England's no more.

[MrMark]

Crouching under the kitchen table draped in a white sheet.

Lucky there's no chance of being attacked nowadays then!

There's always the doom merchants I suppose - nowadays it's the climate change brigade, or Tony blair warning us we need to sort out Iran. The problem comes when one of them turns out to be right...

[thunderlizard]

Didn't Maggie (rumoured to be a woman) become PM in 79? I accept your point about blacks finding it difficult, but women started entering the workforce in large numbers from the 60s. Equal pay was a little harder though (I believe there's a film out soon that covers this issue)

When you find yourself taking Margaret Thatcher as your benchmark of the social normality, you know something's gone wrong.
Men entering the workforce in the 60s could aspire to being the CEO. Women entering the workforce then could aspire to being the CEO's secretary.

[shoes]

There's always something... It changes over the years. We didn't start the fire, as Billy Joel said. Today's theme is terrorism, stupid people, financial meltdown and rapidly diminishing social mobility.

Hey ho, we're all dead soon anyway, what the hell.

[Zippy]

Overall I don't think things are worse. I guess I come from one of the first generations where - if you were bright - you were expected to go to university. Nobody thought I was a weirdo because I was good at science and technology (OK, a few of my girlfriends did ).

I suppose the main difference between now and then is the feeling of entitlement some people seem to have. Not based on equality but inequality.

[gricerboy]

Ah yes, the era of "The Final Cut" and "Two suns in the sunset".

Not to mention "Threads" on the telly.

....and wizard series like Castles and Maisie Raine. I concur, certainly in terms of the quality of TV drama, things have gone way downhill.

[SupremeSpod]

Bring back "The Onedin Line" to the BBC!

[vetran]

It's on 'Yesterday'.

Sets are a bit hmm.

[xoggoth]

People always talk about the inanity of society but I suspect it was always much the same, it's just we didn't have media to spread it it around. Big Brother, Coronation Street and Twitter have simply replaced cockfighting, Punch and Judy and gossip over the fence.

What's wrong with normal inane things anyway? It's the damn activists that cause the problems.

[minestrone]

What busts my balls is that you cannot eat out simply and quickly like the European Johnnie Foreigner can in his country.

Sometimes I just want to pop in a small cafe and get a small, good quality meal in 30 minutes with a small glass of wine.

I don't want to stay for 3 courses. I don't want a kebab, curry, chinese, mexican... yadda yadda

[dang65]

It's interesting how people perceive different periods in time and how the standard, probably instinctive, feeling is that things were better in the olden days. But they were just different. "The Past is another country; they do things differently there" and that sort of thing.

We even forget what things were like in our own lifetimes. Watch the film "Babylon" (1980) and that's how I remember London when I first used to come up here. Squats, corrugated iron, bombsites, rubble, smashed windows, rust, vandalised phone boxes, strippers in half the pubs, fly tipping everywhere. It didn't have "character"... it was a dump. I mean, there were good things, but not many. London is a beautiful place now. I mean, there are bad things, but not many.

Actually, Babylon was filmed in Lewisham so maybe that's still the same. But I kind of doubt it.