How is life different today compared to when you were a child?

Change evolves slowly over time as it is absorbed into daily life. It is only when you look back that you realise how much has truly changed. So where to start? I suppose the most obvious changes have been in communications and transportation.

Before the advent of the computer and all the ‘i’ pods, pads and phones, we relied on the good old land line telephone and the, sadly neglected nowadays, ‘snail’ mail. It slowed communication down, but did give you time to think about what you had to say! Phones were at home or found in public phone booths, not instantly accessible always at your hip or in your pocket like mobile phones are these days. The art of writing a letter, finding an envelope and a stamp and getting the letter to the mail box now seems quite redundant.

I have to say that ‘plink’ arrival of an e mail in the ‘in box’ doesn’t replace the frisson of excitement when a letter dropped through your letter box onto the mat. As I write this, I am reminded that pen and ink skills are now also almost redundant with the ‘QWERTY’ keyboard….. at it WAS with pen nib and ink that we learned the skills needed to physically write with all the required upstrokes and downstrokes. As a child, few families had a car and we relied on walking or bicycling from a to b, or used public transportation, by bus, train or tram.

Air travel was yet to become commonplace. The first flight I took was when, as a young adult in 1968, I flew from Edinburgh to Amsterdam to join my parents on holiday in Holland. We certainly didn’t jump on a plane and fly around the world as is commonplace now. Foods have changed too.

With the world becoming so much smaller with efficient transportation networks, all sorts of foods are available that just didn’t appear on our menus back then. I remember the first avocado I tasted in 1968, which seemed amazingly exotic. The mixing of cultures around the world has also brought varieties of foods toour tables that would have been unimaginable when I was a child. To be honest, as a child it was also immediately post WW2 and food in general was in short supply, though we never went without.

The way we eat, with frozen foods ( Bird’s eye frozen peas were introduced in the 1950’s) and the way we shop in supermarkets was unheard of before the mid 1950’s. Before then all the shopping was done in individual stores, the grocer, the greengrocer the butcher, the fish shop…... Clothing has also changed radically, not only in styles but in the availability of fabrics. Back then our clothes were made of cotton or wool which meant a lot more care in washing than is the case nowadays with all the synthetic fabrics.

There was a lot more emphasis as a child on keeping clothes ‘clean’ than nowadays. Washing them meant a lot more hand washing and then there were all the problems associated with drying clothes without the convenience of a dryer, and ironing to make them remotely wearable. Todays easy care fabrics, tossed in the washer and then into the dryer before folding and back into the drawer would have been an unimaginable luxury. I remember the advent of the first ‘drip dry ‘ shirts for men made out of the new ‘Bri Nylon’ which promised that the housewife would be spared all the ironing, it seemed like an incredible step forward.

Keeping a home clean and tidy was also a lot more work back then. Coal fires made for dusty houses and the house itself was harder to keep warm, no double glazing or central heating systems back then. What a different world in the days before television too. Radio was our family entertainment in the evening.

A night out at the movies might be in order, thre were always two films, the ‘A’ feature and the ‘B’ movie and the news reel too. It must be hard to imagine what our world was like without all the visual input that today’s world has from television. We relied on books to show us what the rest of the world was like. The advent of ‘nature’ and ‘travel’ programs in the early days of television literally opened up the world to us.

I think I have covered enough, I am starting to feel like a dinosaur!