General Chat

I can actually arrange duplicates of anyone

I'm the Clone Arranger :0))

And with my passion for wheelie bins my theme tune sounds like:

To De Dump, to de dump, to de dump dump dump !!

Allan

CC with my humour I would be handing out non-cents

Allan

Or perhaps Edward is now a ghost writer for me? :0))

Allan

lol CC and now I must go.

As always, it is a joy chatting with you :0))

Allan

Hi Perth here too

Ahhh CC Yes, the good old days. What a joke. My sis in Law in Canada is disgusted that we live in what she terms “third world conditions” because we don’t have running water from a town supply _ only a 2500 litre rainwater tank for drinking water and a 5000 gallon tank which is usually filled with rainwater but if it runs out we fill it with running creek water (and I’ve got to say this water is sweeter tasting and cleaner looking than the town supply 5 klms down the road); we don’t have a truck to come and pick up our garbage which means we really concentrate on recycling because we take our garbage to the tip once a week ourselves (and a jolly old time is had by OH going through all the farm bits that have been taken to the tip and he can rebuild to use here – keeps him out of the pub!!): The other thing she’s taken with is that we have to drive 3 klms approx of dirt road – mind you for most of the year it doesn’t have any more bumps in it than the bitumen road to town has. The plus side is that we don’t have any passing traffic. The dirt road stops at the first corner post to my 14 acres (and no, I’m not rich!! Just live out of town.) Our neighbours are not within yelling distance and we can only see where their houses are at night when they have their lights on. And it’s a green oasis when everyone elses paddocks are brown. And she lives in Lethbridge in Canada and says it’s better there because when the winter comes they just turn on the heat and close the drapes. Ah well, to each his own.

My grandmother, whom I lived with until I was 11, was bought a washing machine similar to the one you describe in about 1950. It was delivered on a pallet to the laundry where it sat, unused, until her death in 1960. She refused to use anything that used water and electricity at the same time. Said it was too dangerous – you’d get electric shock and die. God love her. But then, when my kids were around 6, 5, 3, and 2 I had a copper boiler on bricks outside the back door of the house that we used to build a wood fire under to boil the clothes up every Monday. You had to watch out that there wasn’t a snake burrowed up in the fire pit because once you lit the fire they’d come out lickety split. Ahhh yea, the good old days. Then there was the wood fired stove in the kitchen to cook on which had a copper tank wrapped around it and that’s where you heated the water for baths and then bucketed it into the bathroom. Oh yea, we were fancy. We actually had a bathroom, not just a tub out in the laundry.

The other thing my grandma had was an ice chest. The iceman used to come around in a horse and dray once a week and deliver blocks of ice for the chest. Very sophisticated, that.

Didn’t have a TV at all until 1957 and I remember Mum putting a fence around it using a baby’s playpen so that the little ones couldn’t get to the dials and fiddle with them. It used to drive Mum nuts to turn on the TV and find the brightness, contrast, etc. keys had been fiddled with by the babies. They thought it was great fun.

Radio in our house was usually the Billy Graham Evangelist Hour on a Sunday night: I was allowed to listen to The Air Adventures of Biggles and Superman during the week: grandma used to listen to some serial type thing that I think was called Blue Hills and my uncle, much to grandma’s disgust, would listen to the horse races on Saturday afternoons.

Hey hey hey NZ didn't even have Television till 1960.

It took years for my mother to buy an agitator washing machine - I think we got a TV first. She would boil up the copper every Monday and that was her whole days activity doing the washing. In those days it was called a washhouse and you had to go outside to get to it.

The fridge arrived when I was eight - meat was kept in the safe - if it went a bit off my dad would soak it in vinegar and wash and dry it and we would eat it. My kids couldn't believe it when I told them that.

Is Allan real - I thought he was just an apparition that appeared from time to time to amuse us?

CC - I managed to hack into another company when I was working - I did it twice - my desktop screen wasn't mine anymore it was theirs. Our IT person couldn't believe it.
My Managing Director rang me once (he was out for the day) and asked me to go to his desktop and open a particular folder. I went on his computer and I could not find the folder. He said to me you are looking on my green desktop - I said no your desktop is blue - duh he meant the top of his desk - shows how one gets caught up in computer speak.


