What did we do before the internet?

Being nostalgic does not necessarily mean things were better back in the ‘good old days’ – or does it?

Does anyone else think we’re lucky to be alive? GenX and older, I mean. The generation that got hit in the shin a few too many times with a solid iron bicycle pedal; that got flung off razor-sharp roundabouts and shot off scalding slides; that got dropped off at home as a teenager after discoing by taxi drivers in unbuttoned red shirts and nicotine-dyed moustaches.

Yes, when a pack of 20 cigarettes cost less than a burger and fizzy drink.

What a time to be alive, as a colleague half my age says – although he’s referring to 2024.

My 12-year-old son thinks we were lucky to have schools in my time. A friend said his daughter asked if they had books in the “old days”. We appear ‘backward’ to children today, who don’t ask their parents questions because they know we can’t answer them. Looking things up in books is so “primitive”.

Those of us being alive for more than half a century, means we listened to Duran Duran albums as they came out – on cassettes; we went mad when Billy Idol released White Wedding when he was still young; when hair glitter was a thing; when discos had dancefloors; when going round town on roller skates was safe.

Is the issue of safety so crucial nowadays or are we just paranoid?

I asked some peers to tell me what they got up to a good 40 years ago. “Things are not good now. The good times are over,” Nikiforos Theodorides, 55, said.

Nikiforos, whose daughter is three-and-a-half, said “we didn’t have much money back then and we didn’t have many needs, we were happy.

“Nowadays, more and more people opt to stay at home rather than go out. I remember going out and knowing I would bump into friends. Now people prefer their computers,” Nikiforos – a fan of disco and soft rock – added.

Back in the day, his dream was to buy a motorcycle and enjoy freedom, a dream he fulfilled when he was 17.

He remembers that children knew how to look after themselves and anyhow there was less crime and less traffic.

“We used to play in open plots. You don’t see that anymore.”

Emily Voniati, 55, remembers the large, red rotary phone they had at home with a long wire. “To have a private conversation, I had to pull the wire into my room.”

Emily, a professional photographer, who is active on the social scene and can tell you where to go and where not to, said that back in the day “there was no social media – going out was more about actually enjoying yourself rather than sharing the enjoyment.

“People were more candid. In the 80s Galaxy disco we waited till midnight for the DJ to play ‘Happy birthday’, the birthday cakes were then taken to the tables and you got half an hour of blues. Anyone could ask you to dance and there were no misunderstandings,” she remembers.

Nowadays, “it is easier for people of all ages to get carried away with endless scrolling and miss out on actually connecting with people.

“Less screen time contributed to going out more. Now people read less and go out less. It has to do with what is available at home,” Emily said.

Neither elaborated on what we got up to, but we did have fun. Drugs were a thing that only happened abroad and crime knocked on other people’s doors.

We ate sour flower stems oblivious as to whether cats had been there earlier, we frequented cafés and discos, wore shoulder pads and skinny trousers, hung out at drag races, went to every party in the neighbourhood and played for hours on end of pinball in arcades.

Of course, there is no proof of this. There was no internet, no social media, no mobile phones, no fake news. You had to wait two weeks for your film to be developed before seeing your photos and everything we wanted to know we looked up in books.

We didn’t have anywhere to post what we had for lunch. Who cared? We were having too much of a great time ‘putting out fire with gasoline’ to be bothered.

Would our parents have had a fit? I don’t think so – not after listening to their stories. They just told us our 80s music was crap.

Although the internet was being devised in the 60s, it didn’t hit the broader public until the 90s. And although the first cellphone was invented in the 70s, it wasn’t until 2001 that smartphones with internet slipped into our pockets.

With technology as it is today, the whole world is in the palm of our hand. Distances have disappeared, information is available around the clock and the world is changing because of it. Globalisation has now entered a new era and the urban slang of the age is taking over as the informal gab that only GenZs and GenAs can understand.

And who would have imagined in the 80s that the (original version!) of Rick Astley’s Never Gonna Give You Up would be sung in 2024 by pre-teens all over the world? When I pointed this out, my son just smiled. I know that you-wouldn’t-understand smirk all too well.