Feeling Old? Then feel better

READ THIS RIGHT THROUGH, ITS GOOD! IT WILL MAKE YOU PROUD OF YOUR YOUTH!

Do you feel old?

According to today’s regulators and bureaucrats, those of us who were kids in the 60’s, 70’s and early 80’s probably shouldn’t have survived, because our baby cots were covered with brightly coloured lead-based paint, which was promptly chewed and licked.

We had no child-proof lids on medicine bottles, or latches on doors or cabinets and it was fine to play with pans.

When we rode our bikes, we wore no helmets, just flip-flops and fluorescent ‘spokey dokey’s’ on our wheels.

As children, we would ride in cars with no seat belts or air bags - riding in the passenger seat was a treat.

We drank water from the garden hose and not from a bottle and it tasted the same. We ate chips, bread and butter pudding and drank fizzy juice with sugar in it, but we were never overweight because we were always outside playing.

We shared one drink with four friends, from one bottle or can and no one actually died from this.

We would spend hours building go-carts out of scraps and then went top speed down the hill, only to find out we forgot the brakes.

After running into stinging nettles a few times, we learned to solve the problem.

We would leave home in the morning and could play all day, as long as we were back before it got dark. No one was able to reach us and no one minded.

We did not have Play stations or X-Boxes, no video games at all. No 99 channels on TV, no videotape movies, no surround sound, no mobile phones, no personal computers, no DVDs, no Internet chat rooms.

We had friends - we went outside and found them.

We played elastics and rounders, and sometimes that ball really hurt!

We fell out of trees, got cut, and broke bones but there were no lawsuits.

We had full on fistfights but no prosecution followed from other parents.

We played knock-on-the-door-and-run-away and were actually afraid of the owners catching us.

We walked to friends’ homes.

We also, believe it or not, WALKED to school; we didn’t rely on mummy or daddy to drive us to school, which was just round the corner.

We made up games with sticks and tennis balls. We rode bikes in packs of 7 and wore our coats by only the hood.

The idea of a parent bailing us out if we broke a law was unheard of…They actually sided with the law.

This generation has produced some of the best risk-takers and problem solvers and inventors, ever. The past 50 years have been an explosion of innovation and new ideas.

We had freedom, failure, success and responsibility, and we learned how to deal with it all.

And you’re one of them. Congratulations!

Pass this on to others who have had the luck to grow as real kids, before lawyers and government regulated our lives, for our own good.

For those of you who aren’t old enough thought you might like to read about us.

This my friends, is surprisingly frightening, and it might put a smile on your face:
The majority of students in universities today were born in 1986. They are called youth.

They have never heard of “We are the World”, “We are the children”, and the Uptown Girl they know is by West life not Billy Joel. They have never heard of Rick Astley, Bananarama, Nena Cherry or Belinda
Carlisle.

For them, there has always been only one Germany and one Vietnam.

AIDS has existed since they were born.

CD’s have existed since they were born.

Michael Jackson has always been white.

To them John Travolta has always been round in shape and they can’t imagine how this fat guy could be a god of dance.

They believe that Charlie’s Angels and Mission Impossible are Films from last year.

They can never imagine life before computers.

They’ll never have pretended to be the A Team, Red-Hand Gang or the Famous Five.

They’ll never have applied to be on “Jim’ll Fix It” or “Why Don’t You”.

They can’t believe a black and white television ever existed. And they will never understand how we could leave the house without a mobile phone.

Now let’s check if we’re getting old…

  1. You understand what was written above and you smile.

  2. You need to sleep more, usually until the afternoon, after a night out.

  3. Your friends are getting married/already married.

  4. You are always surprised to see small children playing comfortably with computers.

  5. When you see teenagers with mobile phones, you shake your head.

  6. You remember watching Dirty Den in East-Enders the first time around…

  7. You meet your friends from time to time, talking about the good old days, repeating again all the fun you have experienced together.

  8. Having read this mail, you are thinking of forwarding it to some other friends because you think they will like it too…


Digital Television gives improved picture and sound quality. What gives improved program quality?

Oooops… I thought I posted this in the open forum. Maybe a mod could move it over for me.

Fun still exists, but it’s us, we adult children, who make sure it happens, who take our kids to the river, just to throw rocks in the water; to the park just to play on the swings, who play throw and catch, and have six different board games at home and play something nightly; who swear that the PC will always be in the living room and NEVER in a child’s bedroom; who watch movies with our kids and discuss how great it was and never say how dumb what they like is; we teach our kids our music and learn theirs; who make popcorn just for fun; who take extra long baths together (when appropriate you sickos :slight_smile:) just because it’s fun; who can grab glowing orange coned flashlights and play darth vader…we are able to continue and PASS ON the process of childhood…

Fun, love and childhood do still exist. But it is our job to ensure they are passed on my brother. :slight_smile: NEVER quit…never surrender.

Peace

by the way…that entire list…I can relate to …thanks

[quote=“Satellite TV”]Now let’s check if we’re getting old…

  1. You understand what was written above and you smile. [/quote]

I understood, identified with most of it, and smiled a lot, so by God, I must be getting old!

