Inspired by a comment in the 1980s N Wales climbers thread.
What events have been large coffin nails for you, have made you feel like you are from another era?
For me it was discovering that my first real workplace, Templeborough Steel Works had become a museum. Quite a while ago now, but it made me feel like I was iron age man.
That the world's population has more than tripled in my lifetime!
Tabs aren't 19p for 20 any more; 20 Regal Kingsize £12.75.
Expensive coffin nails.
Failure to understand what Instagram is for
Failure to understand...
My 7-year old daughter asked me recently at what age I was allowed to have my own phone.
Tabs aren't 3s11d any more for twenty and I'm sure I had them for cheaper than that, even.
I guess when the small child refers to the man whom I'm godfather to as grandad
16 year old daughter asked did we use dating websites when we were young.......
I actually preferred Woodbine to Park Drive.
> I actually preferred Woodbine to Park Drive.
Wills Whiffs were the smoke of choice in my area. My grandad used to swear by them. Or at them. Can't quite recall which now.
> For me it was discovering that my first real workplace, Templeborough Steel Works had become a museum. Quite a while ago now..
When you say "quite a while ago now".. you know you mean twenty years right?
https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2001/oct/21/arts.featuresreview
Mine was interviewing candidates for our graduate scheme, and finding they were born in the year I myself graduated...
Finding out that the average age in my firm is 26. It's probably less than that now. My kids are older than that
I had to stop teaching undergraduates because they were born after Jurassic Park and Armageddon, so my references for chaos theory and space-induced neuro-degeneration are no longer valid.
> When you say "quite a while ago now".. you know you mean twenty years right? https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2001/oct/21/arts.featuresreview
That's a mighty big nail right there, you going to need a heavy hammer. 😭
> I actually preferred Woodbine to Park Drive.
But you could still get Park Drive in packs of 5 when I was a teenager
No 6 were my nails of choice and I collected the coupons
Of course, if you were skint, you could always fall back on No 10s, which were tiny.
When I went to university, lecturers routinely smoked through the lectures; one of them, Bob Looker, used to chain smoke, alternating between B&H and Gitanes. You could smoke in the top floor of the library. And the ground floor coffee bar, natch.
How come we're not all dead from cancer?
1969/70 we'd get PDs in singles as well for pennies (old).
I first stopped smoking when I was 10.
Sorry. Couldn't resist.
I went back to do some freelance work at one of my old workplaces a couple of years ago, and there was a crew of about a dozen people there on the day doing the job I used to do. I was chatting with one of them during a bit of a lull and it turned out there wasn't a single person on the crew that day who'd been born yet when I left.
For me, the passage of time can be measured by parts of my body not functioning at 100% anymore, I'll spare you all the insalubrious details but as an example, I'm down to my last pair of molars with toothache in one of them, I'll be on wet food soon and I'm 45 😳
> I had to stop teaching undergraduates because they were born after Jurassic Park and Armageddon
Also......
A few years back the missus and I had a night out in Glasgow. Went to the bar we used to date in. Nobody there had even been born when we used to go. That included a 21st birthday party.
A building project I worked on in the 80s has since been demolished, and is now housing.
The new housing estate we moved into in the 60s and was central to my memories of a care free childhood full of freedom and adventures, is now a graffiti covered wasteland that's held up as the worst example of brutalist, oppressive architecture.
> Tabs aren't 3s11d any more for twenty and I'm sure I had them for cheaper than that, even.
You must have been on No.6 or Park Drive.
Number 6 but when times were hard I had to scale down another 4 points....As Rob E W says.
Doing Agony Crack (HVS 5a) in 1998 with a (young) partner - "I've done this before, must have been about 1977" - before he was born 🙄
Visited a country town museum. They had a school desk from bygone era with dipping ink well etc. Looked familiar, and indeed it was from my old primary school.
Extra nail if it had you name scratched in it.
For me, the thing that emphasises the vast gulf between me and 'the kids' is the utter sh1te 'music' they listen to.
Being ink monitor was a bit of a privilege......
I struggle at rural museums. Many of the exhibits are things me and my dad used every day. I still get quite het up at the sight of a massey ferguson 165
In the meantime
I was in the "late 20th century consumer kitsch" part of of the Smithsonian museum in Washington DC and, under glass, they had a yellow Sony "Sports" Walkman. I was smiling at it and this chap in his early 60s saw this and murmured "man, a long time since I saw one of THOSE" so I put on my most proper English accent and said "what ho, I am only here on a short visit and I brought all my music here on tapes and I've got a player very similar to that" and pulled my yellow Sony Sports Walkman out of my bag as the old codger slowly backed away
In fairness it was a stop-gap, as I was "between devices" and it was a lucky find in a charity shop.
> I struggle at rural museums. Many of the exhibits are things me and my dad used every day. I still get quite het up at the sight of a massey ferguson 165
F***, I started on a 35x!
A few years ago I was at a conference at the University of Malaga, in the same building was a museum of computing & a few of us paid a visit during a coffee break. It was full of stuff many of us could remember using, from dial up modems, Comodore 64s, card readers & an original Macintosh. We all left feeling a bit older.
The primary school, secondary school and college I attended have all been demolished. They were all cheaply built 60s and early 70s buildings but even so...
Was that starting on TVO?
> ..... pulled my yellow Sony Sports Walkman out of my bag as the old codger slowly backed away In fairness it was a stop-gap, as I was "between devices" and it was a lucky find in a charity shop. <
My wife still has, and occasionally uses her (non-sports) Walkman.
I was having this chat with my kids recently and I realised that when I was the age the youngest is now I helped gather reeds with a man born in 1889.
