Do you remember...?

2

Comments

  • Jimm_Alumni
    Jimm_Alumni Scope alumni Posts: 5,713 Championing
    edited November 2023
    Oooh, my parents first car was a Vauxhall nova. It was white with a blue stripe all around the middle.

    One of my earliest memories in that thing is taking the ferry from Stranraer to Northern Ireland to visit family in the Republic. We got lost in Belfast and my mum was saying to my dad he should pull over and ask for directions, to which my dad replied "Absolutely not, this is an English marked car and this is a catholic area. I ain't risking it." To clarify, we were catholic ourselves, but the car did indeed have English numberplates.

    This was before the Good Friday Peace.
  • Bettahm
    Bettahm Online Community Member Posts: 1,441 Championing
    Remember those, Vauxhall Novas.  :smile:
    (Family on my dads side were Irish catholic so know what you mean)
    Beautiful country, proud of my roots there.
  • Sandy_123
    Sandy_123 Scope Member Posts: 63,123 Championing
    Remember the power cuts often and frozen pipes with icicles hanging from the window 
  • Bettahm
    Bettahm Online Community Member Posts: 1,441 Championing
    Sandy_123 said:
    Remember the power cuts often and frozen pipes with icicles hanging from the window 
    In the 70s
    Remember I found it quite exciting as a kid!
  • Steve_in_The_City
    Steve_in_The_City Scope Member Posts: 810 Trailblazing
    Someone mentioned Rag & Bone men. In London parlance they are known as totters, and in my street there were two totter families, and I was great friends with them and they were lovely and kind people.
  • Jimm_Alumni
    Jimm_Alumni Scope alumni Posts: 5,713 Championing
    I had always wondered where the term comes from. In a video game I play, Old School Runescape, there's an Old Man who has a quest called "Rag and Bone man". 
  • Strawberry1
    Strawberry1 Online Community Member, Scope Member Posts: 7,067 Championing
    Anyone remember the National Health spectacles 👓. 
  • Albus_Scope
    Albus_Scope Posts: 10,612 Scope Online Community Coordinator
    I remember the NHS specs being very fashionable back when Britpop was a thing!
  • Strawberry1
    Strawberry1 Online Community Member, Scope Member Posts: 7,067 Championing
    Lucozade in a glass bottle with orange crispy see through paper of sorts .
  • Strawberry1
    Strawberry1 Online Community Member, Scope Member Posts: 7,067 Championing
    Not as many cars on the road .
  • Strawberry1
    Strawberry1 Online Community Member, Scope Member Posts: 7,067 Championing
    The really awful smell of diesel from the local buses .
  • Strawberry1
    Strawberry1 Online Community Member, Scope Member Posts: 7,067 Championing
    All the shops you needed in the community rather than going further afield.  
  • Strawberry1
    Strawberry1 Online Community Member, Scope Member Posts: 7,067 Championing
    School closing when it snowed because the boiler broke .
  • Strawberry1
    Strawberry1 Online Community Member, Scope Member Posts: 7,067 Championing
    Outside toilets in junior school. 
  • Strawberry1
    Strawberry1 Online Community Member, Scope Member Posts: 7,067 Championing
    Going home for dinner rather than stay in school. 
  • Steve_in_The_City
    Steve_in_The_City Scope Member Posts: 810 Trailblazing
    I wonder if anyone can remember the Samfer man in Norfolk, going around poor areas on his horse and cart and yelling "san-fer"? It was the food of the poor and you would take a bucket out and get it half-filled with samphire. Now samphire is pretty much a luxury food that came in to fashion about 7 years ago. But I wonder if the samphire man still exists and does the rounds in South Lynn on his horse and cart, and wonder also if it is still a cheap food?
  • Steve_in_The_City
    Steve_in_The_City Scope Member Posts: 810 Trailblazing
    @vikingqueen I do think the days were simpler and happier then back in the big freeze of '63.  Yet it was a transitional period where suddenly peoples attitudes were challenged. The Beatles came along, psychedelia was the norm, and in post war Britain people could suddenly have fun. Diet improved and we started to smile at each other a lot more. Sadly, in '63, lots of people still didn't have a fridge, I lived in an absolute slum without a bathroom or hot water, and we still had gas lighting. But I was a happy little boy (except at home) and as we got in to the 1970's everything improved.  
  • Bettahm
    Bettahm Online Community Member Posts: 1,441 Championing
    Steve_in_The_City said:
    I wonder if anyone can remember the Samfer man in Norfolk, going around poor areas on his horse and cart and yelling "san-fer"? It was the food of the poor and you would take a bucket out and get it half-filled with samphire. Now samphire is pretty much a luxury food that came in to fashion about 7 years ago. But I wonder if the samphire man still exists and does the rounds in South Lynn on his horse and cart, and wonder also if it is still a cheap food?
    Dont remember this but back in the 90s used to go out on the Wash marshes and fill carrier bags with samphire. Loved it, had a taste all of it's own. My aunt would cook it, we liked it with bangers and mash. She also used to pickle it.
  • Albus_Scope
    Albus_Scope Posts: 10,612 Scope Online Community Coordinator
    Ah I remember going samphire picking!  Mum always used to warn us not to eat too much of it though. 

    Remember snap bracelets?  
  • Steve_in_The_City
    Steve_in_The_City Scope Member Posts: 810 Trailblazing
    When I moved from London to Norfolk probably in the late 1960's I didn't fare too well because rural living kind of mystifys me! My first day in Norfolk was an absolute nightmare, and then it went downhill all the way from there! I just can't cope with fields and wild animals like cows! One day when I was 17 I woke up in a field in Lancashire after being somewhere where I shouldn't have been and there were a bevvy of cows all looking down at me! Obviously I escaped and they didn't eat me! But in Norfolk I had pigs to contend with, as well. Anyway, to get back on the thread...

    One place I really liked in Norfolk was a village (hamlet?) called Wolferton. It was by the late Queen's estate at Sandringham. I would cycle along a road that was laced either side with strawberry fields and there were pheasants galore. At the end of the road was a wheat field with a public footpath, and this is where the san-fer man would leave his horse and cart. At the other side of the wheat field there was a little river, probably a tributary  to the Great River Ouse that I loved to swim in, and it opened out on to The Wash. It was very marshy and it was here in peacefulness and seclusion that the sam-fer man collected the Samphire. I did not know you could pick it yourself. I got to know him a tiny little bit. He would then go around South (Kings) Lynn which in those days was an impoverished neighbourhood on his horse and cart yelling "San-Fer" and we would go out and buy it by the bucket. Now it is quite expensive and a luxury,

Categories