Biggest 'Modern Day' Friend

Well even back to when we were first married we had no car, no telephone, no heating, no tv, no washing machine or electric hoover and had to share an ancient bathroom with a tenant in the flat above.

My paternal grandparents lived in a two up - two down terraced house with no bathroom - they had brought up 6 children in there and another who died aged 3. The only heat was in the living room with an open range fire, washing was done in the big pot sink and all food was stored in the large pantry. They did have a gas cooker but all fresh food was bought on the day and cooked from scratch. Life was hard but family were close by (apart from during the war) and they just got on with things and had great fun together.

When I look at life today with all it's technology, AI, convenience foods where everything has to be done or responded to instantly and worldwide travel so easy to achieve I wonder whether how we would cope without any of it. The one thing I would miss most would be an indoor bathroom with hot water on tap and a toilet you didn't have to go outside in the middle of the night to use!

I know we are lucky to have all these things but I m not so sure my Nan missed out that much She ran a guest house very successfully without any of those items She didn’t miss what she’d never heard of and everything was home cooked bought every other day so the kitchen was always warm and a real fire in the living room (I live in my Nans big house now and still have no central heating (far too expensive to have put in or to use)
Washing was done regularly and wrung out using the wringer in the garden and hung on the line in the sun and wind carpets and rugs were regularly hung over the line and beaten We walked or bused everywhere
No phones, we used the corner shop if there was an emergency my Nan was too frightened to use a phone even in her old age when we had one
Yes I m happy with all our modern appliances but I don’t think life was miserable without them I think we would take a while to adapt if we were flung back into that era but I don’t think our grans were miserable people or had miserable lives without them I think they can be a curse too
The one thing I d miss most would be my daily hot shower

Nice to find someone else up in the night! "I really value being warm so I'd have to say central heating! My own childhood home, never mind my grandmother's, had icy rooms apart from the kitchen /living room. Otherwise, a washing machine (how hard it must have been to do the family wash by hand), and a prolific hot shower. I think a lot of our possessions and conveniences have made our life more complicated so I would like to think I could do without them.