Senior Citizen
A Birthday gift / Verse .................................
A Senior Citizen is One who was here before; the pill,television, frozen
foods,contact lenses, credit cards...........
and before man walked on the moon.
For us , "time sharing " meant togetherness, not holdiday homes,
and a chip meant a piece of wood.
"Hardware " meant nuts and bolts ,
and software was not even a word !
We got married, first then lived together,
and thought cleavage was something that butchers did.
" A stud " was something that fastened a collar to a shirt,and " going all the way " meant staying on a double decker to the bus depo.
We thought that " fast food " was what you ate in lent;
A "Big Mac " was an oversized raincoat and " Crumpet " we had for tea.
In our day; "grass" was mown,
"Pot " was something you cooked in,
" Coke " was kept in the coal house and a joint was cooked on Sundays !
We are today's SENIOR CITIZENS .
A hardy bunch ar 'nt we ?
When you think how the world has changed !
Posts
Life seems to have moved on and left me behind somewhere around 1990. I don't understand half of what people are saying these days. Someone on this forum used the word "spambot" the other day and the only image that came to my mind was of a nasty medical condition caused by eating too much cheap tinned meat.
If you live in Derbyshire, as I do.
I'm not that old (61) but I spent the first 5 years of my life in a house with no electricity, light was from paraffin lamps and heat (and cooking) was done on a big range in the living room! In my working life I was involved with computers - paper tapes and punched cards! How the world has moved on!
Scary, isn't it? I'm the same age as you, Hogweed, and feel I'm perpetually running to catch up with new technology. No sooner have I mastered something than I find it's 5 years out of date and superseded by something smaller, more fiddly, and less easy to understand... It takes me ages to master a new mobile phone, only to find something goes wrong with it & I have to change it for a newer, less intuitive one. My son just says "It's easy, mum! Just press this and this and this..."
Yes I know what you all mean , I'm 62 and it hit me when my granddaughter said they were doing about the fire of London in history and asked me to tell her about the " olden days " - -!!!
I remember explaining to my Gran how microwave ovens worked, damned if I can now remember what I said
Our 4 year old grandson ; when his older sister asked me about the olden days tried to explain that I could tell her but also ,could pull the fire of London up on my laptop to show her so we could work the dates out (another thing she had to find )
Grandson , calmly reminded her that grandma thinks she is 21 all the time, so how can I be expected to remember when I was a little girl and what happened .
I'm still thinking about THAT one !!
My older granddaughter was just 2 when she learnt how to unlock her dad's phone...
Now back from an NHS holiday recuperating at my Daughters we have all the family visiting to see I am being fed and watered. Talking about Doctors I happened to mention the half crown Doctor !!!! blank looks, has he flipped, you mean you had to pay for the NHS? No there was no NHS, if you sent for the Doctor he would arrive and hold his hand out, he got half a crown and if you had medicine more money would pass over, I think my Parents also paid coppers per week into the surgery as pre-paid medication.
Granddaughters looking at me with awe "you were alive before there was NHS"? I fully expected them to ask if I was at Waterloo as they knew I was Army.
The flip side was my Grandson asking how a rotary engine worked and being able to tell him, Granddad nothing wrong with your memory he said. Win some lose some.
Frank.
Palaisglide
My grandmother lived to be 108, and "kept all her marbles", so the local schools used her as a resource for history projects etc. Not many people have lived in 3 centuries (born 1895, died 2004)...
I had the opposite experience to yours regarding engines. I never really "got" how an internal combustion engine worked until my son, then aged 8, explained it to me! (He's now a university lecturer, explaining aeronautics to undergraduates.)