My Nan used to have a mangle...

Boiling dirty handkerchiefs
Thinking back , how disgusting that was

 

The fun you could have with some coins, rocks or even a simple everyday house brick was immeasurable....especially if you lived near a railway line.

 

We had a telly that you had to press the button on the front for to get a channel! You actually had to get up, walk over to it and press a button (or in our house your dad would call one of us kids to do it, even if we were in another room or down the road).

When we bought it, there was a little flap that you opened that had little wheels you spun to tune it, you got RSI doing this as well as a room of 'experts' egging you on as they became picture quality svengalis. God help you if you got the channel order wrong, or the brother in charge of the aerial moved a nanometer.

The irony of having 6 or 8 buttons but only 3 channels was a basic form of mental torture....are kids in other countries being forced to press more than 3 buttons...what channels are they getting? This can't be right....though we must know our place as a fallen empire and doff our caps to the yanks with their weather channel and 24hr tv.

It tainted the 70's and 80's I believe....a feeling that only passed when dad got a top loader video and we watched Smokey and the Bandit for £1.20 from the local newsagents, and the 4th button was tuned in to it.

Did anyone else's old man tune the other buttons in to the same channel...so bbc 1 was button 1 and 6?

Just remembered that. Wtf was that about?!

 

The video shops , I kinda miss those days , they were social meeting points

 

We were very at the bleeding edge in South Wales in the early 80's mate.

Anyone else remember how precious their old man would get over his hifi?

Seemed to be the icon of the age, a relatively expensive record player with all that dust extraction gubbins you could buy from ronco at Christmas (along with the jumper bobble shaver and sketch a graph).

Christ, I remember when those colouring books that had the gyroscopic images were all the rage and colouring in triggered a million cases of OCD in kids...

 

I'm already feeling old , I'm getting depressed

 

We had a van come round "like a video ice cream van" and you went out to choose, the first video we ever rented was American werewolf in London - Jenny agutter was a great actress in that and this teenage boy was transfixed

 

Great film special effects amazing

 

I still am.

 

Better then than now...

I think most of us can look back in general terms and remember our youth in maybe 10 films, 20 songs and maybe 50 photographs....and hang our memories around these.

Feel sorry for the kids who take 50 pictures a day and edit them all....life was far simpler then...

 

Do the records turn the other way in the Southern Hemisphere?

 

The thought of having to wait for your photos to be developed , kids today would freak out

 

And most were out of focus and rubbish

 

We had an AEG freezer, it broke after about 3 years, compressor motor failure. Fridges / freezers never die, the interiors just fall to bits, so 3 years was pretty poor. That was the first and last AEG we will buy.

 

Noooooooooo!
That's how you receive messages from the devil.

 

My mum had a hot point twin tub, lasted for years, the pump on it packed up so we used to drag it into the garden and tip it upside down to empty it.
When dad eventually bought her an automatic she used to sit In the kitchen watching it waiting for it to finish. She couldn't get her head around leaving it to run its cycle.

 

I have a friend who had wavey hair down to the floor. Although she always had it pinned it to her head, every time she washed it she pressed it with a flat iron heated up on the gas cooker.

 

My Nan used to have a mangle...

I was expecting a Derek and Clive link.