Rubbish jobs collecting dog turds in the street, a 70-hour week, beer laced with ammonia, take-aways selling only pickled tripe, cholera, lice, soot, smoke, no TV or computer, few political rights, jerry-built houses, crap music, football that was more like rugby league, huge queues to buy the 500th installment of Mr Dickens’s latest work and dead at 17.
Them were’t days.