HOW TRUE!

My mum used to cut chicken, chop eggs and spread butter on bread on the same cutting board with the same knife and no bleach, but we didn't seem to get food poisoning.

Our school sandwiches were wrapped in wax paper in a brown paper bag, not in ice pack coolers, but I can‘t remember getting e.Coli Almost all of us would have rather gone swimming in the lake or at the beach instead of a pristine pool (talk about boring), no beach closures then.

We all took PE .... and risked permanent injury with a pair of Dunlop plimsoles instead of having cross-training athletic shoes with air cushion soles and built in light reflectors that cost as much as a small car. I can‘t recall any injuries but they must have happened because they tell us how much safer we are now.

We got the cane for doing something wrong at school, they used to call it discipline yet we all grew up to accept the rules and to honour and respect those older than us. We had 50 kids in our class and we all learned to read and write, do maths and spell almost all the words needed to write a grammatically correct letter ....... FUNNY THAT!!

We all said prayers in school irrespective of our religion, sang the national anthem and no one got upset.

Staying in detention after school caught all sorts of negative attention we wish we hadn’t got.

I thought that I was supposed to accomplish something before I was allowed to be proud of myself. I just can‘t recall how bored we were without computers, Play Station, Nintendo, X-box or 270 digital TV cable stations. We weren't!!

Oh yeah…. And where were the antibiotics and sterilisation kit when I got that bee sting? I could have been killed!

We played "King of the Hill" on piles of gravel left on vacant building sites and when we got hurt, mum pulled out the 2/6d (12.5p) bottle of iodine and then we got our backside spanked. Now it's a trip to the emergency room, followed by a 10 day dose of antibiotics and then mum calls the lawyer to sue the contractor for leaving a horribly vicious pile of gravel where it was such a threat.

We never needed to get into group therapy and/or anger management classes. We were obviously so duped by so many societal ills, that we didn't even notice that the entire country wasn't taking Prozac! How did we ever survive?

And don 't even start me on counselIing!!

LOVE TO ALL OF US WHO SHARED THIS ERA.

AND TO ALL WHO DIDN'T, SORRY FOR WHAT YOU MISSED.

WOULDN‘T TRADE IT FOR ANYTHING!

AAAAh, those WERE the days!!

Mike Thompson Abernethy