to want to go on a visit to the 70s

[morningtoncrescent62]

I'm not dewy-eyed about the 1970s, and I know it was a time of unchecked sexism, racism, homophobia etc., with levels of child abuse that are only now becoming evident. I don't want everything to go back to how it was then. But I do sometimes feel left behind and overwhelmed by how much has changed since I was growing up - a bit like having culture shock when you go to an unfamiliar country. I just long to have a couple of weeks in the early 70s. I'll sing a few New Seekers songs, hang out on a picket line for a bit, do some shopping in Woolworths and C&As and then I'll come back and get on with my life here. AIBU?

Definitely not me then Vanilla - I can't stand cats

And just for you (cos I'm sure no-one will have told you about it before ) the 1987 storm is largely remembered round our way for Michael Fish's forecast:

Yikes I've just read that 22 people died in that storm. I'd forgotten that - sorry.

Memory's a funny thing isn't it? Mine is causing me some concern (especially having watched my mum go through the horrors of dementia).

However, I can remember what I wore for the school Xmas disco in -

1970 (red synthetic midi skirt with matching waistcoat and pie crust style neck
1971 (brown Oxford bags, yellow blouse with big rounded colour and a brown wool waistcoat)
1972 (blue tartan smock style dress)
1973 (lilac dungarees- which I made myself ....)

I think after 1973 I must have started getting more than one outfit a year so they became less memorable. I think I can remember the shoes too. I so wanted brogues with segs in the heels but had to make do with sensible Clarks and drawing pins ....

We didn't have Vesta curries (my dad wouldn't have eaten them) but clackers and spangles loomed large in my young life. I think clackers were eventually banned because they tended to shatter if clacked too enthusiastically, or something like that.

I hated the long summer of 76. It was hot, sticky and boring if you didn't have anywhere pleasant to play, which I didn't. Also I didn't like not having running water for most of the day, or being able to flush the loo. I'll be steering clear of that summer for my visit.

My mum was born in the 70s.
I feel like a child reading this (just thought I'd pop along to make you all feel old)

I remember watching a truly horrific film about stranger danger. Around 9 so would be 1973. I watched it recently on u tube and it's still horrific.

Yes spangles, and fruit salad large ones 2p and mojos 1/2 p for one.

Being smacked by parents and teachers happened daily but it happened to most I think. The parky cuffed me too.

I was too young to appreciate it at the time butI love the decor. I have as much brown and orange, clashing florals and 70s china as I can sneak into to my house. I collect St Michael 70s/80s brown poppy stuff. Heaven.

I grew up late 50s and 60s, so remember some of the nastier side of 70s.
Hell, I'm so old I remember saving and spending farthings!
I do remember the drought during summer of '76, as I was working at the water board during the hosepipe ban. DH and I married in 1976, and I did have a fair bit of that brown poppy stuff at the time! Oh yes, the brown-ness of the mid 70s!

In the summer of 76 I remember the Tarmac melting in our street. I can also remember my mum and auntie crying when Elvis died.

It was a simpler time. Things were almost completely routine from what you ate to what happened on days of the week. You went to the nearest school. Morecombe and Wise were Christmas. It was perfectly possible to be impossibly excited about crisps. Caravanning on Canvey Island was a legitimate holiday destination.

In the winter your toes froze and in the summer the skin burnt off your shoulders.

It breaks my heart to remember the way we all wanted to go on Jimll Fix It and It's A Knockout.

I have mixed feelings about the 70s. On the one hand it was bloody miserable. I remember getting home from school in the power cuts and huddling round the open fire whilst Mum cooked tea on a calor gas stove. The strikes made life miserable and badly affected my dad's business. Nobody had any money. There was a reason Thatcher got elected in 1979; the alternative was for the country to go truly bankrupt.
At the time, Sundays were very boring, but now I look back at weekends and holidays we spent more time visiting family and hanging out all day at the stables with my mates and our ponies. There were some good times. And the Saturday discos at the church hall were legendary (and very innocent) My home town still had pride and a future. Now that's pretty much gone.
But most of all I would like to go back to the 70s because my mum and dad and other family members would still be alive and I could ask and say all the things I never did in the living years.

