Corpsey

bandz ahoy
Anna Freud: If something does not satisfy you , do not be surprised. That’s what we call life.”

Exactly! Satisfaction is unsatisfactory.

The hedonic treadmill.

We're never happy.

I hate to praise a recentish Woody Allen film but he got that right in 'Midnight in Paris'. For those who haven't seen it, the main character is always wishing he was in Paris in the 1920s, not the 2010s. Then he goes back to the 1920's Paris and meets a woman there who is reminiscing about Paris in the 1890's or something.
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
I read the first of those Yorkshire ripper books by David Peace. Which made the 70s seem cartoonishly grim. Not sure how exaggerated it was.
 

john eden

male pale and stale
that's actually John Eden speaking at 1.30 in

LOL I'm not that patient with kids but have feelings of affection for lefty community workers who did their thing in the 1970s and 80s in inner London.

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These two are both classics of the "trying to make a better life for underprivilged kids on estates who are a complete pain in the arse" docu-genre.
 

john eden

male pale and stale
With both there is the initial idealism that gets shattered when the people you are trying to help smash the place up. But then you get them to pick up the pieces and fix it and carry on, on better terms.
 

sufi

lala
less lead in the air has made us all much less violent - knuckle sandwiches are not really a thing any more are they

i remember school in bristol it was routine, each teacher had their own signature type of violence, mr Siddall would crack you on the skull with a single knuckle, Mr Gillete was notorious with the flying board rubber, mr lewin had a special way to grab a handful of hair and twist it, mr clay had a big stick called the persuader - he was teh art teacher
 

sufi

lala
mr millington punched my in the gut so hard i puked, aged maybe 8. and they had a special fetish for green flash gym shoes, i was a rude little fucker though i'm sure
People can feel nostalgia for just about anything, I think.

I'm already nostalgic about the opening months of lockdown.

i get a lot of nostalgia for 70's 80's US of America, i never was there though, not so much for the school days
 

sufi

lala
people must have had better defined personailities back in them grim days, much more individualistic internal lives without all this homogenising junk we're force fed all the time
way more time to reflect without this constant over stimulation
 

john eden

male pale and stale
I think there is less casual violence (if you will forgive the pun) but a lot more fatal stabbings in London at least.

There is also an endemic mugging culture because young men carry things that are worth money now (mainly phones but not just).

All the teenagers I knew carried fuck all around with them - maybe a walkman if you were fortunate or a nice bike.
 

version

Well-known member
I had a teacher who loved The Beatles. He had the John Lennon hair and glasses. I wound him up all the time, told him they were shit etc. Eventually he slapped me round the head. This was in 2004.
 

WashYourHands

Cat Malogen
@WYH, are you still in glasgow?
my seventies were in Bristol, where my dad, a junior professional on the bottom of the ladder was surprised to move from a flat in london to a nice big house in a good street in a nice neighbourhood. We weren't in poverty (though we did play on the bombsites) but there was a material poverty that's hard to relate to now, almost no electronics or plastic, nothing disposable, a more reliable and solid materialism
and no mass media smog in every crevice, so no current affairs cult or celebrity sacrifice rituals infiltrating every home
cultural forms that existed had mostly existed for centuries, not ephemera

i've been reading some Bristol novels from that era, they feel like they are right on the cusp of this explosion into our current hypermodernity - people's consciousness was not so different - ideologies and identities were similar to now, but our way of life seems to have changed a lot

if it was a grim time, i wonder if we see it more positively now than when this thread was started

Not currently, but travel back frequently with work and for annual football Hun and Jambo smashing. Moved away early 80’s due to my old man’s union job transfer. Coal strike kicked off almost immediately. Cue all that chaos. Hugely divisive, even up until an event like this


Fully empathise with your points about material poverty, no mass media smog in every crevice, no celebrity bullshit other than the odd sports figure. Curious about the Bristolian novels you cite. Subtle but highly significant differences in world-views and social norms are difficult to convey in 140 characters.
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
Unless someone's mentioned it and I've missed it, surely something major you have to factor in, in the then-vs-now which-is-grimmer argument, is that a lot of what people ate in the 70s and 80s wouldn't even be recognised as food by young or young-ish people today.

And it's not just poor-quality food that poor people ate because they could afford nothing else - arguably the worst monstrosities were aspirational middle-class foods, novelty foods, dishes intended to "wow your guests" at your dinner party, or make use of your fancy new microwave oven to cook an entire meal.

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Whereas today you can buy an actually pretty decent pizza from Aldi for about three quid.
 
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