At first glance, it may look like this bunch of chancers are off to some outrageous fancy dress party, but the chaps featured in this soft parade are about some pretty serious business. The date is February 6, 1936, and the event is the opening of Monmouth’s Winter Assizes. In old money that meant court! Bringing up the rear in the Brian May wig is Lord Chief Justice Lord Heart, who had a busy day of it that year. In less than an hour he sentenced a GWR plate layer from Abergavenny to 15 months of hard labour for attacking his wife and daughter with an axe and bound over a colliery labourer from Abersychan for stealing a pony. You can’t fudge the judge you know! (Pic supplied )

Water, water, everywhere, and not a drop to drink. Not unless you want to get cholera, diarrhoea, dysentery, hepatitis A, typhoid, or polio. And they say fluoride is bad for your health! Although you couldn’t drink the floodwaters that occurred during the elemental hell of 1963, you sure as hell could boat on them to do your shopping! Check out these ladies in their headscarves. They’ve never had it so good! Not only did they have a ferry service to take them to and from the shops but they got to pretend they were in a gondola in Venice to boot. As all bored housewives know, a little imagination goes a long way! (Pic supplied )

Who amongst this lot would ever imagine that these big ugly boxes they have been asked to look at intently for this photo would be replaced by sleek and portable laptops and phones, that were infinitely more powerful and addictive? If you can remember a then when computers were called Amstrads, Acorn Electrons, Ataris, Commodore 64s, and Spectrum 48ks, well done, you’re old. The tech in this pic is a long way from the BBC Micros that used to haunt school IT rooms like a disobedient and difficult demon from the bowels of hell, but as you can see from the way the kids are gazing at the computers suspiciously, technology spent a long time making our brains hurt before it made them soft! (Pic supplied )