OF all the years of the 1970s, 1977 is perhaps the best remembered by anybody who was beyond infancy.

As well as being the year of the Queen's Silver Jubilee, it was the year in which existing styles in everything from music to clothes faced their strongest challenge from new looks, new sounds and new attitudes.

In those days, an ordinary person finding more than £55 or so in their wage packet once tax and deductions had been taken could consider themselves to be doing quite nicely.

Highly trained professionals in senior roles could expect more, though.

Recruitment notices in the Swindon Advertiser during the summer of the Jubilee included senior positions in accountancy whose salaries reached the giddy heights of £5,000 or more.

Taking inflation into account, a pound in 1977 was equivalent to about £4.50 today.

There were rather fewer things to spend money on than there are today.

The use of modern microchip technology in consumer goods wouldn't even begin to become widespread for at least another five years or so.

Even a clunky mechanical VCR was beyond the dreams of all but the most affluent gadget lovers, costing up to £1,000 or even more.

By way of comparison, it's useful to remember that in 1977 a two-bedroomed terraced house in central Swindon could be had for about £6,000.

During the same period, three-bedroomed houses in upmarket Goddard Avenue, Old Town, cost about £17,000, while the more wealthy homebuyer might have preferred a larger property such as a five-bedroomed detached house in Ashton Keynes for £25,750.

In those pre-camcorder, pre-camera phone days, moving pictures for the home market tended to come via an 8mm cine camera, projector and screen.

Debenhams in Swindon was selling a variety of cameras at £24.95 to £89.95 in 1977.

The images produced by such technology were often slightly out of focus, peculiarly coloured and jerky. This was inconvenient at the time, but gave the sequences extra otherworldly poignancy when the amateur filmmakers' grandchildren began uploading them to YouTube 30 years later.

Many are the elderly mums and dads (but mostly dads) whose flickering footage of Silver Jubilee parties has now been seen by more people worldwide than a reasonably successful art film.

This is not to say that the world was devoid of home entertainment technology in 1977. Laskys in the Brunel Plaza, for example, was offering portable TVs for £67.50, music centres (turntable/radio/cassette combinations) for £149 and clock radios for £24.95.

Customers wanting all three items but unable to add up the cost could shell out £12.50 for a pocket calculator with an LED display.

The choice of furnishings available to the ordinary consumer was not as broad as it is now, but grew steadily throughout the decade.

In 1977, the special offers at Normans in the Brunel Plaza included double beds at £165 (down from £235), while MFI in Elgin Drive was offering wall units at £54.50 for the basic type, and £69.50 for a more upmarket glass-fronted variety.

If all this spending left a person with the need to put their feet up and have a cup of tea, a quarter of a pound of the leaf could be bought from the Co-op for 12p. Club biscuits to go with the cuppa were 21p for a pack of five.

A boneless rib roast joint sold for 86p per pound at the same shop, while customers on lower budgets had options such as lamb's liver at 39p per pound.

Shop shelves, like TV schedules, overflowed with names that turned out to be nostalgia in the making.