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The Old Days

I had a friend over last week that I grew up with and we were chatting away (like you do) about what it was like to grow up in the 60's & 70's. Obviously we didn't have CD players, hell, we were still using the reel to reel tape deck back then and the '78' had only just gone out of fashion having been replaced with the '45'. We could remember getting dead excited about having our first transistor radio. It didn't matter that it was 'am' and sounded like a tin can with a hole in it, these things could fit in our hand and run on batteries, they made a noise and that was all that mattered. Of course our TV was still operated by valves for some time and were all B&W, the sort which had the dot on the screen for ages when it was turned off. It didn't matter though because there was sod all to watch. There was no kids TV except between 4-6pm on weekdays. Much later came Saturday morning kids TV. We had Blue Peter, Crackerjack with Leslie Crowther and Peter Glaze, well, at our time that was who it was. Michael Aspel was young, way before he started selling pensions and funeral plans, he did 'Ask Aspel' and 'Newsround' was presented by John Craven when he had dark hair.

We did some great holidays such as 'Clacton' which took 2 1/2 hours once we were on the 'Grey-Green' coach. It took an hour to walk to the coach stop with our luggage and we'd be waiting around for a good 30 minutes so the whole trip would take about 4 hours. Other 'exotic' places were Isle of Sheppey and Great Yarmouth though that was around that magic time of 1976 which those of us around at the time would still say was the best summer ever.

On the counter to all that talk of hot weather were the winters when we always had snow and there was no heating or double glazing to speak of. There was a gas fire in the 'front room' and, if it got really cold (way beyond ice on the inside of windows) we'd be allowed to have the paraffin heater on. Most nights we could have the electric blanket on but it barely did anything and the sheets still actually crackled as the ice melt in them when we got into bed.

Oh, those were days ... I may write more about this some time :-)

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