Was the unions that broke Britain.
and I disagree about personal experience. This country cares too much about what happens in other countries while it neglects is residents. Why on earth would anyone vote for a local member of parliament who is more concerned with foreign, or even national problems.
The biggest change over the last 50 years has been to take power and finance away from local councils who now have to go cap in hand to the government. Even planning has largely been taken out of the hands of local council. Local residents have no say in what happens to their communities.
A house is not a home without certain rooms carpeted.
I find rooms unfriendly with hard floors and walking into them sounds like walking into the church hall, the acoustics are terrible.
Not only do carpets deaden the sound, they keep the room warm and a delight to walk barefoot onâŠ
Hard floors are for kitchens, bathrooms and entrance halls.
Was the Thatcher era a time of carpets then?
No I donât like carpets either, they are extremely unhygienic, wooden floors can be decorated with a scattering of (washable) rugs.
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Talking about a child in Barnsleyâs view of the Thatcher years is also personal experience. So if you felt Aberdeen saw bad times in the 80s and I had a different experience in what I observed (in various parts of England) then you canât say it was bad for everyone or good for everyone, but it was definitely good for a lot of people who went through financial hardship during the years of inflation and strikes in the 70s and found opportunity, jobs and hope in the 80s. I saw big improvements in infrastructure in the 80s. I remember visiting York in 86 and it was thriving. Lovely clean pavements, niche shops and restaurants and of course the smell of chocolate in the air. As people bought houses in the boom and renovated them town centres thrived with the new demand for shops, bars and restaurants.
So just because some people felt life wasnât as good for them as it used to be doesnât mean it wasnât suddenly full of opportunity for others.
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I suppose that itâs down to going for what makes you feel good in your own home and suits your lifestyle.
For people who have dogs carpets just arenât very practical particularly when they start to moult, cats also love to get their claws in. They are also so hard to hoover. I never feel a carpet is clean enough after hoovering. Goodness knows how many dust mites live in their fibers.
I adore the grounding of a solid wood floor and rugs are very cosy without all the work of a fitted carpet. Tiled floors are also very nice for a hallway, kitchen or bathroom.
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The rights and wrongs of a fitted carpet, very âGrippingâ but, were all those carpet fitters who became redundant because of the fitted carpets demise, adaptable enough to start working with wood?
How do you stand on curtains - I suppose you try not to. Thereâs quite a move towards fitted shutters. Would you prefer or do you have those?
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Gradually replacing curtains with shutters and blinds, expensive but so much better.
Itâs wasnât until I had laminate flooring that I realised how manky carpet could be!
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Yes! 
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Aberdeen was booming in the eighties Lincolnshire. Stonehaven is only 15 miles to the south. We also had one of the best football teams in Europe. The only bad thing was the Piper Alpha disaster.
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I like shutters and curtains or just curtains if itâs a room that isnât overlooking. Wooden blinds. I am not sure about the shutter craze as they are becoming so ubiquitous.
itâs when you rip them out you suddenly realise how much dirt stays in them, particularly around the edges where the vacuum cannot ever get in the crevices.
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I think it depends on how warm your house is or how well insulated. Curtains are very cosy if you have a draughty window or no cavity walls.
My point was to highlight the weakness of using personal or individual experience to validate what was happened in total, in the majority, across the country. You saw improvement and opportunity. Many, most, did not. The implication of the quoted sentence above is it was 50-50 and the not so good experience was not really that bad. That is very wrong. Look at the sentence. It says âsome people feltâ (err, not felt, but real experience and certainty) âlife wasnât as goodâ (no, not comparative as good, but objectively bad) âwasnât suddenly full of opportunityâ (use of full to imply abundance when reality was it was limited to a few in a few places). A better description of the 80âs would be âin certain places Thatcherâs policies created opportunities for enrichment for some peopleâ. That is where you were and what you witnessed.
Note that unemployment reach 12% in 1984. Millions of people were kicked out of the work theyâd known all their lives. Nothing came along to replace that. Certainly the south east of England boomed. Elsewhere it was grim, shops closed not opened. The north-south divide began, the gulf between rich and poor greatly widened. Thatcher gloated about the notion of society being dead and the future was about the individual. That narrative was applauded in the affluent south but received with dismay elsewhere - it heralded cuts of social spending, it aimed at tax cuts that benefitted the rich. That is how Thatcher broke Britain.
greengage
How do you stand on curtains - I suppose you try not to. Thereâs quite a move towards fitted shutters. Would you prefer or do you have those?
with difficulity 
I think this is very subjective. Yes there was a north/south divide. But parts of the North thrived at the time.
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My point is to encourage us to move away from the solely subjective view. In what way is referring to the majority being subjective? Your claim amounts to being presented with a fact and responding âwell, you can believe that if you want toâ. Iâm not refuting your personal experience, Iâm challenging whether it was similar to the majority in the UK. And a clean pavement in one tourist town north of Watford does not amount to lots of opportunities to secure well paid jobs.
I understand what you are saying, but you seem to be replacing it with your personal experience. There was good and bad not just bad. The good stuff was really good for those who benefited. I donât know how bad the bad was, but there were winners and losers as there would be with any major change. Saying it was all bad is not true.
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I know that even in the same family some people were doing Ć”ell and some not so in the same location. There was a lot of talk about a âtrickle downâ society. Maybe that is always the case.
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