© irene waters 2015
Happy New Year to everyone on the first day of the month. I’d like to invite you to join with me in a prompt challenge that will give us social insights into the way the world has changed between not only generations but also between geographical location. The prompt can be responded to in any form you enjoy – prose, poetry, flash, photographs, sketches or any other form you choose. You may like to use a combination of the two. I will also add a series of questions for those that would like to join in but don’t know where to start.
Heading your response please put what generation you belong to.
The Generations that I think may possibly be blogging:
Greatest Generation
G I Generation: 1901 – 1924 Experienced WWII in adulthood.
Silent Generation 1925 – 1945 Experience WWII in childhood
Baby Boomers
Boom Generation/Hippie 1946 -1964 Space Exploration/ first counter culture
Generation X
Baby Busters 1965 -1980 Experienced Vietnam War/Cold War
MTV or Boomerang Generation 1975 – 1985 Rise of Mass Media/end cold war
Generation Y
Echo Boom/Generation McGuire 1978-1990 Rise of the Information Age/ Internet/War on Terror/Rising Gas and Food Prices
Generation Z
New Silent Generation 1995- 2009 Never experience pre Internet/dot com bubble/ Digital globalisation
Generation Alpha
No sub name as yet but possibly the school or materialistic generation 2010 – These are predicted to study longer and be more concerned with material possessions.
As well as putting your generation, please also put whether you lived (at the time of writing) in what country and whether in a regional/rural area or a city.
My belief is that our location and the generation into which we were born see very different experiences of growing up as we relook at Times Past. I hope you’ll join in. Put a link to your post and I will add it in my post so that it is easy to read others experiences. Lets get started.
© irene waters 2015
Prompt 1: The first time I remember eating in a restaurant in the evening.
While today we take restaurant dining as a natural occurrence in which possibly the entire family partakes, friends socialise and lovers woo, I don’t think this has always been the case. Several years ago when I asked my mother (Silent Generation) what was the biggest change she had seen in her lifetime she chose over all the technological changes and man landing on the moon, the fact that people no longer had morning and afternoon teas. In her day these were how people socialised and the dinner out was rare.
Questions you might like to answer of consider:
Generation
Location
How old were you when you first had an evening meal in a restaurant that you remember?
What food did you eat?
How did you behave?
Who were you with?
Was there anything memorable about the evening?
Was it for some type of celebration?
My first Night time Restaurant Meal
Generation: Baby Boomer
Location: rural NSW Australia.
I was ten before I had my first meal in a restaurant. There weren’t any restaurants in the town I lived apart from the hotel dining rooms and they were places that were not considered proper for a young lady or any self-respecting person (in my parent’s opinion). There was one fish and chip shop (take-away) until the delicatessen opened in town and then we bought (takeaway) the occasional BBQ chook. Around the same time the motel opened a Chinese restaurant.
We were taken to celebrate a wedding anniversary (I think silver but I could be wrong) of some friends of my parents. There were probably ten of us in total and we sat at a long table covered by a white starched linen tablecloth. No-one knew in those days that Chinese is best shared so we all ordered a plate each. My brother and I had been read the riot act and were under strict instructions to be on our best behaviour. That meant not being heard.
My brother took this to heart to such an extent when he was the only person not to be served he sat there in silence. It wasn’t until someone noticed that he didn’t have a plate in front of him (while everyone else had almost finished their meals) that it was finally brought to the waiters attention. He would have gone home hungry rather than raise his voice.
We moved to Sydney a couple of years later but it was not until I left home that I again ate out in a restaurant of an evening.
Looking forward to hearing your experiences. Respond anytime in the month of January. The next prompt will be on February 2nd
Responses:
Silent Generation
Cleveland, Ohio
http://mumbletymuse.com/2016/01/02/dining-out-as-a-member-of-the-silent-generation/
Baby Boomers
rural Dakota USA
Dining Out
Manhattan New York
Times Past | Baby Boomers
suburbs Surrey/ rural New Forest
http://geofflepard.com/2016/01/03/eating-out/
working class Northern England
http://annegoodwin.weebly.com/annecdotal/-restaurant-meals-memoir-as-social-history
New York City, New York
Snails and Oysters (1.11 m/f)
Phoenix Arizona
Times Past: A White Linen Tablecloth and Crudités
Brighton England,
Times Past Challenge: Chinese Spoons And Eating Out
Generation X
rural Northern California
Times Past: Food From the Sea
rural Lincolnshire U.K.
Times Past: Date Meal Delusions
Fireworks have popped and banged all over Australia with major displays in Sydney and the other capital cities. Although Kiribati is the first place to see in the New Year and the first major country is New Zealand, Australia follows very closely behind. We do a test run for the rest of the world on what the New Year is like. In the 9 hours we are ahead of South Africa, the 11 hours to the U.K., and the 16 hours to New York we will probably discover that there is not a lot of difference between the New Year and the Old Year.
Reflections and Nightmares- Irene A Waters (writer and memoirist) 