You suddenly realize you are getting old.

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Comments

  • RockyRogerRockyRoger Shipmate
    This ageing nonsense is getting out of hand when you have a appointment with one specialist for a problem with the right leg and another the same day with another specialist for a problem with the left leg. Fortunately, there was nothing in between that needed attention.

    Doh!
  • Gramps49 wrote: »
    Used a kick starter on a car. Even tried a hand crank once.

    What's a kick starter on a car? I know about hand cranks, as @Sandemaniac has old engines that start that way, but the only other ways to start a car I know about are turning a key or pushing a button.
  • cgichardcgichard Shipmate
    Puzzler wrote: »
    As a child, bath night was Saturday, in a tin bath in front of the fire. The toilet was an Elsan down the garden.

    Ditto, for the ex-game-keeper's cottage in mid-Sussex (1948-9), but a hut over the stream in the halfway-up-the mountain cottage in mid-Wales, described in the advert. in the Lady magazine as having "water-borne sanitation" (1945).
  • Baptist TrainfanBaptist Trainfan Shipmate
    edited 6:47AM
    Gramps49 wrote: »
    Used a kick starter on a car. Even tried a hand crank once.

    What's a kick starter on a car? I know about hand cranks, as @Sandemaniac has old engines that start that way, but the only other ways to start a car I know about are turning a key or pushing a button.

    I've known kick starters on motorbikes (do they still have them?) but not cars.

    Oh yes - and double-declutching to get down into first gear.
  • I don't understand all of this. Surely the chauffeur stars and drives the car, your manservant handles all the cash matters - I could never handle all that dealing with trivial cash - and when I want a bath, I just told Mrs Cassidy which bathroom I wanted a hot bath and it was sorted.

    Or was that not usual?
  • Not, perhaps, for everyone ...
  • FirenzeFirenze Shipmate, Host Emeritus
    You had baths? Luxury! Us 'ad to stand in the rain wi' a bar of carbolic.
  • A bar of carbolic? We had to rely on a weekly scrub down with Bouncing Bet
  • Gramps49Gramps49 Shipmate
    Kick starter was not the right term. I was thinking pedal starter, where you used your foot to crank the engine. In old American cars it would be on the left side, just under the emergency brake. And, instead of a pedal to set the brake, you had to pull out a handle to set it.

    Then, there was the manual choke.
  • I remember the choke on my mother's Triumph Herald.
  • HarryCHHarryCH Shipmate
    I remember using a slide rule. (I think I still have it.)
  • My first car (a second- or third-hand Metro) had a manual choke. I recall Dad having problems starting it in the winter, probably because it was over a decade since he'd had to use such a thing!
    HarryCH wrote: »
    I remember using a slide rule. (I think I still have it.)
    I remember finding a slide rule in the attic in my early teens and Dad showing me how it worked. Not sure I could still work it now.
  • I had one when I was studying engineering. I found it hard to use and kept losing decimal places.

    I was, on the other hand, a dab hand with logarithms.
  • I've just been out on a motorbike which requires a choke to start it (and no electric start, kick it only). Another one here requires you to tickle it before starting. There's fancy :) Last car I had with a choke was on an 'F' so about 88 or 89 - it would have died in my ownership I guess 20 years or so after that.
  • Tree BeeTree Bee Shipmate
    Our phone at home was a party line, so if the neighbours were using it we had to wait for an open line.

    I used to cycle down to the shop for a block of ice cream, with a rectangular polystyrene container to keep it cool on the way home, as our fridge had no ice box.

    Mum used to put a little blue bag of something in with the wash to keep it white.

    Feeling ancient now.
  • RoseofsharonRoseofsharon Shipmate
    Mr RoS had a slide rule, and thinks he still has it "somewhere".
    He probably has, as I don't remember disposing of it when we moved, but we haven't set eyes on it for nearly 10 years.
    I don't remember it being used for anything in the previous fifty.
  • HuiaHuia Shipmate
    I remember the choke on my mother's Triumph Herald.

    My first car was an orange and white Triumph Herald. It died of galloping rust.
    :cry:
  • jedijudyjedijudy Heaven Host
    When I was in second grade, so seven years old, we moved way out to the country. The phone in that house was a crank phone. I thought it was creepy and it smelled funny. We'd had a nice, modern black desk phone in the house we had just moved from.

    Not too terribly long ago, I could remember our ring pattern...three shorts and two longs?? I'm getting too old to remember all that stuff! :joy:
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