(Under the age of 40? You wont understand.) My Ma used to cut chicken, chop eggs and spread marg on bread on the same cutting board with the same knife, no bleach to clean the knife between different foods and we didnt get food poisoning. Our school sambos were wrapped in wax paper in a brown paper bag to begin with, not in ice pack coolers, but I cant remember getting e... coli. Eventually the sambos came in a crate without any paper, still no e...coli. Almost all of us would have rather gone swimming in the canal off Broomer or at the Portmarnok 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 runners 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 cant 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 & respect those older than us (except Donald Dowling). We had 30+ 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!! We all said prayers in school and sang the national anthem, and never had detention, never heard of detention after school because the Teachers were first out the door. We learnt our times table by reciting them every day. I thought that I was supposed to accomplish something before I was allowed to be proud of myself. I just cant recall how bored we were without computers, Play Station, Nintendo, X-box or 270 digital TV cable stations. We werent!! Oh yeah ... and where was the antibiotics and sterilisation kit when I got that bee sting? I could have died! We played “Cowboys and Indians” on piles of gravel left on vacant building sites and when we got hurt, me Ma pulled out the 2/6p bottle of iodine and then we got our backside spanked. Now its a trip to the emergency room, followed by a 10 day dose of antibiotics and the Mum calls the lawyer to sue the contractor for leaving a horribly vicious pile of gravel where it was such a threat. We made our own box carts and scrounged bits of wood, rusty nails and hammered them straight with a rock, no hammer. No Tetanus injections for bruised and bleeding fingers. To top it off, not a single person I knew had ever been told that they were from a dysfunctional family. How could we possibly have known that? We never needed to get into group therapy and/or anger management classes. We did think that the Teachers need educating though and anger management lessons. We were obviously so duped by so many societal ills, that we didnt even notice that the entire country wasnt taking Prozac! How did we ever survive?
Posted on: Mon, 26 Jan 2015 12:38:13 +0000
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