Cardiff was rough during the 70's
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50’s, scrumping apples, riding/making your bogie and using it on the main road, able to go anywhere on your own. Oh for the innocence of childhood again. Many other things.
Cardiff was rough during the 70's
It's always been rough. Teddy Boys in the 50's, Mods and Rockers in the 60's and gangs in later decades. I found the late 1950's particularly violent. I recall once being in the Regal snooker Hall in Gabalfa where a massive fight broke out with lads throwing snooker balls at each other with some serious injuries I would guess given the amount of blood involved. I scarpered quickly so am assuming ambulances must have been involved. But there were many no go areas in Cardiff at the time. The 70's was far tamer.
Funny how you mentioned bogie. I was driving in Whitchurch yesterday and i seen a dumped pushchair. I past the same spot today and it was still there. Back in the 60's and early 70's it would be gone in seconds to make our bogies, or if you live up the valleys i think you call them gambos. Times have certainly changed.
I'm in my mid-thirties now, and would say that if anything, I'd probably have preferred to have been born slightly earlier, maybe only by 5-10 years. Social media came along when I was in my late teens and I think if I'd been a little bit older, I may not have been caught up in it and wasted so much time on it in the years since. Outside of that though I think the late nineties/early 00's were as good a time as any to grow up in.
Having spent the last ten years teaching teenagers I have to disagree with some who have highlighted the positives of having more to do and more technology in recent decades. More TV certainly isn't a good thing and I see first hand how addiction to consoles and mobile phones has a negative zombie-like effect on some (and I stress it is only some) teenagers. I think that boredom can often spark creativity and help develop the use of initiative. Boredom sometimes actually allows us to think a little more deeply instead of flitting from one stimulus to the next. I think the current generation of teenagers have it a lot harder than ever before in many ways; greater social expectations/pressures which destroy confidence and self-esteem, a more tolerant society yes, but a less diverse and very dull range of sub-cultures and fashions to choose from and too much constant stimulation that helps to breed anxiety and other mental health issues.
It’s right though, it’s breakfast, dinner & tea. That’s what it was in the 60s when I was a kid and still is in our house to this day. My old man would have looked at my mam (not mum) daft if she told him not to hang about in the pub on Sunday lunch time as Sunday lunch would already be cooked and his would be in the oven. We always, and still do, have Sunday dinner in our house.
You are so right about boredom, I met a child psychologist a few years ago and she gave me some great advice when my kids were very young. Don’t give them too much stimulation, let them get bored and see if any magic happens. She was so right, might not work for all but endless fussing over kids to keep them entertained isn’t good at all.
Being a kid in the 70s was great. Freedom to play, little peer pressure and contentment in what you had, without too many aspirations of having the latest gadgets. You made do with what you had.
Doesn't hide the fact though it was possibly one of the harder decades to be a parent, with high inflation, strikes, power cuts, fuel shortages and the winter of discontent. Can't have been easy.
I’ll go 60s/70s as well. Everything was more innocent & naive and pleasures came from much simpler things in live. We were rarely indoors.
so everyone is just going to go for the decade that they grew up in?
The question was about being children/teenagers, I'm not best placed to judge and I say this while noting worsening child poverty figures, but I'd say if it wasn't for Covid, this would be a good time to be young, far from the best to be a young adult though. There were plenty of problems in the late seventies when I entered that stage of my life, but I think I had it easy compared to someone in their early twenties now.
Based on my observations of my own family across 8 decades, then I’ll stick with my answer, so yes. My reasoning is yes, primarily because of the practicality of those times, if something needed doing you had to learn how to do it. Today you have a pay society, when everything is geared to pay someone else to do it, the reliance on others is a damaging direction in my opinion.
I'm just glad I grew up in a time before social media and smart phones.
just to change the title slightly would like to have grown up in the 1950's . watching cardiff city pre semi robotic times in front of big crowds , watching and playing baseball in front of big crowds in Cardiff and of course dressed up in teddy boy gear listening to Johnny Burnette , Chuck Berry and Buddy holly coming out of your speakers . bliss !
who knows it was the best but would love to go back to that time as a teenager .................
I grew up in the '70s. It was pretty grim really. 3 day week. Energy crisis. Blackouts etc. Came of age in the '80s. Thatcher's Britain. Unemployment. Miner's strike. Falklands war. City were shit. I wouldn't change anything about my life though. I always had a great time though and I still do. Long may it continue.
I always think 'how far back can I remember' and it's usually always 1990, the World Cup. As an aside a year later I was walking around town with my Mum when Ian Rush scored in that friendly and we heard the roar from the Arms Park! I started Comp in 1992 and through to 1997 then onto Uni until 2002. If I could choose, I'd have liked to have been born maybe 5-10 years earlier, and made more of the mid to late 80s, mainly for music / culture reasons. Saying that I think being a young adult around the turn of the century meant that all the new tech was exciting. Remember getting my first mobile in 1999 (incidentally because I ended up in a bit of a pickle after a night out!), and then getting into Napster a year later and basically saved a fortune through Uni not having to buy CDs.
I was born in 59, so grew up in the sixties and seventies. I like to think that I benefitted from all the freedoms and the music that came with that era. Sure, the seventies had strikes and power cuts, but they didn't really affect me that much. And as I've grown older, I have had the benefit of all the improvements and advancements made over the last twenty or thirty years, like computers, mobile phones, etc. My youth was less affected by pollution and crime, and cyber-bullying didn't exist. There was less traffic and more manual work, but the food was simple, and (mainly) UK grown. I have become used to regularly eating food that was considered 'exotic' when I was young - and I don't mean Indian or Chinese, I mean things like peaches and strawberries all year round. Whether this situation will continue remains to be seen.
So I'd say the sixties were the best. But then I am a bit biased.