges for domestic violence victims. The contraceptive pill hadn’t been invented. There were no home computers, mobile phones or video recorders. London had only one airport, on the site of present day Heathrow. There were no automatic washing machines, tumble driers, or microwave ovens. I was three years old before Britain got its first motorway - a whole 8 miles long! Yes, it really was a different world

Yes I was born in the mid 1940s and had much the same experience.

I had to open a bank account in the early 1960s to be pad with bank transfer. My parents were quite hostile about this and the fact that I had a cheque book. They thought it was "stuck up". Then I was even more stuck up because I had a phone put into my first flat (mid 1960s). My parents were not on the phone til 1970s. You had to go to a phone box! I can remember the first 3 hour train journeys from the north to London coming out. Before that it had been at least 5 hours.

Well to be fair, Ms was used for divorced people, and still is to this day! It’s just that it’s become a little more popular for non-divorced women now too.

I don't think that's right.

I've always been Ms. I was born in the mid 60s (in Ireland) and my sisters and all my friends were also Ms. I always hated the idea of being Miss or Mrs.

Someone recently told me that contactless payment is rarely used in the US and they dont use contactless for tube/transport barriers. No idea how true it is but I was pretty mind blown about that as I thought they would be ahead of the game in tech.

Not so for several years now, for payment in shops, etc and for public transport.

I believe that US citizens have to complete their own tax returns hence the need for their cheque book log . It's easier than having receipts for absolutely everything.

No, you need receipts, but only if you are filling out a certain personal income tax form and claiming itemised deductions. (Perhaps also for business returns but your accountant would be doing that for you, using receipts or your business software).

I've always been Ms. I was born in the mid 60s (in Ireland) and my sisters and all my friends were also Ms. I always hated the idea of being Miss or Mrs.

Same here. Born 1965, grew up in Sydney. In Australia it's usual to be Miss or Master to age 12, then default to Ms or Mr after. My friends and I were mostly Ms from age 13 and so on through singlehood, marriage and divorce. Men who told us "Ms stands for MISERABLE" were treated like the extinct life forms they were and told to shuffle off.

Oh, I just remembered another one. My DM had very low iron levels during her pregnancies (I'm not sure if it was just one pregnancy or all of them) so the doctor recommended she drink Guinness every day to boost her iron levels. I think she was supposed to drink a glass or maybe a pint of it every day. DM was never much of a drinker and hated the taste of it. This would have been somewhere between the mid '60s and mid '70s.

Speaking of alcohol, generations of babies were raised on gripe water.

Just to say in response to a previous post that the connection of HISTORY and HIS STORY is just an unfortunate coincidence. The word comes from the Latin HISTORIA and has no connection to males. Feminist historian talk about HERSTORY but it's not really based in the real meaning if the original word, which confuses people.

I was discussing books we'd read with a friend. We came to the conclusion that things have always changed relatively fast in a person's lifetime.
Both WWs made such differences faster. My DM lived through the second, women had suddenly been needed in the workplace. The health service started soon after. People owned cars. Education was provided to ?14.

My DGPs lived through the first (were retired during the second but did have refugees staying with them). The railways were built in their lifetime - imagine no longer needing a horse and cart to travel across the country. Just jump on the train and get off in London or Paris, or holiday in the Highlands. The rich landowners lost their staff to industry. Working class became wealthier. People worked all over the world in the colonies. People emigrated to Canada, Australia.

Things have probably changed faster with the introduction of technology but things in the western world always changed from one generation to the next.