Rant over

When I was a kid, adults used to bore me to tears with their tedious diatribes about how hard things were when they were young. Sharing a bed, black and white televison, jumpers for goalposts blah, blah, blah....

And I remember promising myself that when I grew up, there was no way in hell I was going to lay a bunch of crap like that on kids about how hard I had it and how easy they've got it!

But now that I'm an old geezer, I am getting more like my old man everyday, the hairy ears included. Kids today have it fucking easy don't they?

1. When I was a kid we didn't have The Internet. If we wanted to know something, we had to go to the damn library and look it up ourselves or look at one of those crappy encyclopedia books that Auntie Nellie used to buy for my birthday.

2. There was no email! We had to actually write somebody a letter....with a pen! Then you had to walk all the way across the street and put it in the postbox and it would take a week to get there, maybe two.

3. There were no MP3's or Ipods. If you wanted to steal music, you had to hitchhike to the damn record store and shoplift it yourself! Or you had to wait around all day to tape it off the radio and the DJ would usually talk over the beginning and the end.

4. We didn't have fancy stuff like Call Waiting! If you were on the phone and somebody else called they got a busy signal, that's it!

5. And we didn't have fancy Caller ID on the phone. When the phone rang, you had no idea who it was! It could be your school, your mum, your paperboy boss, your bookie, your drug dealer, a bird you last saw whilst you crept out of her bedroom window last night, you just didn't know. You had to pick it up and take your chances!

6. We didn't have any fancy Sony Playstation video games with high-resolution 3-D graphics! We had the Atari With games like Space Invaders and Asteroids, You actually had to use your imagination! And there were no multiple levels or screens, it was just one screen forever! And you could never win. The game just kept getting harder and harder and faster and faster until you died! Just like life.

7. When you went to the cinema, there were no fancy spancy seats on different levels, all the seats were the same height! If a tall guy or some old broad with a hat sat in front of you and you couldn't see, you were just screwed!

8. And there was no Cartoon Network either! You could only get cartoons on Saturday Morning. Do you hear what I'm saying!?! We had to wait all week for cartoons!

9. And we didn't have microwaves, if we wanted to heat something up, we had to use the stove or go build a fire in the park.

10. And finally, yoof. When we were on the phone with our friends or a bird and our parents walked-in, we were stuck to the wall with a cord, a 2 foot cord that ran to the phone - not the phone base, the actual phone - so we had our parents listen to it all, whilst our Dads tapped their imaginary watches on their wrists.

Pah, kids of today.