Old Style Skills

Lillibet_2

Just been reminded of something by my Mum : for the boys who don't know how to knit....it saved my Great-granddads life....literally! He was a prisoner of war in WW1 & sentanced to be shot but the guards found out he could knit & instead allowed him to spend 3 years in prison knitting garments for them. He was eventually released when the war was over & got home to my great-grandmother, only to find...ahem...that no one had told her he wasn't dead:o Fortunately they went on to enjoy another 18 years together, all thanks to his being able to knit (he was chef by profession & could cook damn well too, he owned his own resteraunt just like his father before him and 2 of his sons after him. I have my great granddads cookery book with his annotations:D)

Sarahsaver

I have been a single parent too, and also previously married to someone who expected me to do everything despite first working 60hr week whilst having 3 under 5s, then having a stroke.

liz545

I'm not sure how many of my peers (early 20's) would qualify as truly OS - while we can all cook, there are still ready meals to be found, and not many of my friends knit/craft etc, or clean the OS way. But that's not to say that we lack skills and are reliant on others, just that our skills are more diverse. I know several IT geniuses, who can upgrade/overhaul systems rather than the PC World mentality of 'chuck it and get a new one'. I make my own bread and almost always cook from scratch, as does my OH, my sister is brilliant with DIY. OH learned to handwash clothes when he started uni, and realised you had to pay to use the machines! But it does sadden me that so many vital skills - cooking, cleaning, budgeting - aren't a basic part of the curriculum. We risk raising a generation of children who, when they leave home/go to uni, have no idea how to look after themselves, and become very dependent on costly ready meals and cleaning companies, at considerable cost. I think that every teenager should have the basic skills to ensure that they are self-sufficient, and since this seems to be beyond many parents, the state has to provide it. I don't think these skills are by nature sexist - as women work, and people move away from the traditional male earner/female housewife model, they are rightly seen as life skills .

badgermonkey

I'm 26 and I know loads of people my age who don't cook and are amazed that we do. I've made somebody spagetti carbonara (closest thing to a ready meal in our house - on the table in 12 minutes!) and they said "how do you know how to make these things?".

I made soup with homemade stock once (usually I use stock cubes! I think any HM soup still counts as OS though...) and when they asked me how to make chicken stock, I said "Well, when you roast a chicken...". She interrupted and laughed "Ah, there's your problem!". They never roast a chicken! It's the easiest thing in the world to make!

Look at all the packets and jars available. Someone must eat them. As students OH and I would eat Chicken Tonight sauces on offer because we didn't know any better. We haven't had one in our house for four or five years and hopefully never will again. But the new ranges come out all the time, and so people think it is normal to cook like that and that everyone must do it. And to some extent, "everyone" does do it. I saw a couple wandering round the Co-Op with a packet of Shepherd's Pie mix in their hands. What the hell is in that? Gravy granules? I bet if you asked them how to make a Shepherd's Pie from scratch they wouldn't know, and yet making the savoury mince isn't even the hardest part IMO - it's ptting the mash on top that always does me!

culpepper

Well I wish I had had some of your parents.

My cooking skills were gleened from books when I was 17. My dad had died and 6 months later mum had a brain haemorrage (not fatal)which left me ,my brother 20 and my sister 10.Brother had never had to lift a finger and neither had we.
I had to learn everything...handwashing clothes,cooking ,cleaning the lot.
We also were living on our 2 meagre wages as mums widows pension book ran out and she couldnt talk much less sign her name. Brother acted much like my dad had before him and never lifted a finger.
Well thank god for books and reading.
I can now cook ,sort of clean, sew ,knit ,decorate , build computers and even wire a plug :rotfl:
Oh and so can the kids

BWZN93

I learned to cook from my mum and she is a fabulous cook! When she worked full time and I was part time, I took over the household cooking and cleaning and looking after my brother so my mum could concentrate fully on keeping a roof over our head!

Thats when I got well into cooking and used to invent recipe's too which usually went down a storm. Mum still did the sunday roast though, with me as assistant. When I went to uni, I too was genuinely shocked at the amount of people who couldnt cook, one stupid mare even lit a disposable barbeque in her room, and one day left the bath running flooding the room and collapsing the ceiling below! I had a few 'charges' of my own too which was quite nice, and used to cook up big lasagne's etc which I think a lot of people were suprised that someone could do without actually buying a ready made one!

My dad is good at DIY and car services which is lucky as I did manage to pick up a lot of tips and skills from him while I was younger, one of my strongest memories from being little is my dad's two sheds in the back garden with a dusty workshoppy kind of smell, and he took me out to buy my first proper grown up drill when I was 21. I now have a full car service and full DIY kit that I actually know how to use. The best part of car servicing was when one of our male freinds at uni broke down, and after 5 men peering under the hood to locate the problem, it was me in my pyjamas coming out with my tool kit fixing the car within 20 minutes and the men giving me looks of admiration and telling my oh that he was a lucky guy!

Since leaving uni Ive become a lot more o/s, my grandma was fantastic at knitting etc but she died before I had chance to learn properly from her. I love the idea of being able to create original items and I am trying to learn the things I didnt have the opportuinity to do when younger. My OH finds it amusing that i am so handy, but I love being able to fend for myself as I dont see why I would want to pay over the odds for someone to do something for me unless it was absolutley necessary. My current sofa project is making new removeable covers because I cant buy any that would fit in the right colour, and find that just by chatting to people who know what to do I am learning new things all the time. Its nice that people still have these skills and are willing to share them!

I too wonder whether these skills are going to passed on a large scale or whether they will become more and more specialised, and think it is a true shame that most of my contemporaries - even those who are parents - dont even have basic skills like cooking, cleaning, basic diy (changing the fuse in a plug for instance) and basic sewing skills. If I ever have children, they will learn all of the things ive learned whether they are a boy or a girl!

Jo xx

Cazzdevil

I can't remember being taught any of my OS skills, but from a really early age I saw my mother baking every weekend, and she was a seamstress for a lot of years before starting a knitting/sewing business of her own so I guess I just picked up bits and pieces from watching her.

My mother is fantastic in that if I get stuck with anything I'm trying to teach myself she's always willing to help because she appreciates my interest in these skills. I doubt many 26 year olds are as proficient in baking and dressmaking as I am (o:

sandieb

What a great thread. I wonder whether making a budget (and sticking to it) is also an old style skill?

Queenie

sandieb wrote:

What a great thread. I wonder whether making a budget (and sticking to it) is also an old style skill?

Oooh yes!! In my book it is ... after all, we're seeing a whole generation who simply have to hand over a piece of plastic and not physically count out the cash - it's way to easy to spend money and lose track of the when, where and how; let alone be disciplined enough to live within their means .. that's if they can remember what that is half the time, unless they've just received their latest statement

sandieb

I guess Mr Micawber would have been horrified!

Mr. Micawber in Charles Dickens' David Copperfield:

Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen pounds nineteen shillings and sixpence, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result misery.