OVER 55? Managed to convince yourself that you were part of the Greatest Generation ever to battle through adversity to succeed? Roy Hobbs remembers:
Wetherspoons never closed, not even during the Blitz
In World War Two, which I remember so vividly it’s like I was there despite my 1955 birthdate, we all made great sacrifices while doing whatever we wanted, all the time. My grandad ate calamari and garlic pizza bread at his local Spoons every day of the Blitz. That’s the British way.
O-levels were ten times harder than GCSEs
My nephew Bailey left school with ten GCSEs and three A-Levels when I didn’t get any, and failed my eleven-plus. The only possible explanation is that education in this country is now a piece of piss. It all went wrong when they stopped teachers viciously beating you.
We were a better country without all this health and safety
Yes, dozens of people were regularly killed in industrial accidents, but we just got on with things. Regular bouts of food poisoning sorted the wheat from the chaff.
Everyone sang on public transport
There wasn’t any of this staring at phones on the bus. Instead every passenger would embark and spend the entire journey singing along to an old standard about Hitler’s monorchidism, or a merry ditty about ration-book shortages. We’d only stop to smoke.
You could walk into a high-paying job
Sick of being a lathe operator? Walk out, go over to Lloyd’s of London and get hired as an insurance broker that same morning. There were so many jobs that anyone could do whatever they wanted and still have ten and six in their weekly wage packet. Which ws a fortune.
We were the most powerful country in the world until we joined the Common Market
Before we were strong-armed into joining the EEC by a fraudulent ‘referendum’ result, Britain was the most powerful and influential country in the world. It wasn’t just our military and industrial might that made us great, but also our culture — our cutting-edge brutalist architecture and Fanny Craddock’s cuisine were the envy of every nation.
