We are currently halfway through the Winter Holidays here in Australia and it's been freezing cold, wet and fine... sounds confusing but it's true. We've had freezing cold days, wet days and nice fine days but windy too. So, a lot of the time has been spent inside the home with our families or out in the glorious Aussie weather with them.
I love this weather; however when it does turn against us, it does get a little wet and miserable, I often remember when I was young what would happen when the weather turned against us during out holidays. I was a reader; so I read a lot whenever the weather got cold or wet. I've also noticed that when I was younger, there was a lot more we could do than sit in front of a computer and surf the internet or put on a dvd (or in our case, a video) and watch an afternoon of movies with popcorn done up on the stove.
Yep, a lot has changed over the years from when I was young.
My brother and I spent more time at our Grandparents' house during our school holidays; and believe me, there was a lot of stuff to do there! We had the piano to play (with clean hands - of course!), pool/billiards under the house on the quarter-size table under the house, the library of books to peruse in the side verandah and we could help Grandma cook up a storm in the kitchen. Or we could kill ourselves on the home made go-kart that Grandpa had in the back shed; which had no brakes, but that was okay.
We'd go tearing down the front footpath without a care if anyone was coming out of their driveways, without a helmet on, without brakes and ended up three houses down in somebody's front yard; or up against a bush on the footpath. This was fun and this was entertainment! Forget how dangerous this kind of thing was, however. We didn't think of that; because a few years later on, both my older brother and I were avid skateboarders and we stacked it numerous times - all without a helmet or pads to be seen on us.
Yep, entertainment in the 1980's was certainly very different; not to say that we didn't have computers back then, just that the computer age was just starting to take off that's all. It was still finding its feet and still a little on the bulky side to be able to carry it anywhere where you didn't look weird with a laptop on a desk. Laptops were around, but they were large and bulky and hard to work on. They were slow and the battery didn't last very long; and then there was the memory in them! They weren't the best compared to the ones we have today which look like something that came from a outa space in comparison.
And then, you had the cassette tapes, vinyls, walkmans and ghetto blasters. Cassette tapes were our cd's of the day and if you owned some, you were privelaged and had some money; same with owning a walkman (and just by coincidence, this very brand put out by Sony has just turned 30 this year on July 1st). Ghetto Blasters were large'n'loud radios that some people carried around. They were mainly used to set a beat for dancing in the streets - breakdancing - and it was often done in crowds with a large piece of cardboard in the centre where all the dancing was done. This was fun and entertaining. It's not done very much anymore as it's extremely retro. What I loved to own - and still do - is vinyls. Yep, I just can't walk away from them. They are something which are still around in this century and seem to be returning trend; however they're not a trend, they've always been there - gotten better with age.
Now, entertainment is a lot different; it's more computerised and not as close to home as it used to be. There's YouTube and the internet that's available absolutely everywhere (and not just to a few people to communicate like it was the first time it was used in the 1960's). The dvds are better quality than VCR tapes and they don't chew up; instead, they are likely to get scratched and you're likely to lose a few chapters of a movie if you're not careful. We have music that we can take with us on a pocket-sized unit called an iPod and it hold our entire collection of cds on its memory as well as have a radio on board too.
And if that's not enough, the way we communicate by telephone has completely changed around... but that's another blog for another time.
No comments:
Post a Comment