Nostalgia

Oct 04, 2009 21:51

I have caught davegotsu's cold. I didn't sleep well last night. However I'm feeling better now and have bought cold cures in case I have to dose myself up for work tomorrow.

I've been looking at stuff on the Times Online Archive today.

I'm watching Electric Dreams on BBC4, a family are living with only 1970s technology. It's really interesting.
Oddly enough (for someone born in the 80s and with memories only of the 90s) there was familiar stuff there. I suspect this is because various older relatives dumped their defunct technology on my parents, and my parents seemed to let them.

-Mum and Dad still had a record player and we'd listen to some kids records when we were little. No idea what some of the music was, but I remember hiding because I didn't like that scratchy noise it would make when you started it (a was a very nervous child and didn't like loud noises).
-Someone gave us a console with Pong on it when I was in early primary school, it didn't get played much.
-We were given my grandfather's old tape-deck computer (even though we already had one that used CD ROM and everything). It was a novelty for a while but one game never worked and the other involved zooming aimlessly around space.
-My parents wouldn't let us have TVs in our bedrooms for years -I suspect this was only relaxed because me and my sister had jobs and she spent quite a while saving up for one. I couldn't be bothered to buy a TV (I'm thrifty, or maybe cheap, when it comes to shopping for myself), but I eventually got an old one from my Great Aunt. It had push buttons, no remote, a volume knob and often went fuzzy.

The family interaction was familiar too. We used to go camping a lot. I now see that self-catering is definitely easier with my dietary needs. Camping meant spending lots of days riding bikes all over campsites, and spending evenings playing any board or card games we could find -even foreign ones which involved improvising the rules/gameplay.

I think part of the reason I'm not very gadgety or up-to-date on technology is that we never really were and so it doesn't bother me.

family, television

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