OneGuyFromBarlick

Another interesting fact about growing older is that when you see or hear an obituary the first thing you do is check the age! So far, so good.....

The failure of my internet connection yesterday (soon cured by re-booting the router) reminded me of two things, first just how slow 1mps is, back to the days of Dial Up! And second, more importantly, how our modern world depends on such things. In so many ways our modern life is balanced on a knife edge. OK when all the systems are working but chaos when there is some sort of an event.....

The nearest we ever got to such 'events' was perhaps during the general strike of 1926 when distribution of goods stopped. I wonder if we would have coped as well as we did during the war under modern systems. Imagine a bomb dropping on a building full of servers.....

When I was a lad I used to write to my uncles and aunts in Australia. The mail went by sea and if you got a reply back in three months that was fast! Later, when it became possible to have a phone call the price was very high and you had to pre-book the calls three or four days beforehand. Now I just pick up the phone and talk as long as I like for £3.50 a month..... Some things are definitely better these days.
[Oh, and I send an email to all my kids when I get up in the morning to assure them I am not dead behind the door!]

I avoid doors at all costs. Bathroom doors are particularly deadly. I know it can be embarrassing at times but make sure they are kept fully open.

I've never heard of doorphobia before. Plaques must have had some bad experiences with doors. Perhaps he needs counselling.

Long distance mail in the old days...When I was an infant and rationing was still in place we used to get parcels sent by sea from my Grandma in South Africa. She packed things in a sturdy cardboard box and then sewed the box into linen to prevent easy pilfering. It was like Christmas when a parcel arrived and had to be cut open! As well as food there would be cigarettes. My parents smoked during the war and in the years just after but then gave up, more because the cigarettes were too expensive than because of any health concern. And that reminds me, I read about a man who has been trying to give up smoking and he tried something to help but got scammed by buying online. The point that interested me most was when he said it didn't matter because he'd managed to give up anyway and that had saved him about a thousand pounds since. But he'd only given up at the start of June this year! I'm not familiar with the price of cigarettes but it sounds like he was a very heavy smoker!

P is right about the bathroom door, I never close mine. Not a phobia, just common sense.
During the war we used the get care parcels from a bloke called Ernie Hommel in the US who was a business associate of my dad. The food seemed incredibly rich. I can still remember the fruit cake that was stuffed with cherries!

Stanley wrote:During the war we used the get care parcels from a bloke called Ernie Hommel in the US

I think it was just after the war finished our infant school somehow managed to get some food parcels from America. Thinking back there must have been some very generous people in the USA. Unfortunately, for me, the prerequisite for the gift was photo of each kid in the class. The donor would choose which person would receive the parcel. Sitting crossed legged in the main hall names were called out as each box was lifted from a central pile. As time went on and the pile got smaller ‘Shirley Temple’ had three boxes with yours truly still waiting. At the end of the hand outs I still had none. I must have been an ugly little bugger. The saving grace was that the teachers noticed the imbalance and rooted round in what must have been the next age groups allocation and put together a parcel for me. This was my first inkling that life wasn’t going to be fair.

That sounds like a very badly set up scheme P. Cruel to leave some pupils out. A bit like being the only one without a present at Xmas!

P reminds me of the visit by Santa to my primary school during the war. When he did the Ho Ho Ho bit his false teeth flew out. Unforgettable for five year old kids.....

We are incredibly well served by modern communications and media but at the same time there are dangers embedded in them. This struck me this morning when I got what I think is a scam email purporting to come from Amazon. We may not have been as well served 70 years ago but ignorance was bliss and we didn't have the dangers. We all have to be a lot more streetwise these days.....

Stanley wrote:The nearest we ever got to such 'events' was perhaps during the general strike of 1926 when distribution of goods stopped. I wonder if we would have coped as well as we did during the war under modern systems. Imagine a bomb dropping on a building full of servers.....