I remember walking to and from school all by myself and just buggering off in the afternoon to play in the park with friends - all fine as long as we were back for dinner. Honestly can’t imagine that now, not in the cities anyway. I actually climbed genuine trees, and remember when they had see-saws and those merry-go-round things in the park before they were deemed too dangerous? I didn’t have an email address until I was 27 and I still remember the first time I ever saw a CD (which was hanging up in a record shop like a mobile). And we only had a black and white TV when I was a kid - the arrival of colour was momentous.

Geez, I feel ancient :slight_smile:

I grew up in the Adirondack Mountains in New York…all those valleys…no TV reception at all…no phone in the house until I was ten…climb trees all day, day hike by myself at age 8 for miles…just had to be home for lunch…then out back at it. Spooking deer, pheasant…thinking up stories…creating a mind that needed nothing manmade to entertain me :slight_smile:

god that was fun…i wouldn’t wish it on my son, but it was great

I could relate to everything on this thread…

I try to make sure my daughter is exposed to nature as much as possible, as it was, like jdsmith, so much a part of growing up. Right after I was born, my dad and grandfather handbuilt a 3 bedroom cabin up in the mountains outside of Ojai California. Also had carte blanche to wander at will from sunup to sundown on my own. My parents sweated out the Cuban missle crisis up there, spent most weekends at the cabin, and at least one month every summer.

I don’t find this too difficult to recreate here. Sure our kids have every convenience, but I find my daughter thrives on many of the things that I enjoyed as a child. We just returned from 11 days of camping, and never once did she claim to be bored. Be fun to sit around the campfire with the grandkids and listen to her talk about the old days, and marvel at both the technology and the fact that the little ones still enjoy a beautiful starlit evening outdoors… :sunglasses:

Pretty much describes my childhood. Back when sex was save and drugs were dangerous.

I’ve done most of what’s on this list and still have the scars to proove it. We never built go karts. We removed the Engine from an old lawnmower then we would lay on it belly down, hanging to the sides and down that big steep hill. We used the end of our shoes as brakes.
Summer 1977. Caught frogs in the lake every morning, rode my mini-moto everyday on the trails, and of course there was Isabelle and Marie-Claude. My friend Normand and I would meet them in the tree house their dads had built for them and we would kiss. Kids…What’s funny is that sometimes we traded. Normand and I both went out with Isabelle and Marie-Claude at the same time and many times.
It was simple then.

The biggest event of my life was watching the first Apollo Moon Landing and Neil Armstrong step off that last rung onto the moon.

That was a pretty emotional moment.

Yep. I still have the same attitudes to safety and hygiene. I’ll share a glass without a second thought etc.

I remember in my late teens getting so pissed off when they pulled down all the ‘dangerous’ playdrounds (that we still went to to play balltag) and put up little safe plastic ones.

Actually, it’s one of the things I like about Taiwan. It still isn’t too anally overregulated.

Brian

I can identify with this thread enormously, but there’s just one thing…

I’m not old!! Not at all. You don’t have to be old to remember the seventies. Good god, man, that was only a quarter century ago.

[quote=“Satellite TV”]The biggest event of my life was watching the first Apollo Moon Landing and Neil Armstrong step off that last rung onto the moon.

That was a pretty emotional moment.[/quote]

Yep, it was one of the few moments we were glued to the TV when we were kids…You could here a pin drop anywhere in our neighborhood (And anywhere in the western world I’m sure) when Neil walked down the steps…

We also invented all the crap that stiffles everything that article celebrates.

Our happy childhood:

I’m so glad it’s over. :sunglasses:

Man I laughed and smiled at this one…
Recently, I started teaching kids again, and I have to teach PE. So, I taught them Red light Green light. And watching them play with absolute joy for the whole hour, reminded me of some good memories of just the 5 kids on my block(including me) playing that game for hours. How we had to use our imaginations to occupy ourselves, how if we went in to the house one to many times, we heard the warning"if you come in here one more time,you;ll be staying in!" and a whole host of memories flood for me in that hour. Best hour I’ve spent in Taiwan in a long time… :bravo: :bravo:

Ah the late 70’s and early 80’s … There was nothing quite like the feeling of being able to die in a full scale Global Thermo-nuclear war ! YEAH !

Where’s the excitement now when some fool can crawl out from under his rock and do you away with a small piece of C4?

yes, that sucked but we believed in reagan then. :slight_smile:

The whole Nostrodamus thing freaked me out though…however he was wrong…at least about the date. :slight_smile: whew!

Although I’m a child of the mid to late 80’s, this made me smile. Who else remembers the joy of learning to ride a bike non-handed? Round my way, you were truly part of the cool clique of kids if you could do that…

Bicycles? Nah…

For us it was saving up enough money to buy the newest skateboard technology that is still being used to this day…The polyurethane wheel. We scrimped, babysat, mowed lawns, cleaned dogshit, whatever it took. The first ride, on Road rider 4’s following years of teeth-rattling clay wheel riding, was a revelation. To have that shiny red smoothness under your board was the essence of cool in 1973… :sunglasses:

I still ride now, and watch the kids wig out on the “old dude” that still hangs nose wheelies and spins 360’s. Fun fun fun… :sunglasses: