I typed up a post MacGowan! delayed due phone call to send and phone call finished pressed post main screen ANGELIC HAD POSTED!!!!
Today I again read "schools closed" power cuts chaos............ and all because of snow! Before my Mother died and a couple decades ago when we had a particularly heavy winter of snow to bring up the subject, we chatted about school, and why the then grand children were told not to come in as it was snowing and and quite deep .. maybe 6-8". Whilst at the time we lived in a town in the middle of Somerset [ my school years up to early 1960's] the schools as she remembered never closed and we had winters back then, sometimes saw snow everyday for a month + and the weather was minus something for weeks on end, no double glazing or central heating heating was via open fire, cooking was on gas! [ I will try to find a 25 year snow chart I have here somewhere and put it up ] . Every morning a hand on and off the window for about a minute used to melt an area so you could see what it was like outside, getting dressed was under the bed clothes, or the clothes had been brought under them to warm up whilst you lay there, with parents yelling to get up, down stairs was a "coke fire burning away and that "front room" / living room was your target! The schools never closed primary or secondary and later boarding school tech College! The primary school never closed it had a boiler room that piped hot water to big heavy [cast iron ] radiators often the cause of the occassional "burn" quickly dealt with some form of grease from the medical cabinet in each classroom or hallway. Some children never made it to that school .. just a few who lived more than 2 or 3 miles away and everyone [ maybe 99% ] walked to it! Secondary modern never closed but that did have pupils from as far away as maybe 10 miles that ocassionally never made it, bussed in . My last school never closed, [ secondary tech ] in the first year 30 + had a daily walk to main building [ I was in that short straw group! ] as dormitory was just short of 2 miles away...every night and morning no matter the weather . rain snow blizzard gale force winds of 50 -60 mph you walked!... schools regularly had snowball fights instead of football/ netball maybe 2-4 per winter [ secondary schools that is ] At my last school we had 3 ponds and for at least 2-3 weeks the top pond was an ice rink where we played ice hockey with walking sticks and a puck that was turned in school carpentry shop from the gnarled bit of wood where the branch meets the trunk usually got through 2 per session which was about 40 mins. I remember on a couple of occassions the cross country period was adhered to ... the only " extra " allowed to the shorts and 2 tops was a pair of gloves... and btw it was daps not trainers! today a couple inch's of snow and the country is in chaos schools close electric gets lost ... they think this global warming on the way ... WELL some bad news on the way ... wait for nature to replicate the winters of 60 /70 years ago..... you aint seen nothing yet
The world has gone soft in many respects Which is why the likes of the BBC insist on putting out weather warnings for ‘rain’ and ‘wind’ like the apocalypse is coming rather than it just being winter Are people really that stupid that they can’t look out of the window and decide whether to go out or not ? When I was at school we played rugby and football outside in all weathers Very few kids got taken to school by car, my family didn’t even own a car As you said, schools were never closed and people walked to work if there was snow on the ground and the roads were impassable. It was frowned upon if you didn’t go in at all. My Mother was a single parent and we lived with my grandmother who was a widow Coal fire in the kitchen come dining room, no heat upstairs at all. She only got an inside toilet and bath when I was about 6 or 7. It was baths by the fire in a galvanised tin bath and boiling kettles to fill it Sash windows that had ice on the inside in very cold weather and hot water bottles made of stone like the old cider flagons Boiling hot to the touch they were wrapped in a towel to avoid burns, and then there was the unglazed bottom which was horrible to put your feet on I loved it all ps I do vaguely remember the big freeze of 1963 and the floods of 1967 There was also a bad winter around 1980 when there was snow on the ground for weeks on end
What’s changed is we’ve got old. Times have changed. My parents used to do exactly the same comparing how we had it easy as kids in the 60’s to when they were growing up. It’s no different now, just our perspective has changed.