My Grandfather (not Great Grandfather) was born in 1879. He fathered my Mum when he was 60. Gives us all some hope
Both my early schools were probably Victorian buildings, but still survive. My infant school became Cafe Rouge, Primary School became a Solicitors, then Zizzi I think.
> My Grandfather (not Great Grandfather) was born in 1879. He fathered my Mum when he was 60. Gives us all some hope
Or cause for concern!
> When you say "quite a while ago now".. you know you mean twenty years right?
No, he's right. Twenty years ago is quite recent.
I agree, 20 years ago is yesterday, but I reluctantly have to accept this point of view is a harbinger of doom...
> Inspired by a comment in the 1980s N Wales climbers thread.
> What events have been large coffin nails for you, have made you feel like you are from another era?
I am young enough to have spent my teen years on the Internet, so I have fewer cultural differences to current, say, University students than previous generations, but when 00's kids hit uni age it was a bit of a shock. When I tell them that I came to the UK to study in 2004 and they respond that they were 2 at the time it does make me feel like a dinosaur. :-P
probably being done away with at work in my late 50s after 6 months of horror from a hired Axeman, never recovered really
That's austerity for you - apparently it is supposed to make you a Brexiteer according to some aplologists here
> No, he's right. Twenty years ago is quite recent.
I remember when I used to think it was ancient history, but you're right.
And it's only getting more recent, as the grave yawns ever wider..
I've been climbing since the 70s so I tend to think of memorable routes that I did, say when I was working on the Roaches guide, as being fairly recent, not in my ancient history. So, just from memory, Old Man of Hoy, Vector, la Rencontre... ancient history. Checking my log; Predator, Hot Tin Roof, la Snoopy, Climber's Club Direct, Bachelor's Left Hand, my ridiculous attempt to do a direct start to Entropy's Jaw - all in the modern era... and all in 2000.
I can remember my dad cutting the meadow I now look after with a scythe and my friend Bill cutting his dad's fields with a horse drawn cutter which was driven by the wheels and worked like hedge shears. When helping out we used to rake it into windrows with a wooden tooth rake and later pitchfork it onto haystacks built around interlocked A frames made from timber.
> And it's only getting more recent, as the grave yawns ever wider..
I don't want to be buried.
I prefer: as the furnace door (be it Hell or the crematorium) creaks ever wider open.
Oddly enough, I still use a scythe occasionally- a modern austrian one- its good for small patches and i quite enjoy it.
I've just finished a 250m hedgelaying project down an old suburban railway line- just me and a billhook. Not how I expected to spend lockdown, but at least I was working.
Yes, I've got one of those modern ones and have tried to emulate my dad on a tiny part of the same piece of land - I lasted about ten minutes. I've still got the one he used ( in bits) and it's a different tool altogether.
Explaining to my PhD students that I wrote my own graphing package to drive a pen plotter (and then explaining what a pen plotter is)
Funny that - by any rationale I shouldn't care but I've made it quite clear I don't want cremation, I want a natural burial in a wood somewhere.
I want someone to dig me up in 5,000 years and ponder, as well as saying 'Teeth were a bit naff, weren't they primitive in those days?'
About 10 years ago I was asking for an audio DIN plug in a shop in Penrith. The gentleman serving me said "I think what you are asking for is a thing of the past ...".
My primary school is under the inner ring road, no trace is left of my parish church, my secondary school is flats, my hall of residence is flats, the hospital where I trained is flats, my teacher training college is going to be flats, the school where I was deputy head has been airbrushed out of history, and the den I built in the woods... gone!
Ou sont les neiges d'antan?
When you read and Internet thread about getting old..... Then find yourself nodding in agreement and muttering "yeh sound familiar"
Best yet
I mentioned that Nichola Sturgeon looked a bit like jimmie krankie, and both my daughter and son in law didn't have a clue who I was talking about.
My older brother has bought himself a fancy E-MTB instead of scoffing at him, I find myself a little bit jealous
Berlin Wall has been gone for more than thirty years.
> Berlin Wall has been gone for more than thirty years.
Oof! That one hit the spot.
The closest 'Summer of '69' is the next one.
I still have a Commodore VC20 (the smaller version of the C64, but only 3.5k RAM) and a Macintosh SE sitting in the cupboard in my old bedroom at my parents' place.
Do I feel old.....
CB
Never mind 1980s tech, many of the places that are now memorials for the iron curtain along the Bavaria/Czech border were artillery targets for me back when I was doing my military service. My children cannot believe how close to total annihilation we were throughout the 1980s!
CB
I found an old diary last year, from 1987, and there was an entry which read:
"found a fiver on the way to lectures yesterday morning. Used it to drink in The Pomona until I could barely walk."
I know, back in the day there used to be pubs!
The most disturbing thing about that anecdote is your choice of watering hole!
> Berlin Wall has been gone for more than thirty years.
And more than a quarter of a century since majority rule in South Africa. Hard to believe, especially since I have the photographs I took of the queues at the polling stations that rainy morning in Cape Town...
One of my fellow MSc students flew back to SA for that day --- he was a mature student and it was the first time in his life he had been allowed to vote.
That hit home at the time - and ensured I use my vote every time
I felt old in 2007 when I realised that it was the twentieth anniversary of the release of Robocop.
Now that I actually AM "middle aged", and proportionally x number of years (where x<10) seems like "nothing", it struck me that we are a "mere" 6.5 years away from the fortieth anniversary of the release of Robocop.
Apollo 13, the Tom Hanks movie is now 25 years old.
It was released on the 25th Anniversary of Apollo 13.