Monday, 22 February 2016

On days gone by ...


22 February



First off, I made a bit of a booboo yesterday when I listed the shops we have in town, we have a second in-store bakery (in the loosest of terms), Greggs has an outlet on Harefield Road by the bus station. No damage done, but a mistake is rectified.



Jan is busy looking for the confirmation emails for two items she ordered from links on Facebook, one is a pocket watch with a booksie theme that I took a liking for. The other item is a pair of bracelets, with a warning that she suffers from Fybromyaldria (I can never work the spelling of that one), that one. She ordered the bracelets on 30th of December, so they should certainly be here now. We are wonder if we may have been scammed with these two items. As far as I can remember, the watch was a link to Amazon though, so that one should have been safe enough.



Our kitchen was supposed to be finished in 14 working days; and yet here we are sat in yet again waiting for some bloke to come and fit our new radiator. At least we didn’t get up at 7.30 this morning. It won’t be long and I shall be on phone to them to get it finished so we can get back to normal. We are both please with the amount of space we have in there now though. It was very tight in there before when we were both there, but now there is plenty of room for us. But that is down mainly to the designer rather than the fitters.



So I had two days off from my lappy, and now it’s back to the way it was before with all the ads appearing while on line. Again, the most difficult to get rid of the one for a W10 repair tool that I wouldn’t be interested in even if my OS was damaged in some way. And so the fun and games go on. I’m sorry, but the site I’m having difficulty with is the funnies site where my daily giggles come from; so there won’t be one until I can get it sorted out again.



Late last I read a blog from a lady who wrote about her childhood in the 1960s, and interesting it was too. I’ve just looked at Twitter to find her name and the link for it but guess what, I’m getting that stupid ad cropping up again on there now. But back to the blog … I was surprised at just how much her early life seemed to follow my own, at least in some parts. Like Sundays after a bit roast lunch, I would be off down the woods getting filthy dirty from swing in the trees and walking down the stream unblocking and damns that had built up. But the blogger also spent a lot of her time in her local woods, just like me.  



Do any of you remember the Oliver Twist shows on telly at that time. We were enthralled by them weren’t we? Black and white pictures, very grainy and dark, and yet we thought it was great, so well produced and acted. Of course we wouldn’t think that now would we. Oh no, that’s because we have moved on along with the improvements in the technology that out modern TVs are now supplied with. And don’t forget, we only had three channels to watch in those far off days, and not the 100+ the Sky and cable TV now gives, let alone all the on-line content we have access to on a daily basis. Would I want to go back to those days? No bloody way!



Life really was so different back then and so much has changed for the good over the years; like this lappy I’m sat in front of, typing away quite happily. I was at senior school between 1960 and 1964 and at that time typing was the preserve of the girls; we boys went in for wood work or metal work. I choose metal work, but I wish I had gone for wood work instead.

But there are so many things where changes that haven’t been helpful. My lappy is a great tool and I’m sure many of you feel the same one way or another. But could I make a living from it; I don’t think so. Look at how all our working lives have changed. Gone are the days when you walked out the front door and five minutes later you were clocking on. Jobs like that have mostly gone. My dad worked in the coal mine at Arley and I could see clearly the winding gear from my bedroom window. That mine closed in about 1966/7.



I worked as errand boy at the local Co-op in the village but when I left school I took the bus into town and worked to my first full time job. The hours there were long and hard for a 15-year-old and it really didn’t suit me at all, so I moved to a different job, but further away, meaning more travel and more time spent travelling. And yet today a long commute seems to be the norm, not the exception.



Today’s army is a volunteer professional army, not the national service army of the early 1960s. That stopped in around 1964/5 I think. Should it be brought back? Oh no, no way! So much has changed these days and the army is no different, I even saw a big difference in the  

men joining our unit in 1979 when I left than it was 12 years earlier when I joined up. So no, I wouldn’t to see national service return. I wouldn’t like to see all the closed mines opened up and men going under-ground, slowly killing themselves with the think coal dust air down there. No, I would want to see all car manufactures opening up again. Some what they built were great motors, but much large slice of them were really crap.



What I would like is to be 16 again, but with all my current knowledge still there, now that would be fun!



Today’s photo …

This is the sort of truck I passed my driving test on in the summer of 1967.

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