we had those at my grans house [ was only a few minutes walk from the places lived in when we were there ] so didnt stay very often. but bedrooms had fire places in them and an upstairs bathroom toilet. Castle Cary was home to a coking/gas works! My grans hose was just 100ft or so away and the garden fence that was the boundary was just 6 ft from the bottom of the gasometer! Coke "scraps" were really cheap.. almost free ... and the coking coal was often spilt near gates or outside, "cinders were free... collect your own ... and a few shovels of coke usually filled your trolley/ cart! by accident!! ... bedroom fires were lit at 2pm and allowed to go out usually about 8pm ... bedtime or just after! HWB was similar or rubber! at my grans. At home a mixture of fire bricks on a tray in propped blankets to warm bed then a rubber HWB .. usually kicked out of the bed when got cold and woke you up! At boarding school sash windows .. were always open about 6" my main building dorm had 2 windows went back this year on an open day ... they were massive 8ft X 4ft now double glazed ...whimps! perspective? or is it attitude? as Angelic says we got on with it! Tin bath in first 3 places IN FRONT OF THE FIRE.... Proper bath at Grans and last place but enamelled cast iron .. that chilled the water in about 2 mins to luke warm! 63 I was in main building snow lasted till easter? Being agriculturally orientated holidays were longer as we always had classes Sat am 9 till 1230, Easter was 4 weeks and used to help on local farm but that was so far behind finished most of that holiday in battery houses and deep litter houses .. cleared out 2 of the deep litter ones and had the "job" of also exterminating the rat population as we progressed .....
I also remember those heady days of having a tin bath in front of a log fire and having to heat the water to use. The big problem was that my dad had kept his eels that he had caught in the rhynes in the tin bath out in the back shed, but did take them out prior to my bath and I used to joke that I smelt worse after my bath than before I had my soak. Hot water was a thing of beauty back in those days and the pampered idiots who complain about everything and nothing today don't know the half of it, do they? My family never owned a car and so it was either by foot, roller skates or bike to go short distances but public transport for the longer journeys. Thankfully my dad worked for Bristol Omnibus and so I could go wherever he was working on any given day but the favourite trip was up to Bristol on the last bus of the evening just to see the lights from up on Bedminster Down before returning to Edithmead/Highbridge for the end of dad's shift.. Oh the excitement.
We had single glazed windows and only had one radiator which ran off a small Torbelle aga-like coal fired range. The same range heated the hot water (although we did have an electric backup). Our front room was heated by another coal fire (a Parkrae - forerunner to today’s multifuel stoves). We had no TV until I was 14. My mother hated TV but finally relented for my 14th birthday. Mum was a stay-at-home mum but she gave piano lessons for some extra money and my dad was an engineer at Rolls Royce but retrained as a teacher when my sister and I were still at school. Hard times indeed with no money coming in when he was a student. My sister and I were on free school meals and could never go on any school trips. Luckily we had my older cousins’ hand-me-downs for clothes. Holidays were 1 week per year staying with my grandparents in Moylegrove, Pembrokeshire. What’s changed since then? For the better: foreign travel (both cost and availability), entertainment options (there were only 3 tv channels when I was young and they all shut down overnight - and no possibility of recording anything to watch later - or look up on iPlayer). Comms, technology, video games and general comfort items and consumables. I also think there is less racism and homophobia these days compared to when I was young. Although there’s a lot wrong with our healthcare today, some of the diseases and conditions that can be cured or halted now are those we might have died from back then. Worse: Affordability of housing, job security, sense of community, collective pride and belief in politicians (of all persuasion) and our country on the world stage, music (the 1960s and 1970s were very special). Law suit culture replacing common sense, young people with a sense of entitlement. Our bank manager, doctor and dentist knew us all personally and we could speak to somebody local when calling utility companies - someone with the power and authority to fix your issue, compared to today when after navigating loads of automated telephone robot menus you finally get to speak to someone the other side of the world you can hardly understand, who tells you ‘computer says no…’ like on the little Britain sketch. We built stuff back then - good stuff (like Concorde, the Vulcan and the Harrier), some great cars (Rover P5, Bentley, Rolls Royce - admittedly as well as some BL dross in the later 70s and 80s) and our factories, utilities, infrastructure and services were mostly British-owned. Unlike now, after Thatcher and successive regimes since her sold them all off.
The one that starts off saying how tough it used to be, then gets silly, each character claiming they had it tougher than the one before, saying things like I lived in a hole in the road, worked 32hrs a day down the pit for 3pennies a year and we thought we were lucky, to which the next one would say LUXURY, and then claim something even more ridiculous.
I always ask when I need help, which also has a flip side I always help when asked [ if physically possible ! ]
