Did anybody grow up in the 70s?

[floraloctopus]

The 50s and 80s threads are fascinating. Can anybody shed light on the 70s please?

Aye.
Bay City Rollers socks.
Rolf Harris Stylophones.
Clackers, and broken wrists.
Walking to school in heavy fog.
Fireworks only happened on 5th November (unless it was a Sunday)
Bath night was Sunday (unless we got very dirty on other days)

Loads of strikes - numerous powercuts, queuing for bread.
Drought of 76, collecting water from stand pipes in the street.

3 day week and power cuts, queuing for bread and sugar, total misunderstanding about teeth and sugar, making our own clothes from Laura Ashley fabrics. Then punk arrived .

Having a bath with my brother and sister in the drought. The Queen's Jubilee, wearing knee high white socks with everything, crisps were 2 1/2p, not everyone had a landline or a car. The only pasta was spag bol, hand-knitted ponchos, gloves and hats

Okay, I didn't phrase that very well! The only pasta was spag bol. We also wore hand knitted ponchos, hats and gloves.

I grew up in the US but we visited the U.K. most summers (mother rented out a flat to students during the year and then we’d go stay in it so she could do work on it in the summer). What I remember most was the limited TV, both in terms of channels and also hours it was on!

I also remember loads of strikes and not very good fruit/veg.

On the plus side, my mother used to let my younger brother and I run around Edinburgh on our own. We used to play football with the neighbourhood kids in the middle of what is now quite a busy Edinburgh street. I also remember the milk being delivered by a horse drawn cart (in its least few years)

Salt n shake crisps
IRA
Went to school by myself on the tube once I was 8 - 3 stops, 1 change
Angel Delight
DM shoped locally, daily-ish
DM did a degree as a mature student. She used to leave her baby (me!) behind the till in the college bookshop when she went to lectures..
Big collars,big patterns

Rag and Bone man used to come round with with horse and cart.
The local brewery used to deliver beer by horse and cart too, in Central London (I believe they did until they closed about 10 years ago).
Kids TV was limited, and a bit rubbish.
We played out in the street and took shirt cuts over unfenced railway lines.
Got the bus from London to not far from Brighton by myself, to my grandparents. I was about 11-12.

Pasta was foreign, unless it was ravioli or spaghetti hoops in a tin.
Pizza, McDonalds etc unheard of. Wimpy was waitress service.

Chopper bikes
Yorkshire ripper
Babycham
Kicker shoes
Drought of 76
Saturday night fever being released and all the hype and the Bee Gees
Morecombe and Wise
Miss World
Conductor on a bus

Partridge Family, The Brady Bunch, queues for petrol, bell bottoms, crochet vests, my mum in orange jeans with daisies, no seat belts, school days, endless summers...

I had 2 pairs of shoes. Brown school shoes and plimsolls - black gym shoes, then Dunlop green flash. And wellies. Wellies and plimsolls usually were hand me downs.
Slam door trains.
The summer of 76!
Polyester everything !
No school uniform.

I bought a pair of Kickers a few weeks ago!

Mum's in the summer sitting on the doorsteps (terraced houses) with a cup of tea in the evening when it was hot, kids playing in the street, a great community atmosphere. Silver tinsel Christmas tree with multi-coloured fairy lights. Always getting a box of lemon and orange sugared jelly sweets with your Christmas presents. No central heating or landline. Walking to school and home again for lunch.

Being “allowed” to stay up to watch Morecambe and Wise abs The Two Ronnies. Ie: parents didn’t want to miss itZ
oh yes. Live broadcast tv. TV was on when it was on, possibly repeated at 4am 3 days later.
Phones were attached to a wall or a phone box.

Scrubbing the front step.

The black and white minstrel show - imagine that now.

5 tv channels

Rainbow - supposedly a kids tv show.

Going out to play and just make sure you're back by 6pm.

Phone boxes

Moving house in 1976 and not getting a phone for 4 years

Decimalisation

Grease!

Our coal fire
No central heating
Bath once a week
All clothes being a massive fire risk!
Psychedelic wallpaper in our lounge.
Tufty the squirrel telling us how to cross the road.
Scary public service ads about horrendous ways you might die!
Mary Mungo and Midge.
No supermarket in our town just small shops.

Sharing a bath - weekly.
Mum not working, she'd walk into town on market day and come home with shopping bags of fresh veg & fruit, plus fresh bread from the bakers.
Car journeys with no seat belts, how many of could fit on the back seat?
2-star petrol

Bedroom was painted green. Not a pastel green. Not a mint green. Absolutely bright racing green.
Habitat.

5 TV channels @cstaff?

We had BBC1, BBC2 and ITV.
Great excitement when C4 started in 1982, even more excitement when we managed to tune it in in about 1987!

Local phone numbers only 4 digits long - how many of us use old phone numbers as PIN now, I wonder?

I was a young child in the 70s, remember the last half of the decade.

I walked myself to primary school from the age of 5yo by myself and back home.

Parka coats and balaclavas.

I remember the first supermarket in town (Asda) opening and it was like a different world. Before that I'd had to trail round all the different shops with my mum.

Mum had a top loader washing machine which had to be attached to the kitchen taps with a hose and was pulled into the middle of the kitchen when in use.

I wore all my older brothers cast off clothes and Before that they'd belonged to my cousin!

Was allowed to roam round the neighbourhood with other kids for hours at a time. Just had to be back for tea.

The tv channels didn't use to broadcast for half the day. I would sit and watch the test card some afternoons as I was so bored!

Summers seemed hot and lots of water pistol fights. Winters it always seemed to snow. School would shut for a few days and we would go sledging. The local dads would take it in turns to tie a sledge to their rear bumper and pull us round the estate!

My brother had a chopper bike. And I might be imagining this but I swear I had a bike with solid/concrete wheels....no tyres!

Oh yes, the phones! My mother used to tell each batch of outgoing students to absolutely NOT cancel the phone when they left because if they did, we had no chance at getting a phone line over the 6 odd weeks we’d be there. It took months to get hooked back up again!