A light hearted look at growing up in the 70's and 80's as a kid.

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Geektastic

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#2809003 7-Nov-2021 19:11

Bung: Our local theatre had a cupboard with 3 or 4 brooms. If you could get onto 1 of those you'd get a free ticket to next Saturday's matinee and all the wrapped lollies you could find. The rest (Snifters & Jaffas) had been thrown about during the film and weren't that safe.

Get onto one? Were they Nimbus 2000's then?

gzt

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#2809044 7-Nov-2021 21:25

Geektastic:
Bung: Our local theatre had a cupboard with 3 or 4 brooms. If you could get onto 1 of those you'd get a free ticket to next Saturday's matinee and all the wrapped lollies you could find. The rest (Snifters & Jaffas) had been thrown about during the film and weren't that safe.
Get onto one? Were they Nimbus 2000's then?

At the end of the day I think it's safe to say you could get onto one if you were on to it.

Geektastic

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#2809050 7-Nov-2021 21:41

Now I'm confused. Too much vernacular!

Geektastic

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#2809051 7-Nov-2021 21:43

neb: While everyone is rhapsodising about how great it was growing up as a kid in the 70s and early 80s, let's not forget what it would have been like for parents who weren't isolated from living in a Soviet-bloc-style economy: The government ran one third of everything (or at least in the 1970s one third of the workforce worked for the government or government enterprises), and what it didn't do itself it regulated: Price controls, import controls, wage controls, trade barriers, etc. Because they were protected from any competition, local companies could charge whatever they wanted and build any rubbish they wanted and you still had to buy it from them. The "locally-built" (meaning foreign-made and then hammered together with a mallet somewhere to qualify as locally-built) brand new car you've just driven off the lot broke down at the end of the street? Hope you paid for a service contract! It took months to get a phone line put it. The wharfies went on strike every year at Christmas along with the Cook Straight ferry operators, and many times during the year as well. Even when they weren't on strike, it could take months to get anything unloaded (I remember Father Neb coming home once with a load of desperately-needed machine tools pleased as punch that he'd been able to find some wharfies to bribe to unload them after only two weeks of waiting). And to get them you had to organise friends and neighbours to drive in convoys from one post office to another with everyone buying $3 (I think) money orders so you could get the items in from overseas. I was looking at a newspaper my sister-in-law had saved for some reason from the early 80s and it seemed like the entire paper was nothing but strikes starting, strikes ongoing, or strikes ending. And the ads, things like "after six months wait we've got a shipment of X in, remember to queue up early and bring your coupons".

So yeah, it may have been great being a kid, but until the reforms in the mid-80s it was crap being an adult.

Did you live behind the Iron Curtain? Whereabouts

We mostly watched them parading tanks and trying to scare the BAOR troops.

MadEngineer

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#2809122 8-Nov-2021 00:44

Dingbatt:
elpenguino:

Really? Happy with all your haircuts from those days? :-)

What’s a haircut? (Aucklander)

This talk of pyrotechnics reminds me of my late father. He was a qualified quarryman and had an explosives licence. He decided to use “some jelly” to remove a stubborn stump on the farm. Miscalculated slightly and sent the stump flying up into the air. It landed about 2 metres away from the tray of the tractor and he turned to me and said “Damn I meant for it to land in the back-tray”. I was only about 7 at the time so thought he meant it. Would have been an interesting explanation to the insurance company if it had landed on the tractor.

my grandfather told me a story of some neighbours that did similar only to have some poor kid open up their leg when they slipped on a shard of the stump they were playing on

You're not on Atlantis anymore, Duncan Idaho.

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