I thought the idea of the internet was redundancy and duplication , (certainly for messaging as re-routing is automatic - for storage a good ISP should have remote storage elsewhere - preferably in a cool, dry underground cavern with excess heat generation piped to any nearby houses)

I was talking to one of my friends yesterday and we were musing on the problem of 'bored' people. There is nothing more sad than someone who, after a lifetime of work, gets complete freedom and can't think of anything to do with it further than vegetate in a chair in front of the TV. We agreed their should be education to prepare people for retirement and it should be during the last two years of work and financed by the employer.

I agree with that wholeheartedly. My dad was on of those who retired and from the next day onwards he didn't know what to do with himself but sit in front of the TV or annoy my mum by wanting to take over her tasks. She solved it by finding him another job and he was a happy bunny for many more years and she could get on with her life as normal!

All too common Tiz. It's as though we are chucked on the scrapheap and left to moulder away.... The cure lies in our own hands, we have to approach retirement like another career and get ready for the change over while we are still in work! As a friend of mine in LA once said, "The only reason for going into work is to finance the search for the next job."

Oscar Wilde once said "Beware of any enterprise which demands the purchase of new clothes". I was reared at a time when you had Sunday best and your weekday clothes were your old Sunday clothes unless you had completely grown out of them. This is why on many pics of schoolchildren 100 years ago they appear to be wearing very tight clothes.
I think that habit, once acquired is permanent. I am going out to tea with a grand daughter and her partner in their new house on Sunday and I shall wear the suit I last wore at Janet's wedding in 1992. Lots to be said for losing weight!

Oh no I won't! When I looked in the Forbidden Zone in my wardrobe the suit was missing, I must have discarded it. Oh dear.... Never mind, plenty of clothes to go at.
Talking about clothes and the fact we grew out of them reminded me of the red letter days when my mother used to take me to Lekerman's in Underbank in Stockport for a new raincoat, always a blue Burberry. I used to come out looking like a nun, the hem was well below my calf and the sleeves covered my hands. "Plenty of room to grow into....". I hated it!



The ubiquitous Burberry was obligatory wear even on holiday.... Can you imagine trying to get a modern child to dress like this. This was Cleveleys in 1943. Note the girls in uniform. There was a war on!

Well, there's something we share...we've both survived holidays in Cleveleys!

My memory is that it was an extremely boring place! The only excitement was a ride on the electric train to Southport and when you got there there was no sea, only sand.... One thing does stick in my mind, I heard a record being played over and over again from a booth on the sea front, It was 'Give me land, lots of land 'neath the starry skies above....' I can still remember the words.....

"..a ride on the electric train to Southport.." - from Cleveleys? Are we talking about Thornton Cleveleys, between Blackpool and Fleetwood?

You're right, I was mixing my resorts up, it must have been Blackpool. We used to call the train a 'tram puffer'.....

Even in the depths of the war, when my father couldn't take holidays because he was on 'essential war work', we always had an annual holiday and it was invariably on the West Coast. Rhyl was a favourite, you could actually get on the beach and find sea! My mother was nothing if not adventurous. A favourite day trip was to Liverpool where we rode on the overhead railway and the ferry and had our meals in one of the restaurants at a big department store. I can remember having a salad one day with three boiled gull's eggs.
Can anyone remember whale meat and Snoek?

Remember horse meat as well. Off ration during the war. The best steak I ever tasted was from Bert Slack's horse meat butcher's shop just off Prince's Street in Stockport during the war. My dad couldn't stomach it because he had worked with horses in Australia but didn't object to me eating it.

Stanley wrote:I can remember having a salad one day with three boiled gull's eggs.

Many Cornish towns now have terrible problems with gulls nesting on roofs, dive-bombing people and even killing pets. People are not allowed to disturb the gulls or their nests. Perhaps there should be a change and they should be allowed to collect the gulls eggs and eat them!

We ate anything we could get hold of during the war. Two really good innovations were dried egg powder and dried apple rings from Canada. This innovation continued after the war when we still had rationing. Peanuts from Africa were going to be a major source of protein but the government scheme to set it up failed. See THIS on the abortive 'Groundnut Scheme'.
One mistake made was that the ex-army tanks sent to be used as tractors were supposed to have all armaments taken off before being sent out there but many went with the guns still on them. These weapons resurfaced during the insurgencies after the war against colonial rule.