Oh yes Matey - I'd love to go back and see my mum and dad in the 70s. They were both still in their 40s at the start of the decade. I lost them both in the last 5 years after so many years of watching them struggle with old age and then succumb to the horrors of cancer and dementia. It would be wonderful to go back and see them in their prime.

home made clothes and orange and brown chrysanthemum wall paper!

oh and yes - paraffin heaters and frosty windows

and the Apline Pop man delivering every Friday!

It's quite amusing how the memories are so age-dependent. Obvious, but still amusing. I mainly remember brown and orange, and sitting on a rug in the sun with the cat. My mum was incredibly slim and wore brown and orange. My dad smoked a pipe. We had a funny old tealy blue car, and a black and white tv. I remember quite a lot, and everything was slower and softer and calmer, and people were kinder than they are now. But that could equally because I was three, and three year olds generally have a gentler pace of life than adults.

Sundays in Ireland had an extra level of boring: MASS as well as everything closed. I remember flares, thinly plucked eyebrows, sideburns, the smell of fags and BO, not much on TV, lovely feral freedom for kids roaming round the streets on their bikes, everything coloured brown, orange and mustard. I have lovely 70s memories but I was only 8 when they ended...different challenges for the grownups.

I have an enormous (rose-tinted) soft spot for the 70s and remember having the placemats in GraceGildee's photo. My bedroom had a sink in it which was useful in the summer of 1976 - I remember waking up during the hot nights and soaking flannels to cool me down. And the lovely, small, curved tv in our sitting room was the only screen in the house.

I remember what I was reading. Fear of Flying by Erica Jong, and all the George Orwell books as well as Katherine by Anya Seaton. There's a mixture .
My mother wore lots of swirly orange dresses.
I had purple loons and cheesecloth tops.
In the late 70s when Grease came out we bought black skin tight trousers like Olivia NJ wore. This was before lycra was invented. It took two people to fasten them and you couldn't breathe let alone go to the loo.

YANBU, I would love to time travel too.

I'd like to echo someone who wondered if everyone smelled.

Even in the 80s my dad smoked in the house and we changed clothes and washed much less than I do now.

Actually he still smokes in the house - but I don't live there - and when I visit everything that has come with me gets washed as soon as I come home.

My dad used to smoke a pipe. Can't remember being bothered by the smell but it must have been awful.

When I was at secondary school I only had 2 school blouses at a time. I wore one for 2 days and the other for 3 then they got washed at the weekend (in the twin tub).

When I was at primary in the 60s I had a bath once a week on a Sunday night and hair was washed, in the bath, every other Sunday. Mind you, I worked with someone in the 1990s who had very long wavy auburn hair which he never washed. I don't mean he didn't wash it often, he hadn't washed it in years. It looked fabulous.

We were lucky as dps bought brand new house in 1971 so always had heating and hot water and my dd had installed central heating at our old home in the 60s. Dps also had a dishwasher.

The music was great but my dps weren't into it so only got into pop in the late 70s. Lots of brown and yellow and long dresses. DM making cloth kits for us. Soda syphons, velvet sofa with thread border.

I was 10 in 1970 and my memories of that decade aren't good
Miners strikes, 3 day weeks and having to go to school in shifts while the heat and light was still on.

Being perpetually cold
Mum being groped and propositioned at work (seen as inevitable in the workplace then)
i started work at 16 and was also groped by someone in a senior post.

Cig smoke everywhere - journey home from work when it was busy was a total nightmare and I got off each evening wheezing.
The Yorkshire Ripper and the total fear when out alone and looking at every bloke and wondering "could it be you?"
Inequality, homophobia, sexism and racism were everywhere. TV programmes utterly dreadful looking back - Never Mind The Language, On The Buses, Alf Garnett, one I can't remember the title of about a black family and a white family lliving next to one another :(
Awful squalor and poverty in some areas. Looking at our school photos, a lot of kids looked pasty, drawn and unhealthy.
Far more bad memories than good for me about this decade.

When you put it like that, dailymail, it sounds grim.

Sorry mine isnt so nice. I remember family trips into central london and having racist things shouted at us and that being the norm. And just not knowing what to do. We would never say anything back, just out our heads down and be embarrassed.

"one I can't remember the title of about a black family and a white family lliving next to one another "

That'd be "Love Thy Neighbour".