Depending how you look it I am now 5 decades old, 50 years old or half a century old.
I think we can get rid of that last one but it got me thinking about the different ways looking at things can influence how you feel and your outlook on life. I'll try and explain through some pictures and comparisons on how far we have come in such a short space of time, there's the first positive.
I was born in this street, Wilson Street St Helens Lancashire on the 2nd February 1965. This shocked my mum who was in hospital at the time...
The house was a 2 up 2 down terrace house, two bedrooms and two rooms downstairs, the two downstairs rooms didn't include a toilet, that was about 20 yards away from the back door at the bottom of a yard. That's the first change, fortunately in the UK outside toilets seem to be a thing of the not so distant past...thank goodness.
The downstairs front room had,until I was around the age of 4, an open coal fire, the coal was stored in a hole adjacent to the previously mentioned outside loo.
The advent of North Sea or natural gas was a massive step forward though gas vans seemed to take
up loads of my playing out space in the street for a long time as fitters installed gas fires and changed
pipes to cookers etc... Another big change.
Something else that some readers may not recognise is this piece of furniture above. This is a radiogram and we had one very similar. It was fantastic with speakers that would be the envy of anything today. It had a great function on it that enabled you to stack 7 singles or albums if you were brave and it automatically played the next single once the current one had finished, no shuffle mind or skip function but revolutionary for its day.
When I think about how I listen to my music now and the fact that it is stored digitally in a cloud somewhere the short time span seems incredible.
Speaking of digital technology, this is a picture of a 500mb hard drive being lifted on to a plane in the 1960s...500MB! I am writing this on a 16GB iPad resting it on my knee on the sofa...now that's progress in a short space of time!
One more example of progression, this was the first video player I used back in 1979, it weighed a ton! And had tape recorder buttons as you can see. I remember having to save up to buy blank tapes as they were around £9.99 for 3 hours! We were lucky as well as had expert advice on choosing VHS rather than Betamax or Phillips...picked the right horse there.
The short space of time was again illustrated in conversations with my son when he was around 4 or 5 and watching the first cartoon network channels and getting into Scooby Doo et al. "Did you watch Cartoon Network dad?"
"No son it wasn't around then" "
you watched Scooby Doo though? "
"Oh yes every Tuesday after school"
"What if you missed it? Bet you had to tape it or watch the reaper"
"Err nope, if you missed it, you missed it, no repeat and no videos either"
Silence, as this concept took some thinking it was only around 30 years since I had been that age!
I could go on about the many many different changes that have happened since 1965, colour tv, satellite TV, man on the moon, the Internet, medical treatments, the list is almost endless.
Not all have been good or as useful as they could have been and there are still areas where improvements need to be made and are frustratingly slow in coming particularly in medicine.
However the changes that have occurred have been amazing and have happened, I'm glad to say, over a very short period of time...I wonder what I'll put into my centenary blog?
