Talk about the 1960s

[mynameisben]

If you can remember the 60's, man, then you just weren't There.

 

[oggbashan]

If you can remember the 60's, man, then you just weren't There.

I was there but my recreational drug of choice was draught bitter...

 

[AllardChardon]

Oh, I was there, took Owsley's STP acid in 1966 on my first trip, followed by too many times to count. I still smoke pot daily, at almost 60 years of age, and I can remember plenty. The year it happened is kinda fuzzy, but the memory is permanently seared into my brain. I still get acid flashbacks when I see Eric Clapton or Jethro Tull live. It is the only drug that changed the way you perceived everything, often for the better. I must say, even the "bum trips" were educational. And all four of my grown children were born 'normal', whatever that means.

 

[matriarch]

I've been asked to talk to a class of 10-year-olds about what it was like living in the 1960s.

What can I tell them?

What should I tell them?

What can't I tell them?

What shouldn't I tell them?

Any advice?

PS. I can talk about the pop scene in London in the mid-1960s, the Cuban Missile Crisis when my role as a new Ministry of Defence recruit was to stay OUT of the bunker and tell my bosses when the bomb had dropped...

I was a teenager at high school in the first half of the 60's. I would focus on the difference in lives of children/teenagers then and now. No mobile phones, no ipods, no computers, no videos, only 4 tv channels. We amused ourselves by....guess what....playing together outside! Christmas and birthday presents consisted of books, jigsaws, board games, oh and record vouchers to buy 45rpm singles (you could get 3 for a £1 in Woolworths!), or an album. My first album was The Beatles, Please please me. I played them on my own record player which came in what resembled a small suitcase, and could only play one record at a time. As for recording......the only option was a reel to reel tape recorder, and I begged and begged my parents for one.

Clothes, food (what fast food? There was always fish and chips, but Chinese restaurants were only just taking off out of the big cities.

Any use??

 

[oggbashan]

Thank you, Matriarch.

Computers? I was working with an IBM 1401 mainframe in 1963. With its ancilliaries it took up a large room. Now my watch has more processing power.

TV? My aunt had a Baird televisor before the war. When TV broadcasts started again after the war she bought a new TV with a six inch screen. We watched the Festival of Britain on that. By the Coronation in 1953 she had upgraded to a ten inch screen. I remember the excitement when she bought a box to plug into the aerial socket so that she could watch ITV as well - but all that was 1950s.

In 1960 I was travelling to Australia in a 1st Class cabin on a Dutch liner. I returned in 1962, 1st Class P&O. It would have taken 3 days by air, but 4.5 weeks by sea was far more civilised.

I started work in 1962. By 1969 I had accumulated, and lost, three fiancées.

Clothes? In 1962 I had some winklepicker shoes handmade for me when I was in Communist Yugoslavia. They had to be handmade because no one produced winklepickers in UK size 13. In 1964 I bought my first pair of black drainpipe jeans. You had to put them on before climbing into a bath to soak them to fit. Cleaning the bath afterwards was possible if awkward but the dye on my legs took a week or so to wear off. My shape, even then, just didn't fit with winklepicker shoes and drainpipe jeans even if I preferred them to my office uniform of discreet pinstripe suiting.

 

[AllardChardon]

Thanks for the trip down Memory row, British-style, of course. I love hearing about the 60s in England, the birthplace of the Fab Four and so many other great bands, collectively called, "The British Invasion".

 

[voluptuary_manque]

I was definitely there then but never felt that my mind needed altering, thank-you very much. And marijuana just put me to sleep. Kind of sad, I suppose, to have lived through the entire Woodstock decade without actually 'experiencing' much of it. Drugs of choice? European coffee, German beer and California red wine. Even my vices were so moderate they bordered on dull.