The olden days

It would appear that I am turning into my grandmother. You know what it was like when you were a kid. The older members of your family constantly reminiscing about what it was like when they were children and how good it was then. How cheap things were and us kids looking at them in wonder at how old fashioned it all sounded.

Well, I suddenly realised recently that the same thing is happening to me now. For example:

* in primary school my pocket money was 2 shillings which Dad gave me every Saturday morning. Oh boy you could buy a lot with that in those days. A lot of the time I would go to the Saturday matinee at the local theatre where tickets were 1 shilling and 3 pence and I would spend the other 9 pence on a huge bag of mixed lollies from the milk bar across the road. At Mrs Lemmon's general store you could buy 3 pence worth of broken biscuits and get a big bag full. Biscuits came in large tins then and you bought them by weight.

* Being from a family that was not actually flush with funds, my brother and I used to save Dad's daily newspapers until we had enough to roll into a big bundle then we would take them to Pat Roots butcher shop where Mr Roots would buy them from us for 6 pence a pound. He would use them to wrap his meat parcels, the first recycling I can remember. Often we would take the money in the form of sliced devon to eat on the way home.

*The Beatles were all the rage when I was in primary school and a couple of the boys at school had plastic Beatle wigs they would wear to school.

* I started high school they year Australia changed over from pounds, shillings and pence to dollars and cents. I felt ripped off as 6 pence was the same as 5 cents but when you translated that into lollies, you got less. Not fair!

* My first ever brand new "off the showroom floor" car was a red Datsun 120Y. I bought it in 1974 when I was a student nurse and I have no idea how much I paid for it because I was only interested in the monthly payment figure and whether I would get a good trade-in for the crappy old Morris 1100 that I was driving at the time. The payments worked out to be $95 a month and on my student nurse salary, I could manage that.

This was not my first car, oh no, my first car was a 1963 blue Ford Falcon that my Dad bought for $80. It has a hole in the automatic transmission which he skillfully repaired using aluminium foil, araldite and some other secret substance which actually worked because I drove that baby around for 18 months with no problems.

Then I traded the Falcon in on a Morris 1100 which turned out to be a piece of crap. I didn't even complete the first trip I did from the place of purchase (Penrith) back to the hospital. It stalled in Maroubra and when the NRMA bloke arrived, he told me the alternator had failed. Then every time it even looked like it might rain the bloody thing would not start or if it was actually going, it would conk out after 3 drops of rain. The final straw was when I was on my way to visit my grandfather for my 4 day break, who lived on the central coast. I had just crossed the Hawkesbury River on the new F3 freeway and was chugging up the hill when it started to rain and (surprise, surprise - not) the car stopped. No way could I start it again and by now the rain was falling heavily.

We are talking about 1974 here folks and of course, no mobile phones so I had to try to flag someone down to help me. It was starting to get dark by then and it was only after at least 30 minutes of waving frantically at the traffic whilst getting soaked that some kind person finally stopped. They drove to the nearest phone and called the NRMA for me. In those days I discovered that the NRMA had no jurisdiction on the F3 freeway. The Freeway people had their own road service which eventually turned up and I could hardly believe what they told me. They would tow my car off the F3 and onto the pacific Highway which would then enable the NRMA to come to service the car. Why they couldn't look at the car themselves was beyond me.

Anyway, to cut a long story short, after a couple of hours wait, the NRMA managed to start the car again and I finally arrived at my Grandfathers place after 11pm. It was on the return trip 4 days later that I drove into the Datsun dealer in Maroubra and told the salesman "I want the red one in the front window".

Well, back to 2010 and the other day I was sitting patiently at a red light in Armidale when I saw a Datsun 120Y go past the other way and I thought "Boy, I bought one of those new" and that started me thinking. I wonder how much you can get one for today? A couple of hundred bucks probably. Funny how things turn out.