REGARDING Alice Watt's letter (April 15): as a wee boy and forerunner to the Baby Boomers I recall wartime rationing and post-war austerity, Harold Wilson’s 1967 “the pound in your pocket”, mortgage restrictions, the global crash of 1972-73, the oil price shock of the seventies, Black Wednesday 1982, Black Monday 1987, double-digit interest rates, the late eighties crash, early nineties recession, the dot-com bubble.

Need I go on? This was never a land of milk and honey nor life a bed of roses.

R Russell Smith,

96 Milton Road, Kilbirnie.