Then
Of course there was no internet, no social media, no smartphones pinging with the latest news alerts. What was external rarely intruded. We mostly lived in our own local realities. Where was New York City anyway and did we really care? Sometimes we waited at our village phone box to receive or make calls involving friends or sweethearts from other villages. It was hard to use the house phone because somebody else would surely be listening in. Apart from word of mouth, there were no reviews of items or services we planned to buy. To a large extent, you simply had to dive in and hope for the best. This was true of lots of things from books to holidays and from new music to forthcoming television shows. Nobody found boyfriends or girlfriends online because "online" meant on the washing line where underwear and football shirts fluttered in the breeze like flags. To acquire a new sweetheart you tended to use the grapevine along which secret messages were passed or you m...