I remember Monty Python
I remember Monty Python
"So if you meet me, have some sympathy, have some courtesy, have some taste ..."
I had an Aunty Eunice… She was a free spirit in a time when free spirits were very much frowned upon and considered unsettling influences and possibly ‘dangerous’… We loved Aunty Eunice.
She was a nurse and never married which was very odd in the early 60's. Especially since she was a bit of a looker and had no shortage of men chasing her. There was some hint of scandal that was never discussed but frankly it just made her even more exciting. She has the baby of Mums very large family and after Mums father died very young (complications from being gassed in WW1) the family led a slightly bohemian existence which suited Eunice to the bone.
She was a Red Cross Nurse during the Korean War and when she visited on leave she smoked foreign cigarettes and drank coffee. We thought that was terribly wild for a woman her age… (Probably in her 30’s). She went on leave in places like Hong Kong and sent us toys that were just eye popping in suburban Christchurch. They were just like nothing we had ever seen or could have imagined and were cooler than my mates Lego (he had just arrived from England – we had ‘Betta Builda blocks which were lameo). Frankly us kids thought she was some kind of Pirate Queen or a secret agent or something and the whole nurse thing was just a front. Surely these toys were plundered from a Merchant on the high seas?
Eunice adopted a Korean Orphan and raised him here in NZ, literally picked him up in the street as he was dying – amazing woman. When she came ‘home’ she was Matron in several country hospitals and my younger bro and I would go and stay in the wards during the holidays – hilarious fun, completely wrong and really got fussed over by all the young nurses and the patients…
Eunice was a generous free spirit and a firm shaker upper of conventional thinking right until she left us and I always remember her kindness. The excitement at Christmas and birthdays when these amazing tin plate toys and real sized cowboy guns would arrive from overseas was unreal - you really would never know what was going to appear. Everyone should have a wonderfully mad and slightly bad aunty.
Driving a tractor and a small bulldozer on the farm. Nicking off with dads BSA Bantum. My first ever pig hunting trip with my older cousins and all the rabbit hunting trips we went on.
There is no wonder kids these days are self absorbed and self serving brats, they have never had any real dangerous fun and have never had any real responsibility.
Just another leather clad Tinkerbell.
The Wanker on the Fucking Harley is going for a ride!
"Look, Madame, where we live, look how we live ... look at the life we have...The Republic has forgotten us."
My god, this is fantastic.
Takes me back a bit. try telling my kids that we used to bike near on 10 miles to the river to go eeling, then all the way back again. "Mum, we will be gone for the day fishing" reply..." be careful" and that was it, we were gone. sometimes we didn't get home again until after 7pm at night and were greeted with "did you kids have a nice day?" Life was so simple then. No cell phones or tv. Seemed so easy to make your own fun. All the kids had dark burnt skin from being outside all day, was hard to tell the difference between the maori kids and the euro's. That's why we knew nothing about racism then, we ended up being the same colour anyway.
I used to bike about 5 miles to catch the bus to town for school every day, in the ice and rain through the winter and in shorts i might add.
I would hate to think how many miles i did on my bike in those days.
Black and white tv, if you actually had one. no programmes till 6pm at night and shutdown again around 11pm i think with the Goodnight Kiwi at the end. Man if you got to see that, you were up very late. always remember the agonising wait you had for the TV to warm up, that was punishing at times.
I could go on and on, but i have to work so damn hard for my money these days i just don't have the time.![]()
Trumpydom!
I was the mate who got the extremely large table piled with twisting turning HO scale Marklin excellence.
All my mates didn't give a fuck, they had just all received GameBoys.
My train set was brilliant
Then when the others upgraded to GameBoys with colour, I got a new (to me) Piano
Explains why I am so bleedin' awesome![]()
...growing up in Lyttelton in the sixties was pretty cool...we had a big train sets to play with and they rolled in and out of the tunnel every day, full of coal or mutton or cheese...we had big ships to play with too, and harbour board punts for being scallywags in the harbour with, and when they were building Cashin Quay and a constant train of Euclids were carting rock from the quarry to the sea we were left with the biggest moonscape to bash our bikes to pieces on...we had free range to do whatever we wanted with all this stuff and if we got out of hand we inevitably got a bollocking from an adult who knew us all well and when we got home it wouldn't be long before your old man or your mum new what you were doing...dangerous shit upon reflection but fuck all of us got much more than broken bones and stitches...cant remember a death from my generation of kids there when we were playing...the authorities did not like us jumping from the tops of the cranes on the wharf...I never did that...I didn't mind being called a chicken...I always wanted a slot car set but that was out of the question...never even thought about asking for one...
Well Fuck Me ... I'll bet you all grew up in Godzone?
"So if you meet me, have some sympathy, have some courtesy, have some taste ..."
I didn't think!!! I experimented!!!
We had a 5 acre paddock with a pond across the street that was a great playground. Tadpoles, frogs in the pond. My older brother, Graeme, had model aeroplanes and was often extracting them from the pond. I had a cousin, girl, who was a very good athlete. She would come stay with us in the holidays. One summer Graeme and she cut a 440yd running track with Dad's hand hedge clippers, a scythe and a sickle so she could train.
I remember cycling to High School in the winter, across frozen puddles without the ice breaking!
Our punishment for "indiscretions" was a few wallops with a razor strop that hung behind the bathroom door... usually meted out by Mother as Dad was away working most weeks.
Tea was always accompanied by, "Dad and Dave," Life with Dexter," on the old 7 valve Columbus radio.
Week's highlight was the Goon Show on Sunday nights.
Thems were the days!
"Statistics are used as a drunk uses lampposts - for support, not illumination."
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