To have not realised how old I am??

[bellav]

DH and I were just talking and one of us said "as if by magic" after which the other one said "the shopkeeper appeared!" Obviously a Mr Benn reference! So we Googled and found this:

https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=10155630054483895

Which talks about coal being delivered and also looks SO dated! Now we feel old! We remember milk being delivered and playing out in the street, one phone in the house that you had to sit at and use the "dially thing". Argh! We were born late 70s. How have times changed so much??? Anyone else shocked?

I knew I was old when my daughter came home from her GCSE history exam and told me that the historical document on the paper was the My Lai massacre which I remembered happening.

When I got married we bought a washing machine and cooker from an older couple who were moving house. The cooker was cream coloured ,it had 3 solid rings and a cast iron lid to make a work top when you weren't cooking.
The washing machine was also cream .it was a single tub with an electric wringer attached. I remember the smell of fairy snow washing powder and the clouds of steam. That machine was so efficient . One load was washing ,one was wrung out and rinsed and then you swung the wringer round and wrung out the rinsed load into the sink . You started with the white wash and the last load was my husbands work clothes. I washed woollen and delicates by hand . The machine would boil nappies very efficiently too. We paid £5 each for the two items. When the cooker broke down we bought a 1950s American electric cooker from a local farmer. I cant imagine where he had aquired it as his house was otherwise a museum piece. It had 6 solid rings,a huge oven and a timer. It was turquoise and pink. It looked like a juke box and I loved it. Was so sorry to part with them all but parts were no longer available . I also used the hot soapy water left from the hand wash to wash the kitchen floor after " washday" and then it was further recycled to wash the flag stones outside the back door. Apart from small items and nappies I only washed once a week. It was a big job but I had a Rayburn to help with drying. Washing is so easy now ,bit I do seem to have washing lying about all the time.

My mum told my teens that she had to cover her hair at Mass from about 14. She had a bit of black lace (which seems a bit of a racey material given it was for modest hair covering!)

A few years ago there was a spate of burglaries in our village. I was walking back home alone, slightly worse for wear, from a friend's house at about 1am. The street lights go out at midnight so it was pitch black. I heard the sound of a car crawling round the streets and pausing occasionally. Definitely suspicious!
Being drunk and fancying myself as Miss Marple I turned off my torch and hid behind a tree....
Then the milk man came round the corner!

I had no idea that milk was still delivered like that. The burglar did get caught eventually, but no thanks to me!

I'm 55 so even older. Most of the time I don't think about it. I just get on with living in the world as it is, doing things in the 'new' ways that have gradually crept up on us. But now and again, like when I'm talking to young colleagues about music and they're in awe that I saw their legends live, or that I remember this or that that my DC talked about in history lessons or when I find an 80s ra ra skirt in the attic and DD is thrilled, those times, i realise just how amazing and cool it is to have lived over half a century and seen so much. I feel special and privileged and wise and fortunate.

I was born mid fifties and lived in the countryside - there were hardly any cars and little tv.
so peaceful

Yup, this all sounds very familiar from my childhood.

I remember once my elder sister had to make a phone call to her last place of work and i went with her to the phone box (we didn't have a phone at home.) She couldn't get through so she pressed button B and the phone must have had a glitch because it returned not only her coin but several shillings worth of copper. We celebrated by going to the shop for cream cakes!

Huh!

I am not that much older than you (62) but when I took my test there was no written part. You just did the practical bit and at the end the examiner asked you two or three questions from the Highway Code and then they told you straight away whether you had passed or failed.

Same here! And I’m 52… I got a few questions in the car and that was it!

Same here and I am 52. I passed in 1989 - so I think the written tests came in late 90s or noughties.

My sister is also November, and I remember taking great pleasure one NY at the bells pointing out she'd be 40 the following year. She tried to throw it back that I'd be 30, but as my birthday's not until February I had another year (as it were). She was not amused!

I had to look up “galley proofs”, so time consuming- I think if I had had to do all that I probably would have failed my degree as it was I was up all night as stupidly had left the printing until the last day! I think other more organised people would have been fine😂

At least we weren't able to waste oodles of time scrolling on our phones ;-)

But no lecture notes on the internet - if you wanted to know what the lecturer said, you had to actually be there - including at the 9am Saturday morning one.

I think after a while you just forget about it (I'm 40s).

I had a 23yo say to me this week that it was nice to meet someone not his age, he's doing his Masters degree 😆 I had to keep a straight face

Oh and I used to love Mr Ben

Early 70s child here
When i think of the 80s i think 20 years ago!

I LOVED Mr. Benn! I think there were only ever 10 made, though it seemed to be on all the time.

Looking back though, it was a bit weird. I wonder what the writer was on 🤣

A friend died recently. Aged 70. Well that feels like a not too bad age to die.
It's only 15 years older than I am now.

I'm 63. I'm so old I was already an adult by the time internet came along. When I started work there were still manual typewriters around. I can still manage to pay for stuff using my phone and keep my loyalty cards on there too.

@SummerSplashing I am only 2 years older than you but did my driving test in 1984. Your DD might be fascinated to know that back then there was not even a separate theory test at all. We just got asked a couple of questions on the highway code at the end of the test.

Yes OP Mr Ben seems very dated now. I was born in 1966. Coal delivered, milk delivered. But we also had the Corona man come fortnightly door to door with fizzy drinks. And our local shops (not the main city shops, just the local ones) included a grocer, green grocer, butcher, fishmonger, haberdasher and iron monger.

When we first got a telephone we had a “party line” so had to share the line with another householder. If they were using the phone you had to wait.

TV was a black and white one until I was about 6.

The doctor (who to be fair had his surgery just up the road) made a house call to me every day when I was 4 and very ill with measles.

The difference between my childhood and my children’s childhood is huge. But so was the difference between mine and my parents’ who grew up with rationing, no TV, no telephone.

Well I was born in the mid 60s and don’t feel old at all , like a pp when I did my driving test there was no theory test just questions at the end of the test . My sister and I went to a concert a couple of weeks back of someone that we see every time they tour or are localish and we were reminiscing about the first time we went which was 1979 !

As a teenager in the 80s, the 50 year olds in my life were all born before or during WWII and did a lot of "ooh, back in my day, this were all fields" etc., and I used to roll my eyes. Guess what, now I'm 52, and can't believe how much the world has changed. My teenagers roll their eyes at me. Their turn will come.

I remember the first supermarket opening in our town, where you could actually pick up groceries and put them in your basket instead of asking the shopkeeper for them - it was about the size of the average Sainsbury's local.

My father can remember the National Grid for electricity supply being put in, and was already an adult when the NHS was founded. He was relatively well off, and they had electricity and a car - my mother grew up with oil lamps and water from a well in the garden.

So much change they saw in their lives, but my generation are seeing even more, and there will be more still for generations to come.

Probably Same age but I don’t understand the shock?

Mr Benn rocks.

I loved all those types of programmes,Mary ,mungo, midge,ivor the engine, captain pugwash, Noggin the Nog,Mr Ben.

So true… we all think we know it all but when we hit our 50s we realise how different things were and are!