How was life different 15 years ago?

[jamontoastaddict]

2007. I don't mean personally but generally.

Got me thinking in another thread about something that happened (relatives accident) 15 years ago and it seem so recent yet seems so long ago too. 15 years before that was 1992 so I imagine 2007 seems a different lifetime 1992.

Anyway what has changed. I remember topping up my non-smart phone (Samsung clam) by text and that seemed so much better than a top up card.

I remember going to choose a Tom Tom sat nav!

The first series of Gavin and Stacey was very 2007, I remember boys dressing in Fred Perry and driving Citroen Saxos. There’s one episode where Stacey is watching the Weakest Link, I went to uni with someone who went on it in 2008

Wow, how long did you go for and did you miss them or were you having too much of an adventure?

15 years ago I was taking my digital camera to boots or snappy snaps to print out physical photos to put in photo albums. I was learning French from a series of CDs.

We used to rip off the latest albums and films off the Internet. It could take 3 hours to download an album.

I used the library loads. They've closed down my local library and the one in town is only open when the moon is in venus.

2007 was when last Punch and Judy show was at a the village fayre. I know it’s mocking domestic violence but cannot lie it was centuries old tradition and I loved it as a child and am a bit sad it is now dead and gone.

Also around then, was when Guy Fawkes night became Bonfire night and no Guy to parade, Penny for the Guy etc before burning him.

2009 was last time I saw Morris dancers too. Maypoles were gone from May Day in the 1990s.

Lots I grew up with, things that had lasted centuries or millennia have disappeared.

I was finishing uni and still going out every weekend raving. All those places have gone now: the end, egg, turnmills. What a time it was. But then all we ever heard was old timers telling us how much better 1992 was.

I’m a lecturer now. Our students definitely still drink; they are much more image conscious and much more into coke than pills than we ever were. They go to festivals instead of raves. But they are also just so smart and thoughtful. Anxious though. So very anxious. Combination of the high-pressure exam factory in school, Covid, the enormous burden of debt, and then the scary “no future” public narrative. I feel very sorry for them, and can relate because graduating into the 2008 recession felt similar, but 2008 felt less total and unending.

On the flip side, we work really bloody hard at my uni to try and make their lives better and university worth the investment. My RG uni gave no shits about me or my life! Fortunately, I was very intelligent, as my attendance was appalling (see: the raving), and I still graduated with a great first in an era when they were rarer than hens’ teeth. But so many more fell through the cracks and no one really cared.

I left school and started uni in 2007. I had Bebo but also used emails to catch up with school friends after we had went our separate ways to uni. My halls of residence had no wifi, if I wanted to use the Internet it was on my laptop plugged in in my room. I never used the internet on my flip phone and if I ever accidentally clicked into it I would panic and exit immediately in case I racked up a bill. I remember my housemates and I would go to a dvd shop to rent DVDs to watch together in the communal area. I went shopping frequently in Topshop, Miss Selfridge, Dorothy Perkins, Faith shoes etc. Such fond memories of that time!

Some of these memories sound more like 1997 than 2007!

A work colleague gave me a minidisc player for free around that time because they were obsolete even then. I didn’t have an iPod yet, I was still carrying a portable CD player.

Not much different. Economic woes, high unemployment, housing bubble, protests/riots, wars & famine around the world.

We were so disconnected. There’s very little record of my life other than the times I purposely took a camera, like holidays or parties. Not the day to day photographic record we have now! And the photos are all genuine not edited. In a way though I am glad that my past is so anonymous. I don’t want my current partner to be able to scroll back through details of my time with exes!

Blockbusters was still open

I was thinking gavin and Stacey too.

Watching them back really show the time as I remember it. They captured it incredibly well. Stacey's outfits and her tiny bags and her sliding phone. And burn singing James Blunt!

I lived in NW England from 1995-2004.
I used to get a Tesco/Sainsbury or ASDA delivery every Thursday in 2003-2004.

Ocado was around 2008 nationwide because my BBC Good Food mentioned it and I remember saying that I would have loved a Waitrose delivery. We had Booths and I realize it was better. 😉

Summer 2007 was devastating for us as my young sister in law died in a car accident age 31. It broke my husband. Remember all the shops especially debenhams where we would get a lovely coffee and cake or meal. Seems very depressing now, so hate going into the town center.

Nights out in Sankeys, the Warehouse Project (when it wasn't the pose fest it is now), going to gigs most weekends and a general sense of invincibility. No-one seemed to be as anxious as they are now. My housemates and I drank cheap wine most nights, smoked like chimneys, lived on £90 a week and still had a great time. Nights out meant hearing The Klaxons, Killers and Hot Chip, and we all expected we would just graduate and move into our desired jobs. However behaviour from men would definitely be defined as sexual harassment today, and sexual comments were either normalised or laughed at.

My DH wasn’t dead so life was def better then.

I’m so sorry for your loss.💐

They are not illegal migrants. They have not been processed and so not illegal. Hth.

Two separate trips, between three and four weeks each. And I'm afraid to say that I was having way too exciting a time to miss them too much! The girls were late teens though, so I didn't feel too bad about abandoning them.
My late DH was a star. He knew I'd always wanted to go backpacking (which wasn't his thing) so he encouraged me to go and do it anyway and convinced me that it was okay to do my solo thing and leave the rest of them behind.

Moved to Australia.

So it was! I had forgotten. I used to take my children regularly to the one in Chiswick.

My niece was born in 2007. I was going to get her one of those what-happened-in-the-year-you-were-born birthday cards a couple of years ago. It had "Madeline Macann went missing" on it. Why tf would you put that on a child's birthday card?! Depressing.

Lots of time talking about and using hair straighteners - GHD the best. Everyone straightened their hair.

I had a Cath Kidston Nokia 6111 sliding camera phone - till this day probably my favourite phone I ever had.

Two could eat in Nando's with an alcoholic drinks for just under £20.

Facebook - I resisted for a while, felt weird but all my friends moaned at me to go on it so I did and we all talked about Big Brother!

I was drinking Archers Aqua - lime or raspberry flavours when I went out.

There was a HMV, Early Learning Centre, Mothercare and a River Island on my local shopping street all gone now.

Have you forgotten the 2007 Credit Crunch and the banking disaster? The economy was not ok. The recession started in 2007.

Exactly and culminate in the riots in 2011. 2007/8 was a disaster.tons of people losing jobs, homes, businesses

Maybe the credit crunch started in 2007, but people don't really remember it until it actually hit them? The news also wasn't so intense and clickbaity as it is now. There was BBC News 24, but it just wasn't like it is now. People didn't share news reports on social media, newspaper websites weren't as well used, people read actual newspapers. So people weren't being bombarded with constant tales of doom. I remember news reports of people lining up outside Northern Rock and that seemed to be when it started to feel angsty, although that was actually September 2007! But I was pregnant throughout most of 2008 and I remember my NCT group musing and feeling that it hadn't felt precarious at all when we conceived (which would have been Nov/Dec 2007) but by the end of our pregnancies it was, and a lot of people were worrying about the world they'd brought children into.

I do remember money worries being fairly big because MoneySavingExpert / Martin Lewis was a big thing and I was on their email list and spent lots of time in their forum. I actually think that was really formative for me, because he made financial literacy accessible to people who don't necessarily have the background in it.