Was it the "Nice Decade"?

PasturesNew

jamescredmond wrote: »

if you're going to drink with me in jersey, you'd better get ready for lots of real ale.

can of pepsi indeed......

I'll tell you now: you won't be drinking that over dinner.

eww real ale. I bet you've got a beard and sandals.
If there's Morris Dancing on, I'm not going!

PasturesNew

Phirefly wrote: »

how about this?

I saw that. Had a whip round with some mates, who managed to only come up with about £100k between them.

So we were still a bit short... then somebody saw some squirrels and we forgot about it.

harryhound

All the "good times juice" has been squeezed into one decade leaving the older generation to benefit most whilst my generation just out of education has to bare the worst times for the best part of our lives in a long drawn out recession which could last well over a decade and I doubt it will be followed by a boom anywhere near the size of this one.

I think the problem is people just DON'T GET IT, they think oh what is he moaning about it's only going to be a recession! But it's going to be such a big dent to quality of life for almost everyone- there are so many bad things happening at once in the world right now and each one by itself is a bombshell, together the destruction is unthinkable.

So why has life been so tough on you as against me?
As far as the ground rules go the only difference is the student loans required to get through three years of further education. Had I been part of the 3% who went to university, I might have got some sort of grant. Actually the figures were not quite that low in the late 1960's because a lot of institutions which are now called universities were then called "Tech's" or "Teacher training colleges".
But I had to go out to work to help pay off the 3.5K of debts that my father left to a stay at home wife and a school girl daughter. (That is about 40K in today's money).
The management trainee job I got paid 750 a year.
That job folded under me as the company was taken over and asset stripped. No redundancy pay in those days. Managed to get a central London job on 1000 a year plus luncheon vouchers plus overtime. Guess who volunteered for two hours overtime each night?
What assets did I own at the age of 21: A build it yourself Hi Fi and a Honda 50 second hand motorbike and the monthly rent of a 6 x 10 room in a shared flat..
In actual fact the 5 years of the late 60's were wonderful. Us youngsters did not have much but we felt we could change the world. I managed to hitch hike from Istanbul to Vancouver, though I did need to find 50 GBP to cross the Atlantic.
Still feel a bit deprived that I was too busy working to do the hippy trail.

The 1970's were grim economically. Britain was the basket case of Europe. I'm redundant again. But that put us young people in the position of the Poles of the last 10 years. I found myself regularly "living" in a walk up "hotel" in Geneva. It took me a long time to work out why I was the only customer getting up for breakfast in the bar (no dining room) and going to work. This work meant I finally managed to pay off the debts and get married and get a mortgage on an 11K house by the mid 1970's. (Slightly in the wrong order as it is my wife's signature on last debt payment - I still have that cheque.)

I then switched to IT from being a glorified sales clerk. Spent 5 years living in and renovating a wreck. Redundant again, but this time I collect 8K in payments:T
We then had two kids. If you want to be instantly poor, try supporting a wife and two children on a single wage. But now it is the 1980's.

Britain is "restructured" and has the once in million years good luck to find oil in the N. Sea. Oil boom makes "yuppies" (young urban professionals) rich. Though there was a property bubble caused in part by deficit financing, following an economic "jolt" in 1987 caused by computer trading (Similar to the present banking credit crunch, BUT the difference is that the deficit financing came BEFORE the economic jolt, so this time it could be back to the 1930's ).

The 1990's were a decade of recovery and liberation, the global economy must have made swathes of people in the former communist states feel the way I did in the 1960's; but after the Millennium party (I remember it well, I was sober ready to play "swat the Y2K bug") the fundamentals were going down hill. The country and USA had been running a balance of payments deficit. Following the dotcom bust and invasion of Afganistan & Iraq both countries were well into deficit financing (Just like the Vietnam war that shafted the 1960's boom).

So here we are back in 1972. The oil and gas is running dry. Are there any differences.
Yes most young people seem to be in debt but have many more toys than I did 35 years ago. They also seem to enjoy exotic foreign holidays but simply "put them on the plastic". When we gave a party we started 3 weeks in advance by creating some devils brew in a dustbin for 5 pence a pint, don't think this happens much these days. Back then it was Abigail's dinner party style: Prawn cocktail, Casserole, Black Forest gateau and furniture second hand or bought from "Shabbytat".
Oh yes cars were truly awful and failed their MOT because of rusty holes. Saturday morning's entertainment was crawling about underneath replacing the silencer.

As we find ourselves in a rerun of the early 1970's, there are some fundamental differences: The world population has doubled and the easy to get at raw materials have been mined out. Back in the 60's there was a 2 way way debate about "civilisation" ending in a bang or a whimper. The bang is temporarily less likely, New York has taken down the bomb shelter signed that were everywhere in the 60's, there should still be a peace dividend now there is no longer a cold war arms race. Food supply is just about coping with the weekly increase of 1,300,000 new mouths to feed. BUT we seem to be bumping up against a limit to growth in the form of an overheating planet.

In the near term, there is a popping property bubble. A lot of wealth has gone to "money heaven" and the interesting thing thing will be who is going to pay for these deficits - I've a nasty feeling it might be pensioners like myself, not spendthrift young people who failed to read the bit in the bible about 7 good years followed by 7 bad years.

