I remember a time before mobile phones, when somehow we still managed to be able to make plans and meet up where and when we said we would. I don't feel like we were any worse off for it.
In many ways I believe we were far more resilient and we certainly remembered the little messages we had to pass on as we did not have the luxury of being able to call home on 57 separate occasions each time we remembered that which we had forgotten to remember in the first place.
When young love struck or we wanted to catch up with friends after school, we would stand in the local phone box clutching a handful of shiny coins, feverishly popping them in to the slot, one after the other to keep the conversation going, we would know if was time to deposit another when we heard what we called, 'the pips', a series of beeps followed by the warning;
Or words to that effect. We would stand there for long hours even in the dark nights in the dead of Winter, it never felt like hardship.
I remember when phonecards came along, it felt like the height of technology, the very pinnacle of innovation was upon us. We would insert the phonecard in to a slot, much like the one we had once deposited our coins in to... I remember the feeling that I missed coins and none of us understood how these new fangled cards worked.
The majority of us in the 70's and 80's, (or at least here in the UK or perhaps, my social class), did not have the modern luxury of a landline telephone in our home, that seemed like a positively space age concept, although they followed with feverish rapidity in the coming years.
Most people today don't even have a landline, I do, it only rings for spam calls and wrong numbers but reminds me and my lady of a time when we both had a living mother (dads are a complicated story for us both) and grandparents who would call just to say hello or in case of emergency, as they grew older, the emergencies became fairly regular, we still skip a beat when it rings.
Just think of it, in a few decades, the concept of the telephone has gone from being something that could be streets away, to something plugged in at the wall in the home, to moving out of the home, considered an archaic technology to everybody having a phone with them everywhere that also doubles as, what a few years ago would have been considered, a super computer!
I would buy postage stamps with great regularity as I needed them, as did we all, to stick on the front of the envelopes that contained the handwritten letters we wrote, or the bills we paid this way, for many companies, the only way!
They often contained handwritten cheques, which I remember being a fairly radical, modern concept too, they were like money but made from paper that we wrote on to translate value, I don't remember the last time I even saw a cheque.
If we went on holiday, it would usually be by coach or car as the majority of people where I come from did not travel abroad let alone have the resources to afford a plane ticket. I didn't own a passport till I was almost 25, about the same time I first used a cheque incidentally. When we did have a holiday, we would etch a greeting on the back of a suitably tacky postcard and send it to those back home to let them know we were thinking of them, always including the words:
We wrote, on actual paper, a shopping list, because we needed to remember everything in one go as there was no 'hopping in to the car', to pop to the nearest supermarket as we didn't have a car, most of my friends families did not either. Parking must have been a total bloody breeze back then, there was no gridlock and trips to the shops were done by bus.
Even Nostradamus himself would have been hard pushed to envision an app that brings cooked food, groceries or downloads of your favourite artists new record or a cool authors latest book right to your door with the click of a button, Bezos drones were a thing of the dim and distant future that we would never have believed.
When we watched a TV show, after each episode, (which would not be repeated), you would wait an entire week for the next one. If you didn't like what was on the 3 available channels... Tough luck buddy!!!
UK TV Broadcasts
Eastenders (Angie & Den divorce papers) - 30.15 million
Eastenders (the following episode to Den serving Angie with divorce papers) - 28 million
Coronation Street (Hilda Odgen leaves Weatherfield) - 26.65 million
Live Aid - 24.50 million
Only Fools and Horses (Time On Our Hands) - 24.35 million
Eastenders (Arthur Fowler, Pauline Fowler, Mark Fowler HIV story) - 24.30 million
Royal Variety Performance 1965 - 24.20 million
Eastenders (Angie suffers a renal shutdown) - 24.15 million
To The Manor Born (series finale) - 23.95 million
Miss World 1967 - 23.76 million
At the time of most of the above broadcasts, the UK population was between 45 to 50 million, it's easy to see why, at school or at work the next day, we all had something to collectively talk about. There was a shared experience kind of vibe that I miss.
I would queue at the local HMV record store on the day a new album was released, fully aware that the vinyl record may well sell out. Boy, did I have to save up for a long time to be able to buy it.
Then in the blink of an eye, vinyl was gone, replaced by the nifty new cassette tapes, I must confess, I loved new technology in the realm of my beloved pop music. Tapes were amazing, as long as you had a pencil at hand to re-spool them up when the player chewed them up and dragged out enough tape to cover a sports pitch.
But I begun to miss vinyl, my heart ached for the 'good old days', no sooner had I gotten my tiny little mind around audio cassettes and poof... They were gone...
I saw presenters on current event shows biting in to these uber-shiny new compact disc thingummy's, to show how allegedly indestructible they were, what witchcraft is this, I thought?
Never, and I mean EVER, could I have foresaw the concept of downloads and I must confess, I won't even purchase them now, nonono thank you very much...
I love the smell of the musty old pages of a book, always have, always will. Mostly because I could only afford them second-hand but oh my did I cherish every word that had been conjured up in to that finished work. I don't even know a second-hand bookstore anywhere near me anymore.
A television set, as they were know then, was a major purchase. There was a lot of hours of overtime at work needed to make that massively important purchase. Most of the people I knew rented a set either weekly or monthly as the cost was astronomical. To be honest this was no surprise, a TV was the size and twice the weight of a double decker bus and quite obviously contained a refurbished jumbo jet engine.
Getting a new TV into the house took something akin to pallbearers to accomplish as they were so bloody heavy. Every neighbour would be twitching the net curtains (wow! Net curtains, they were a thing too, I had almost forgotten) when a new TV was delivered in to the street.
The TV would stretch out a couple of feet from the wall and need a special sturdy TV stand to sit on. They were certainly built to last though. If you drove a tank in to the TV at high speed, your tank may not survive!
Now they are as thin as an ice cream wafer, and light as a feather even when they are 6 feet long and 40 feet high, which, they invariably, all are. People enjoy their new TV for 4 days until a newer, better, smarter model comes out. They then crumple it up like a tissue (as it has zero resale value) and fill one more landfill with cheap consumer crap made with components mined from the ground by the kids of the poorest people on the planet...
There is a sadness in these recollections and a hearkening to a simpler time with each reminiscence, but that is not the whole story... That is why you may have noticed the sneaky addition of the words PART 1 to the title of this post.
You could probably guess but I am committed to writing it anyway... The rustiness of my writing muscles has been well and truly exercised, (maybe even exorcized!) and I confess that although midnight has just struck, I could've written till dawn, it feels great to be alive and writing again
Why did I feel like my title should have been Grandpa as I read that back???
Thank YOU for taking the time to read my post and if you're one of those amazing people who like to hit the comments section... Then I doubly thank YOU!
Either way I want you to know that you are appreciated!
@c0ff33a If you are an active UK member and would like to be added to the teamUK community on Discord, just let me know 馃槑