Sue - I like the smell of baking and cooking except when I do fish - it seems to permeate the air and when one arises the next morning there is still a whiff in the air. We are having fish tonight - have made a chowder. So if there is a strange smell it has wafted through the threads.

Persey xx

I love catching up on posts that have been put on at various times.

Persey - I'm making honey mustard chicken for tea. Always smells nice. Chowder sounds wonderful.

Thank you for your kind words CC - but we all do acts of kindness without realising what we do. Just smiling at a passing stranger can lift that person if they are feeling down.

It's been sunny but d**n cold here but I've just spoken to my son in Hobart and it's even colder there. Of course Pam is probably basking in the sun - a balmy 27degs no doubt:-))

Sue xx

Hello

How is everyone??

I am taking five from study. Only four weeks to go and I have decided that I will take a break for 6 months and go back in the New Year. Balancing has been quite hard especially this last few weeks and we are in the process of moving house also !!

Hope all is well with everyone, I will try to read back posts but it has been awhile since my last post...

Keep Smiling

xx

Yes, SueMaid I agree. It is fun being able to pop in and pop out as we do here. I love catching up with the posts, too. Almost like going to the post box and finding a number of letters, isn't it?

CC: I think I must be feeling my age. When you said rake into the shrubbery I immediately thought of the one with a handle. Oh dear, this will never do. I"ll just have to take my brain out for a good fresh air walk or something.

:Yes, it was another lovely day today. Currently 9pm here and I"m rugged up a bit with a sweater on but I'll be off to bed shortly. We got down to 10c/50f last night so that's starting to get seriously cold here. Must get the doona out of storage ready for the winter months of July and August.

OH has got the tractor stuck/bogged in the creek. Couldn't get it out before dark so it's stayed there until morning. Have to get our friend up the road with the big 4WD truck and see if he can pull him out. Failing that, another friend even further up the road has a big 4WD tractor that should do the trick. There goes my last bottle of fine red wine. To pay the guy with the big tractor. The big 4WD truck is only a few beers. Love this barter system we use up here.

Cheers till next time,
Pam. xx

CC .....Some of the radio programmes you mentioned filled me with nostalgia, as I too listened to most of them. Though I am surprised there was no mention of Radio Luxemberg. I spent hours and hours listening to that, and to AFN -American Forces Network. I liked the music they played.
The signature tune of "Housewives Choice" filled me with dread. I frequently had to go shopping for my mother bedore school. That tune went out at ten past nine. I was due at school at 9 am, so if if I got back in with the shopping and that music was on the wireless, then I knew I was late again, especially as there was a 15 minute run to school.

I remember the Ice Man coming round the streets, selling ice off the horse drawn cart, as did the milkman, baker, coalman, and also the Rag and Bone man, who would give a few pennies for a bag of old clothes. We wore our old clothes 'till they fell apart, so he never had anything from our house.

I also remember the lamp lighter, who appeared in the street at dusk to light the gas lamps with a long pole, then again at dawn to extinguish them. Some men paid him to knock them up early in the morning for work.

My earliest memory was sleeping on a matress in the dining room of my grandparents house with my mother, grandmother, and two aunts during the war. When the air raid siren went, we would all dive through the french windows and into the air raid shelter in the garden. The shelter was buried in the ground, and was lit only by a candle and an oil lamp. It was damp, cold and stank of candle grease and the oil lamp. My mother and co would sing loudly on the top of their voices to drown out the noise of the bombs dropping around us, and the boom of the anti-aircraft guns in the nearby park.
My grandfather never joined us down there, as he apparently maintained it had nothing to do with him. Even the night the house was straffed by machine gunfire from a German fighter leaving bullet holes down the wall over the headboard of his bed never moved him. Years later I helped him dig the bullets out of the wall, he kept them as souvenirs.

