Thursday 12 September 2013

Whatever Happened To....? 25

the Age of Aquarius

album cover art

angelica and candied peel

Babycham

Blighty
TV channel (opened with much fanfaire and closed 5 July 2013)

breaking the shells of your boiled egg so that witches couldn’t use them for boats

cable programmes about floods, the railways of Switzerland, other people’s nicknacks etc

childhood illnesses that required the child to stay in bed for three years

cinemas showing old movies, art movies and foreign movies

Courtelle (thick, springy man-made fibre yarn)

creativity (very important in the 70s)

Design Centre (closed in the 90s)

District Messengers

Estuary English
eurhythmics (Dance exercises popular in the 1920s - still going. Search for "Dalcroze".)

French slurs about the English eating animal feed (turnips, swedes, broad beans) and putting jam on their food (red currant jelly, mint sauce)

ginseng

girls called Freda

Gorgonzola
(60s posh smelly cheese)

goulash

hanging one lustre from a chandelier in your window to reflect light

hats held on with elastic

heliocentrists


idea that you could only “do” your hair properly if it was dirty

iodine

Italic handwriting

laundry marks

ledgers
library signs exhorting SILENCE

male chauvinism

mothballs

New Maths

New Millennnium

nuisance calls
(now internet trolls)

Op Art eye makeup

ouzo and retsina

pageboys
(in pseudo-military uniform and pillbox hats)

palmtops that you controlled by a “gestural language” (now smartphones)

people complaining you can’t use “gay” to mean “happy” any more

performing Shakespeare with authentic pronunciation

pierrot shows on the beach/pier

poison pen letter writers (now internet trolls)

porn mags in newsagents (all on the internet)

protest songs
putting a record on when people came round
putting red kidney beans in everything

ragout
recipes called “something supreme” and “something a la King” (smother in cream, cook in white sauce)

roule cheese

saints
scuba divers communicating by gestures

selecting a track on an LP and putting the needle down in exactly the right place without scratching the record

skywriting

spoon warmers

tamagotchi

tealadies

The Pedway
(System of elevated walkways in the City of London. Fragments remain.)

Threshers off-licences

tinned gooseberries

Toffos


travelogues (moved to TV)

treacle toffee

Turkish cigarettes
(elliptical in section)

turnips (Wartime famine food. They were still pushing turnip recipes in the 70s. Why wasn't Dig for Victory revived then?)

TV aerials

Twitter novels

Urban Outfitters

Women’s League of Health and Beauty (still going as the Fitness League – search for Bagot Stack classes)

YHA sheet sleeping bags

More here, and links to the rest.

1 comment:

  1. Love these! What about:
    the paperless office was definitely going to have happened by now.
    Canvas tennis shoes - Dunlop green flash - but now everyone wears trainers for tennis.
    Screen-in-screen TVs, so you could actually see what was going on on the other side, in a square in the corner of the screen. Obviously no-one actually wanted that feature.

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