This week: The Good Old Days

What is this so-called New ‘Green’ thinking lark? When I was young we had to walk to the shops, not get it online. We already took a shopping bag and the only packaging was a brown paper bag and, if you were lucky, a stringed carrier. Arthur Crown

Dr F: I know. I remember when an asylum seeker was a Russian diplomat who had flags on the bonnet of a limousine and bodyguards. Now all you need is enough space in the boot of a car or a dinghy.

They talk about windpower and solar power. In my day all we had a clothes line. Titas Fukk

Dr F: Yes. We had to wash our nappies, not buy toxic throwaway poop hammocks. Which is not easy when you were only a few days old.

We didn’t have CFC Ozone destroying fridges. We had a lump of concrete in a larder for a lonely bit of cheese to grow its only civilisation. We had a car on every street instead of three on a drive. Go Green my arse. Mister Meaner

Dr F: Back then, we returned milk bottles, pop bottles and beer bottles to the shop and were given real money! The shop sent them back to the dairy or factory to be washed and sterilized then refilled, so it could use the same bottles over and over again.  So they really were re-cycled! Then we would hop over the off licence wall into the yard and nick more empties to oblivious landlords while one bought 3 Woodbines as a distraction technique.

50 years ago I went to a real labour exchange to get my dole. Not these fancy pants jobcentrepluses that I go to now that give you all the jobs the world never wants. I was proud to accept my pittance when the benefits officer would actually phone up and arrange an interview for me. Not fuckaboot asking what I had done to get work in the last week while they sip a latte and stink of TCP Billy Idle

Dr F: Yes. I am lucky and in work healing people of their fictitious symptoms. I would rather...tighten my nuts with a pair of molegrips on my bellend while gargling raw sewage and carpet tacks with African Green Monkey phlegm injected into my spleen and my nipples severed by a pair of Toyah Wilcox’s pinking shears than sign on these days. The world has enough Betterware catalogue distributors or Avon representatives.

We walked up stairs, because we didn't have an escalator in every shop and office building.  We walked to the shops and didn't climb into a  200-horsepower machine every time we had to go two hundred yards! We used Brylcreem because it was cheaper than KY jelly. Gerry Hatrick

Dr F: Too right! Kids got hand-me-down clothes from their brothers or sisters, and slept 7 to a bed. I always asked for the shallow end. We spent our pocket money buying playing cards for our bike wheels, not in McDonalds or TK feckin’ MAX eating and buying food to wear and clothes to eat. We lived on natural Fray Bentos pies, semolina, and tripe, not re-constituted muck that spent its life not being able to turn its arse round in its cage and see where it had shite.

Back then we had one TV or radio in the house -- not one in every room!  The TV had a small screen the size of a handkerchief, not a screen the size of Yorkshire.  In the kitchen, we blended and stirred by hand because we didn't have electric machines to do everything for us.  When we packaged a fragile item to send in the post, we used wadded up old newspapers to cushion it, not Styrofoam or plastic bubble wrap.  Back then, we didn't fire up an engine and burn petrol just to cut the lawn.  We used a push mower that ran on human power.  We exercised by working so we didn't need to go to a health club to run on treadmills powered by electricity. What cunt knows how to black a stove these days? Thats right! A bloody arsonist.

When we were thirsty we drank from a tap instead of drinking from a plastic bottle of water shipped from the other side of the world.  We refilled writing pens with ink instead of buying a new pen, and we replaced the razor blades in a razor instead of throwing away the whole  razor just  because the  blade got dull. We didn’t have a ‘Brazilian’ or a ‘New Yorker’..we just had impetigo. Lil Shaver

Dr F: People took the bus and kids rode their bikes to school or walked, instead of turning their mums into a 24-hour taxi service.  We had one electrical socket in a room, not an entire bank of sockets to power a dozen appliances. Neither did we need a computerised gadget to receive a signal beamed from satellites 2,000 miles out in space in order to find the nearest fish and chip shop! Kids didn’t have an X-Box or Wii. We had a piece of string for a fishing rod and a jar to put the sticklebacks in. At 9 years old I made my own fun and used to borrow a local bike to ride all day and all night and hope it didn’t  make me saddle-sore or end up pregnant.

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