Re: Back in the Day
 

I'm very glad you weighed in! I didn't watch the mechanics fixing my tyres, back then. Our conversations were through the Minsk InTourist girl, who spoke English. I presume they had to cut holes in the tyres somewhere: is that right?

And re the cell-phones... We oldies can remember when "I'm all thumbs" was a confession of incompetence with our hands. Now, it means the opposite, at least regarding phones. My land-line rings about once a month: it's one of only three people who call on it. Losers!!!

Re: Back in the Day
 

I’ve had a German car with French tyres that never needed air in its tyres ever.

BUT they never had air, they were nitrogen filled, apparently the gas has bigger molecules or something like that. Supposed to run cooler too.

They checked them once a year in the garage.

Here in Grenada Chinese tyres are rubbish, poor grip, but even with our huge import duties US tyres are cheaper here than in the uk.

Re: Back in the Day
 

I don't mean to indulge in one-up-manship, but... Has anybody here ridden in a car with a dickey seat? My English grandfather had a small one in Toowoomba, and my brother and I absolutely loved riding in it, whenever we stayed with the grandparents there. He (the grandfather) died in 1947 when we boys were eight and four, and I have no idea what happened to it. For anybody who doesn't know what I'm talking about, just Google "dickey seat" and check out the photos.

Re: Back in the Day
 

Well, yes - & no! Back in the '70s one of the "inmates" in the place I lodged at had one of these -
https://cimg0.ibsrv.net/gimg/british...b654764a21.jpg
designed for one person only, 3 of us used to buzz down town regularly, 2 of us lying down in the back. Does that count?

Re: Back in the Day
 

No never, but I did have a relative who owned a sports car manufacturer, that folded but it became a famous sports car dealer…. Porsche west London was owned by the Fraser Nash Co. Old man Nash drove a Porsche in British racing green. He was.also a member if the real RAC gentleman’s club in London.

Re: Back in the Day
 

Back in the day - December 1966 in this case - I splurged on a fancy wedding-ring for Linda. $1000 or so, from memory. (Canadian dollars, but still...) It was a big step up from the first wedding ring she had got from me, a few weeks after we hitched a ride together in eastern Turkey in '64. A convoy of Iranian students driving home from Germany picked us up, and the woman in the group warned that Linda might be in danger in the less sophisticated parts of the Middle East if we advertised our single status. So we bought a brass ring for a shilling in an odds-and-sods shop in the town. She wore it the rest of our time on the road, and kept it (as far as I know) when we broke up back in England.

So. I have to ask here, who else has bought a fake wedding ring for social reasons?

Re: Back in the Day
 

Here's a question from way back in the day... When and why did we in The West get our own exclusive needles for inoculations? I can remember lining up at school - and in my brief stint in the army too - and receiving shots in the arm from a huge needle that serviced 40 or 50 of us before being replaced. It always got a bit blunt towards the end, and the punch a bit more brutal!

The procedure must have been safe enough. None of us ever suffered from anything worse than a bruise. So was the switch to one-shot disposables made for some kind of aesthetic reason?

Re: Back in the Day
 

I remember lining up for the school nurse to administer injections. A large glass syringe, with a needle sticking out of it. One time the needle came dislodged from the syringe, leaving the needle in my arm. :eek:

Re: Back in the Day
 

NO, Man! Judging from the picture, I doubt you'd get two of you standing in the back! As for the pilot/driver... surely there's not enough leg-room for anyone but a midget - unless there's no engine and the beast is pushed along the road with the driver's feet! Come on.. what's the real story?

Re: Back in the Day
 

No, not standing - as I said lying down, with our legs alongside the "pilot", who sat in the middle using a handlebar set of controls. Standing we would have been spotted - and nicked!

https://cimg8.ibsrv.net/gimg/british...ec8d2ad6ff.jpg

Re: Back in the Day
 

Back in the day... My best friend (only friend, really) among the twelve pupils at our local primary school in the Queensland "bush" back in the 1940s, later became the district's representative in the Australian Federal Government. His electorate was Maranoa, a sparsely settled district with 100,000 voters in an area of 280,000 square miles, nearly three times the area of Great Britain! These days, my son is set on living in Ecuador in South America, a country of 17 million in an area about the same size of Britain. Cripes. Quite a contrast! And a reminder to us all just how big Australia is, outside the cities. Plenty of room for expansion, eh?

Re: Back in the Day
 

Was anybody else here pressed into service as an occasional teacher in a one-room school? Aged nine - or maybe ten - I taught little Jenny Cox her a-b-c in one corner of the room, while the teacher taught other things to the other classes. I remember "a is like an apple on a twig, a says 'a'. b is like a bat and ball, b says 'buh'."

At age eleven, I was packed off to a boarding-school in the city. What a change that was!

Re: Back in the Day
 

When Linda & I lived in the New Hebrides (now Vanuatu), back in the 1970s, we spent a weekend in Noumea, the capital of the French Overseas Territory of New Caledonia. (The French don't have "colonies", only Overseas Territories and Overseas Departments.) There, we encountered the common term for an English-speaking person, poken, pronounced po-ken, English-style. Noumea was a regular port of call for Australian and New Zealand cruise-ships, and the local shopkeepers, anxious to attract tourists' custom, put signs in their windows saying ENGLISH SPOKEN. Hence, "poken", right? The New Hebrides was jointly administered by Britain and France, and we who lived there adopted the word. Referring to a French-speaking resident we might ask "Is he a poken?" Meaning, "does he speak English?" Lovely!

Re: Back in the Day
 

I'm in regular touch with two of my chums from school-days. I bumped into Graham in London 60 years ago, and checked in with him whenever I visited Australia. Now, thanks to the miracle of WhatsApp I chat with him every few weeks. The other is Don, who was off the radar until quite recently. He's not on WhatsApp, but we email each other regularly. He likes to be called by his school nickname of "Shorty", but I have to remind him that I never called him that, because I was even shorter than him, at the time.

Those two were never friends and aren't now. But what they have in common is that each of them took a boat to England at age 21, and returned overland. It was only a few weeks ago that Don told me of his journey. I only made it halfway home before turning back (with Linda, at age 25), but all three of us chaps have enough in common to welcome others' tales of life "on the road", back in the day.

Re: Back in the Day
 

Back in the days before television, we used to get our regular amusement from comedy half-hour "shows" on the radio. My earliest memory is of "Much Binding in the Marsh", with Kenneth Horne and Richard Murdoch; and in our house we adopted several of the catch-phrases. One of them sprang into my mind a couple of days ago, and I wonder if any other old codgers here remember Horne's "Not a word to Bessie about this!" Translated, it was "Don't tell Mum!" - as a joke, more than a genuine plea. Bessie herself never appeared on the show.

And my #1 favourite catchphrase from the Good Show, years later: Minnie Bannister's totally off-topic and meaningless plaint, "You can't get the wood, you know..." Oh dear! I'm chuckling as I type this. Pathetic!