Some kids jumping out of windows onto mattresses for fun (England, 1980s)
Some kids jumping out of windows onto mattresses for fun (England, 1980s)
I miss being indestructible.
I think I just put my back out seeing that jpeg
I feel like I left it all on the field. I wasn't even a dare devil, but I broke more than a few bones. Ribs, wrist, ankle, several fingers. Tearing ACLs is where I drew the line. Some stuff doesn't heal.
It's still good to have a sense of what is possible if necessary.
No parents. No Internet. Very limited home entertainment. Full boredom.
Growing up Gen-X was like a perpetual episode of Jackass starring The Goonies.
libraries, arcades, malls, bowling alleys, pool halls, swimming pools, console game systems, video rental stores, bikes, parks, dungeons and dragons. There was a bit of things to occupy time.
Elder millennial, youngest sibling here:
A gen x older brother was a master class in being a crash test dummy
Thatcher was PM, if you were a kid then you’d be throwing yourself off a building too.
You say that as if it's got any better.
Now we've got Thatcher wearing a tie and running the labour party...
For a second time…
We jumped off buoys and navigation markers as a kid.
Sure it was water below but under the water … the supports and ladders of the buoys, mangled barnacle mess.
And the ospreys.
Goddamn did an angry osprey make jumping off the buoy that much more exciting, a little bit of “and maybe we’ll get attacked by a raptor” excitement….
Comrade here jumping into an ocean full of sharks and is worried about being attacked by birds...
I too was a bay child. We'd use the barnacle covered chains holding the buoys in their place to pull ourselves down to the bottom for whatever reason
I have a scar on my left leg from where I slipped on the ladder abd sliced my calf open on barnacles.
It bled till it didn’t. And I survived.
I’m pretty sure I’d die of some terrible infection if it had happened today.
This is what happens when you cancel Doctor Who, BBC.
Bless single payer healthcare.
What’s “single payer healthcare”?
It's a form of socialised healthcare where the government negotiates the prices with medical companies. The government of an entire country negotiating prices carries way more bargaining power than individuals so it means the prices are much lower. Combine that with taxes paying for healthcare and you have a nice healthcare system
Edit: in some cases it's just one guy paying, in this case it's Alan: https://www.thebeaverton.com/2017/08/poll-canadians-love-single-payer-healthcare-except-alan-single-payer/
Well shit, 80s kid here and we kinda did this. We had a pile of old mattresses and cushions. The mattresses were the super cheap and crappy kind with no springs so were actually really good for landing on. The ground floor of our house was maybe 6ft higher than the back garden and we had a kinda small raised patio at the back door with steps down into the garden. We piled up the mattresses on the lawn, beyond the flower bed. And threw ourselves off the wall at the edge of the patio down onto the mattresses. Lots of fun.
My siblings and I used those same mattresses to slide down our stairs, crashing into them at the bottom. That was fun too.
I also remember finding these long smooth metal sheets somewhere and using them to make a slide down our garden steps. Then using a sledge sliding down it and crashing into the mattresses.
I miss those days.
That would be a hard pass for me.
slightly (or absolutely) unrelated story, but I remember we built cross tracks in the forest for ourselves and our crappy bikes (I'm talking early-mid 80s on the other side of the Iron Courtain; the best bike I had was a rusty Csepel BMX, then my father's Sputnik race bike). once we decided fuck it why don't we do the same in our own street (a mud/gravel street at that time), and took shovels and stuff and destroyed the street. when the first adult residents got home, they were very pissed for some reason and commandeered us to restore the street. I remember the feeling of betrayal / injustice to this day! :-D
We used to jump off the roof into a snowbank. Then when the snow got deep enough we would just sled off the roof onto the snowbank.
Comment from an old reddit post:
Ashfield Valley estate in Rochdale. It was completed in 1969 and while it was initially popular, like many housing estates at the time, it quickly declined and by the 1980s was a haven for drug users, glue sniffers and squatters as well as being home to a large number of families, OAP's and single people. In January 1987, frozen water pipes cracked, flooding 15 of the 26 blocks. Many of the tenants were evacuated, with some having to sleep in a local church. 23 blocks were demolished in 1992.
ah, the British Space Program of the eighties!...
No wonder they didn't get to the moon, using mattresses instead of trampolines.
This is why video games are important.
What's the spring situation like here? Did mattresses not have them back then? Have they been removed?
My mattresses were just stuffing. The spring board under it had the springs. Do you have springs in your mattress now. I went memory foam and air combo decades ago so im not sure what a typical one has now.
Personally mine (which I got from a local mattress manufacturer) has springs in it and sits on a "box spring" which as far as I can tell is just a platform for the mattress to sit upon and contains no actual springs
And then after playing head inside and watch ma’s Corrie and make her a proper cuppa I remember these days I do
I did this in the 70s!!!!!!! good old days :)
Holy shit!!! We did that too! And we did it inside the building too.
I did that until i knocked a kidney stone loose at 14
Good, clean fun.
We used to do this off roofs into the snow as a kid.