To ask what you thought was weird as a child (lighthearted)

My mum's father died before I was born. For some reason my mum used to call my paternal grandad 'Dad', so I was confused as to whether my parents were siblings.

That I wasn't allowed to walk home with the big group from school who lived near by me but had to go the long way round just in case my dad was passing and he could give me a lift.

The long way included going through a throng of teenage boys as I had to walk past the boy's school at letting out time.

I couldn't understand why people were sad at funerals because the dead person would be in heaven now.

I spent a lot of my childhood being puzzled about things.

That program’s were pre-recorded and not live. I remember my mum trying to explain it to me once about the Dick Emery show which was on tv at the time. The concept was just too much for my brain to understand lol

I remember crossing the road with my gran and her saying..."wait for the green man. Do you see the green man. Look theres the green man lets go". I was scanning the busy city crowd for literally an actual green man. Wondering why we should wait for him. Feeling it was all a bit odd and wondering why i could see him. A wee while later i realised what she ment but that 2 min conversation is printed in my memory. I must have been about 3. My memory is shocking to. I have no idea why that stuck.

I must’ve watched a programme about recycling as I had vivid memories of seeing a conveyor belt full of waste being sorted by people wearing gloves. I was a teenager when I realised this didn’t apply to the entire bin bag though and that the black bag contents just got buried in the ground as landfill - I was absolutely flabbergasted and horrified to think this was how a civilised society decided to live. The whole emphasis on picking up litter and Keep Britain Tidy seemed fraudulent if it was ok to just dig a hole in a field and shove all the crisp packets, old food and dirty plastic bits in there and I was shocked by the whole concept. Still am - it’s obviously a disaster in the making for future generations and just so harmful to the environment.
I think the same globally now about plastic being permitted to be produced when we know it’s already in every bit of the sea, in rain etc - it’s like we’re wrapping the whole planet in cling film ignoring the fact we need to breathe, grow food etc 😩

That you got baby girls from kissing but you had to kiss AND 'do it' to have a boy. (I don't think I really knew what 'it' was but I knew it was mucky.)

I remember telling my best friend this with some authority and sympathy.

Sympathy because she had a brother and I didn't so her parents were obviously a bit filthy.

I remember watching Crimewatch, when they asked for any information that viewers may know/have heard that could help them with investigating the case.

I desperately urged my parents to call the hotline with the useful clue that I had deduced for them: the number plate of the car that was used in the crime, which I had just 'discovered' from watching their reconstruction video that they'd just shown!

I couldn't understand why they kept insisting that the police/BBC already knew the reg of the car that they'd used in the reconstruction, and that telling them what it was probably wouldn't help

My first foreign holiday I remember being so confused why Dad had to get a special credit card (visa) for us to go. I'd seen visa credit card ads on TV that said accepted everywhere (or something like that) so it didn't make sense why he couldn't use his normal credit card. Probably didn't help that he thought it was funny so told me his credit card was American Express but I knew he had a visa card. Tbh I still don't get why you need a visa when any info they need can be tracked through your passport.

But that's the whole point of the confusion: we say "I am not"; we never say "I are not".

I thought a woman's cleavage was a hole and the doctor put his hand in to take the baby out. My friend pointed to where the baby actually comes out and said It comes out of here. I thought that was weird as I didn't realise there was another hole, only the one that wee comes out of and surely that would be far too small!
I also thought it weird when the same friend told me babies are born naked. I always assumed they were born wearing pink or blue. Otherwise, how would you know if they were a boy or a girl?

I thought big cities were called that because the buildings were taller. I was so confused when I went to a big city for the first time to find that the buildings looked roughly the same height as the buildings in any other city.

I was baffled by an episode of Fawlty Towers in which the hotel inspector came and the hotel staff were panicking because the cat was in the kitchen. Our cat ate in our kitchen every day and no one batted an eyelid. I'd been to other houses where the cats (and dogs) ate in the kitchen too.

I thought society was like a big pretend game in which the grown-ups just decided amongst themselves who would do what. E.g. "you can be the boat driver and we'll be the people on the boat".

I couldn't understand what my dad did with the vast sums of money he drew out from the cashpoint - £100 a time! I spent about 50p a week on sweets.

I couldn't work out when "the mean time" was. An older girl at infant school once made a dark reference to someone doing something naughty "in the mean time". It sounded sinister.

Also, I thought that time was organised wrong and the time we got up should be called 1am, not 7am. Fairly recently, I found out that this is very similar to the way time is counted in Ethiopia.

I thought that rashers were made from pigs ears, as in one pig would yield 2 slices 🤣.
I also thought that when seeing anyone on the TV that they were actually inside the set. I was very tempted to smash the screen once to get into Jason Donovan 🤣

Someone at our school thought he was singing:

"Piss off, honey"

Now, we don't talk anymore...

When I was 7 I thought people had normal jobs in this country (UK) but if they wanted a proper, serious, long job, they had to move to Korea.

I thought any mountain was potentially a volcano and could blow up at any time.

I found a dried up, dead seahorse on a beach and I was convinced it had been the king of the seahorses because it looked like it had a crown.

I thought it was really odd that people spoke other languges. I thought they were just having to translate it into English in their head, so they might as well have just spoken English to each other.

Why Michael Fish & his weather forecasting freinds kept making it rain! Why couldn't they just make it sunny, rain only at night, and snow in winter, rather than making the weather so crappy?

Leap years. I didn't understand why the extra quarter day every year didn't have an impact on the time of day eg if it was 5pm in Jan why was the same time not, for example, 5.06pm in Dec (I'm not explaining this very well and actually am not entirely sure what I'm trying to say lol).

I thought in every couple the man is older than the woman. I think it’s because my dad is older than my mum. And my Grandad is older than my Grandma.

Why planes looked so small in the air and how do people fit in to the them.

I have this memory of running around in a field and looking up at the sky, and I was perplexed about how people fit in to these teeny little planes that kept flying overhead 😂.

Obviously this was before I grasped that when something is far away it looks smaller.

I never thought the storybook illustrations of giants were giant enough..Surely giants would have fingers as wide as a 200 year old oak trees and have their heads in the clouds. I was also frustrated when the Dads Army arrow on the credits always went the same direction eack week.

Because you're shortening "are not I". The apostrophe takes the place of the missing o.

I thought any programmes shown on satellite TV were filmed on a spaceship.

I thought when people’s parents went to work they all went to the same place. Also couldn’t understand why some people called it a taxi and some people called it a cab.

That is very poignant and just shows how rational children really are.

That my parents thought dragging me to a garden centre every weekend was some form of entertainment for me 🙄🤣