Our house had an outside toilet on the back of the house. There had been a "lean-to" built across the back, so you went through the lean-to and into the toilet - a nasty scary dark place, full of spiders.
One Sunday morning when I was small, my mother left me sitting on the toilet while she went back indoors. Suddenly a VII rocket, a doodlebug, took out the house next door but one, killing the elderly couple that lived there. My mother couldn't immediately get out of the house because of the blast damage. When she did, she discovered the lean-to, and the toilet had completely disappeared off the back of the house, and me with it. I was eventually found 30 feet into the garden, burried beneath a pile of rubble, and incredibly still sitting on the pan. Being only small the explosion had wedged me down into the toilet, and someone had to smash it with a hammer to free me.
There was no serious damage, just covered in cuts and bruises, but I apparently didn't speak a word, or make a sound for six weeks after that event.

It wasn't all bad. Being the only child in a row of terrace houses throughout the war, and in the austere times after, I was spoilt by the neighbours who always shared their sweet ration with me. One old couple saved stale crusts of bread in a jar especially for me when I visited.

We only had one coal fire in that house. My mother never had enough money to buy sufficient coal in the winter, so it was my job to follow the coal cart at a discreet distance as it made its way round the streets. I carried a sack, and would pick up any pieces of coal that fell from the coal sacks as they were carried into peoples back yards. That way we had many a good fire on a winters night.

As Pam said - The Good Old Days - I don't think so.

Tec.

Hi everyone,
Tec, your story is very interesting.
Honey mustard chicken sounds nuce Sue. It's been raining here today. I'm eagerly looking forward to the startof the World Cup!

Hello Pat,

Good to see you, hope you are well. I am also looking forward to some of the matches.
Tec.

Hello everyone - how interesting everyone's posts are. Wedged in a toilet Tec:-)))))

One of my earliest memories after arriving in Australia is falling asleep during the Top 10 hits on Sunday night radio. I waited for the Banana Boat Song as I loved it. Now my grandchildren love it. I remember one night I think I may have been ill or couldn't sleep and my dad sang Scarlet Ribbons to me.

Hi Pat - I can't wait until the World Cup either. I have a chart all ready to fill in. The only thing for us Aussies is the time difference. The Aussie and England games are at 4:30am and midnight:-( I'll still be watchng them live.

Sue xx

Good morning to Richard, Sue, Janet, Persey and Pam

Those last two names would make a good name for a theatre act :0))

Good evening to CC, Pat and Tec

~~~~~~~~~~ to Diane.

All these reminisences of early days! When I was a lot younger we were fortunate to have inside plumbing and running water: Mainly down the walls.

The rising damp was so bad that my father started collecting animals!

However, to be serious, my OH when I met her in 1967 was living in one of the old terraced houses jerrybuilt for the millworkers. There was one toilet for every ten houses and they were the old tippler closets (waste water closets).

The flushing mechanism was activated by waste sink water filling a box which then 'tippled' over depositing the toilet contents into the sewer. The kids used to drop half bricks down the toilets to try to disable the balance mechanism often with great success and horrible consequences.

I spent the first year after qualifying doing nothing but housing inspections of such properties as part of a major slum clearance programme.

Allan

Hello Allan - where did everyone go? Was it something we said:-))

Sue xx

And nobody has mentione 'Voice of America' or 'Radio Moscow' :o))

Allan

CC I had a short- wave radio so I couldd pick up some exotic radio sations: once the bl**dy thing warmed up!

With slum clearance there was a set criteria as to what rendered a house unfit so the houses had to be inspected and reports prepared.

Back to back houses by there very nature were legally defined as being unfit for habitation. No inspection required.

The only thing wrong with the slum clearance programme was that some councils also used it as an excuse for demolising properties which had to go for major roadworks.

The Reason? If a property was acquired for roadworks full market vaue had to be paid to the owner. If declared unfit, no compensation payable!

CC I remember the prefabs!

Allan

Ah Quatermass: it scared the living daylights out of me :o((

Allan

Such interesting reminiscences.

CC - I have a Best Of CD with Scarlet Ribbons on it. It's the most beautiful song. Dad had a nice voice and one of my last memories of dad was him singing. He loved music and OH put together a CD of all his favourites. When he was sunk low in his own world it would soothe him.

Sue xx