Life in the 70s

I was born in 1978 so what I saw of the decade was spent mostly sleeping and crying. Being grown up now and dealing with the joys of domesticity such as paying bills, working and shopping in an era of computers, privatised utilities and much wider choice of things like food and the media I'm curious about what day to day life was like back then. In particular I'm interested in the aspects of daily life that people take for granted. What was it like having just one supplier for the utilities, a regulated public transport network and shops where foreign foods were still pretty obscure and expensive? Were bills really in brown envelopes and what was it like dealing with banks and the like when there were no call centres? How did local govt behave in the days of domestic rates and before the abolition of the metropolitan county councils? It sounds like there was a fair bit of horse trading when the old Wet Riding County Council was replaced with the Wet Yorks MCC. I'm also curious about working life. I work from home with 2 phone lines and in teams where I've never met all the people in them but I know even 10 years ago that wasn't possible. What was it like having a single phone line for a whole office and no email or possibly even computers?

(I know I usually just write about training but the history of daily life is something else I'm interested in)