Fond dreams of the 70/80's

[ElderDruid]

OK so I'm giving myself away to be aged but I don't care. Was reading another super poster who is cooking a load of party food from scratch it made me think back to a time when I didn't have to be a pro at this adulting business.

All the foods our parents would cook, sitting in a pub with a can of coke and bag of crisps, parties with home made grub and cheese/pineapple hedgehogs. The local social club for weddings and parties. The same place hosting random bands on a Saturday, bingo on a Sunday. Or the bigger ones that had a bigger lounge, where you'd go after bowls on a Saturday, watching your family play on fruit machines, just wanting to be allowed to press the button.

Being able to bike for miles, swim in rivers, jump off bridges into the murky depths below. Exploring, so much exploring. Going cap in hand to a farmer who's track we'd followed, coming back at dusk on our bikes to see the gate bolted. Getting a brew & cake from the farmers wife, whilst the farmer told the best stories.

Going to the play park / recreation ground after hours with alcohol you paid a random adult outside a shop to get you. Cigarettes that cost next to nothing. Fish & chips on Fridays. As a rare rare treat a trip to the Chinese, which wasn't actually for you, but prawn crackers dipped in your Dads curry.

Babysitting for kids you barely knew, because the parents knew a friend of a friend of your parents. LP's, proper music you had to save for, not just click buy on iTunes. The Atari was tech golddust. No computers, the first when I was in my teens in the 80's being the Amstrad CPC 464, screeching tapes to load a game. That's right kids games on cassettes. Although you don't even know what a cassette is. Not to mention TV before Sky, how did we cope? We got Sky pretty much as it came out, even then there weren't a thousand channels. Your brother watching German TV late at night, because, well we all know why.

Those phones you had to dial with your finger in a circle. Any phonecall after 10 and you assumed someone must have died. VHS tapes to record stuff, with murder being a choice when someone taped over your programme. Has to be mentioned, trying to record to top 40 on a Sunday old style disc jockeys. None of this down with the kids stuff. Although possibly shouldn't mention them as not all are the paragons of virtue we believed. Disco's where you usually ended up in the school toilets with a friend with smudged mascara as a boy had been a dick. Hairstyles that are simply the opposite of the straightened within an in of its life look now. Not knowing if you lit a cigarette after using half a can of hair spray if the room would combust.

Kissing and smoking behind the bike sheds at school. MLiving in fear of getting in trouble because the teachers could launch the blackboard rubber at you or worse, the phone call home! Times when your parents would take the teachers word as tacit proof and you'd get a bollocking at school then worse at home.

Im sure I've missed loads out, but does anyone else remember those times of simplicity fondly?

This thread is bringing back some lovely memories of being a teenager in the seventies, thanks OP.

I remember Saturday's in Woolworth's with friends, thinking Miners make up was the height of sophistication. Snickers were called Marathons. Thursday night was TOTP and fingers crossed David Cassidy. I had a huge poster of him on my ceiling, so I could gaze at him in bed! And yes, proper stripy sheets and blankets, and a heavy bed cover.

Walking home from school at 11 yrs to an empty house and expected to get the tea started, listening to Radio Luxenberg 'Luxy' under the bed covers...sneaking Players No 6's from big brother for me and friend to smoke by the park.

School disco's in Youth clubs, wanting hair like Farrah in Charlie's Angels, wearing Tramp perfume and gypsy skirts with frilly longer petticoats underneath.

Fish and chips for a Saturday night treat, good stock of candles in the cupboard because of power cuts (which I bizarrely loved). Going to the football with bro and his mates and standing, not sitting...and it cost 25p to get in.

Of course there were bad times and dangers, there always are, but there was a sense of freedom and simplicity which was amazing.

I grew up in the 70s really.
There was a lot more freedom - and the stress over exams was just personal, not part of media hype.
But there was a lot less care over children. Yes parents cared, but in my experience teachers didn't that much. There was a lot of bad stuff happening at my school, and teachers turned a blind eye. I think when "sniffing glue" started on a largish scale, was the first time the school was forced to recognise what was going on.
Despite anti-smoking lessons, a blind eye was turned to it happening in school bathrooms etc. And the staff room was a blue "fug" of smoke.
And there was a lot of child sex abuse. The real "paedos" who were seen as scum. Teacher student relationships. Teachers that you wore high necklines for. The guys who would hang around outside school to watch us playing netball, (and why PE skirts got longer as we went up the school). The dad who would try to get a "kiss" whenever I visited his daughter. And the nightclub which was "strictly over 25" but quite a few 14 and 15 year olds from my school went to, to meet rich guys.

When I went to Uni the lecturers would moan how health and safety meant we couldn't do "real" experiments, even though at least two of them had permanent injuries from lab explosions (one blind the other deaf).