First thing’s first. I am not big into observational humour, and although I use it here, it ain’t my thing. Capiche? Secondly, I don’t like to reminisce about how wonderful things were in ‘my day.’ My old man is convinced that the finest time in civilisation coincidentally coincided with the prime of his life. No-one had any money, and an angry man from Germany had just committed genocide, but you could leave your door open and no-one stabbed grannies because they had sniffed a Pritt-Stick. And there were certainly none of “them lot.”
However, from a recent comment on my blog: Blog 2: Blog Harder I realised that there is something that has changed today, and for the worse. What is that? The answer is: the people who knock on my door. Back in the eighties, there were a plethora of ladies and gentlemen knocking on our doors for our time, money and custom. Here are a few I can remember.
The Video-man: What a man! He came armed to the teeth with Betamax and VHS videos and you would give him a few quid and he’d come and pick them up again, the very next week! You didn’t have to go to Blockbuster, pay the best part of a tenner and have to speak to some spotty little twat behind the counter, to rent a film for three hours. The video-man cared. Your business mattered, and he knew what you wanted, and also what your Dad wanted. Ey? Ey? You know what I’m talking about! Ey?
The Milkman: Yeah, I know they are still going, but they are a dying race (not literally). I remember our first milkman. He had something wrong with his lips and he spoke funny, but it didn’t matter that you couldn’t understand what the fuck he was saying. You knew what he was there for: To deliver milk.
The Insurance-man: What a weird concept, thinking about it now. We used to have a guy from the Prudential come round and you’d pay him money, every fortnight, for various insurance schemes. You probably didn’t get the best rate, but you didn’t have to go trawling through websites. How I hate it so.
Jehova Witnesses: They gave up, didn’t they? I haven’t seen one in years. There were definitely more back in Great Yarmouth than there are in Loughborough. Not sure if that is statistically true, but it feels like it. I used to love ‘em. They really used to put up a good fight. Not physically, well, it depended on how many beers the old man had sunk, after work.
The Prison-Man: Do these exist any more? Ex-cons going straight and selling wares. I remember the fear in my mother’s voice telling some of the hardest men in the country that she didn’t want to buy an ironing cover, or seven-hundred pegs.
I could go on and on, and I usually do, but it was always an experience opening the door. It was a magnificent lottery that you just don’t get these days.
What do you get now? A firework in the face at Halloween and … fucking N-Power!
Fucking N-Power.
Jacko
Maybe I’m too young to rememebr most of these, the only ones i remember are the peg sellers, though i always had the impression these were gypsy folk.
Also, maybe due to the fact we lived in a vicarage, we used to get a lot of homeless gents knocking on the door asking for food etc. I once remember us giving one of these gents a nice mug of cup-a-soup, then, when going out later, my brother jumping around in what he thought was a puddle on the doorstep from the rain only to be told ‘stop jumping in that wee’
Jackman that was uncanny, just settled down to read the latest blog, and then the doorbell went. It was the Green Party (not all of them) wanting to know if I had the issues with the local area. Asked if he could get the bin men to be a bit quieter at 7.30 on a Wednesday morning. Nothing doing.
We still get Jehovah’s Witnesses round this way. Still haven’t forgiven them for disturbing my breakfast one Saturday morning in 1994, byt the time I’d got rid of them my cornflakes had gone soggy