Young people it is your world - my baby boomer generation thought we could make a difference. We did but not enough.
It is your turn now. Get a grip on reality and I'll expect your report back in 35 years time.

Harry.

PS I'm still around to give a hand, not desperately SKI'ing like some of my generation.

setmefree2

Oliveru wrote: »

All the "good times juice" has been squeezed into one decade leaving the older generation to benefit most whilst my generation just out of education has to bare the worst times for the best part of our lives in a long drawn out recession which could last well over a decade and I doubt it will be followed by a boom anywhere near the size of this one.

Hi Oliveru,

I thought I would address this part of your post. I graduated in the early 80's in Thatcher's Britain and it was a really tough market to try to get a job in. So I do think that there are many of us out here who do understand your plight. But however bad you think it is now - trust me we did have it worse, just as our parents had it so much worse before us. Dig deep - look for the oppotunities that come from recession (cheap housing ?). Some sectors will thrive as the world adjusts. There will be adults around you that have lived through recessions I'm sure they can help you a great deal.

All The Best

SMF2

PS Fantastic post Harry Hound

Oliveru

setmefree2 wrote: »

There will be adults around you that have lived through recessions I'm sure they can help you a great deal.

Sorry but you don't get it this isn't just going to be a recession, it's going to be a depression! It worries me that even someone compassionate enough to answer my post still doesn't get how bad things will become. I imagine those that ignored my post are even more deluded as to how things will be in future.

This is going to be the mother of all recessions.

PasturesNew

Oliveru wrote: »

Sorry but you don't get it this isn't just going to be a recession, it's going to be a depression! It worries me that even someone compassionate enough to answer my post still doesn't get how bad things will become. I imagine those that ignored my post are even more deluded as to how things will be in future.

This is going to be the mother of all recessions.

I guess a depression if you've grown up in the last 15-20 years does seem bad. But for the older generation we've seen most of it before and been aware of it.

We were brought up with Russia threatening to nuke us in our beds. Leaflets given out to householders on what to do in the event of nucleur attack and public information films on the TV.

Black and white TV, 3 channels that ran for a few hours in the morning and again in the evening, shutting down at 11pm.

70s shortages. 3-day weeks, strikes, every house having a 6-hour planned power cut every 24 hours (some nights tea was bread toasted on the open fire), potato shortages, sugar shortages, petrol shortages.

Only the middle-classes really went to University. Less places, less Unis. The rest were manual labour/shop/factory fodder.

No minimum wage, no flexi-time, minimal annual leave, no top up benefits for families.

There was shame in living together, shame in debt, shame in being unemployed. And shame if somebody saw you doing something a bit naughty (like sitting on a wall you shouldn't) as they'd tell your mum and you'd get told off and probably a smack.

Renting rooms/houses was a grim experience. Think Rising Damp - then take away the comeraderie the show promotes and add a few draughts.

All the older people at work and around us had fought in the WW1 and WW2. Every town still had the Workhouse and you knew what it was for.

Mend and make do. Everything 2nd hand.

No central heating, few indoor bathrooms, no fitted carpets, no colour TV, no videos, no PCs, no Internet, no 24 hour multi-channel TV, no mp3 players/iPods, no mobile phones, no dish washers, no automatic washing machines, no microwaves, no foreign holidays, no credit cards, no 0% finance, no cheap goods.

Ropey, cold vehicles.

I'm sure I've left out things others can think of.

Did I live up North? No.

So when things revert, if there is a depression, we've seen a lot of it before. And we're not scared by it.

Oliveru

PasturesNew wrote: »

So when things revert, if there is a depression, we've seen a lot of it before. And we're not scared by it.

I am and I bet a lot of others would be if they knew how bad it will be.

The key point here is that this depression was avoidable but just imagine a government that has been doing exactly the opposite of what it should have been doing the last decade- That is to say it's been running this country into the ground.

Luckily I'm moving to China within a year so I should be ok

olly300

PasturesNew wrote: »

I've always wondered where this whole wine drinking culture came from.
The Great British public never used to knock back bottles ... and over the last 10+ years it seems nearly everybody's buying wine with their weekly shopping and knocking it back like it's Vimto.

I don't buy alcohol to consume at home. It never occurs to me. Having a drink is what you do when you go out, for a reason.

It's because life under Nu Labour wasn't and isn't that great. If you drink enough you forget everything.

BTW Oliveru when you move away you will miss the odd things about the UK and things won't be that bad. However when you come back it will look like a sh***hole.

borntobefree

Oliveru wrote: »

Sorry but you don't get it this isn't just going to be a recession, it's going to be a depression! It worries me that even someone compassionate enough to answer my post still doesn't get how bad things will become. I imagine those that ignored my post are even more deluded as to how things will be in future.

This is going to be the mother of all recessions.

Sorry Oliveru Pasturesnew is right - we've seen it all before I'm afraid. Most of us really did start with nothing.;) (and I'm mean nothing. I'm sure many of us on here could tell stories that would shock - not to mention our "living" parents who had even less)....frankly we're not too frightened off going back there, the benefits for the planbet would be huge:T

borntobefree

Oliveru wrote: »

The key point here is that this depression was avoidable but just imagine a government that has been doing exactly the opposite of what it should have been doing the last decade- That is to say it's been running this country into the ground.

:rotfl:That is the definition of Thatcherism:rotfl: