Random childhood stuff you have no explanation for.

Getting the bumps on your birthday. One person at each hand and foot and you were swung up in the air and down to the ground times the number of your age while the other kids chanted the numbers. I'm amazed we weren't all injured!

I think it was malt

I’m also going to say this one, but I brought it up in a group a few years ago and nobody remembers, they were looking at me like I made it up.

There were men in the cities in Ireland that used to have little tiny monkeys, dressed in clothes and you had to pay to get your photograph taken with them.
My dad would not let us near them and I always wanted to see the little monkeys. Nobody else seems to remember these. Does anyone have such a photo and did it even exist in the UK?

We had a dog that hung around with our gang, he went everywhere with us and would get the bus into town and we would send him home on the bus by himself and he would get out at the right stop. The bus driver must have opened the doors for him.

The helium balloon sellers at the beach or touristy places. One person walking around with what seemed like 100 balloons over their head and you could choose which one you wanted and they'd magically find the right string.

Ive not seen one since the 90s??!!

We were given doses of Virol too. I’ll have to google it as I’ve no idea what was in it (lots of sugar probably as we liked it) or what the point was

I’m sure that as kids we used to split rosehips open & then rub the exposed fleshy seedy part on other kids’ backs. Really itchy!

I remember being crazy about those little I-spy books. A big moment was when my mum stopped near the first station and I was able to fill in several items in one go. No idea why that was so important to me but it seemed a big thing. My kids certainly didn’t care about ispy unless it was played on a long journey and no books were involved.

Did anyone else play car snooker? You had to spot a red car, then a yellow one, another red one, then a pink one, etc all the way up to black. The cars were more interesting colours then though. I think it might take a while to spot a pink one these days.

We've still got a shallow paddling pool in our park @MyThreeWords 😊

We do Minis and yellow cars, with 5 punches for a yellow Mini.

I remember getting excited driving the kids when I knew we were coming up to the Mini showroom 😁

We had stronger immune systems from being exposed to more dirt. I’m sure the sterile environment our children now live in does them no favours at all.

I can remember a family at the end of my road, mid 1970s. Had a few quid compared to the rest of us. The dad bought a ‘luxury’ caravan to take away during the hols. The rest of the time it sat at the side of the house.
I can’t begin to describe the excitement when the daughter asked me if I wanted to stay in it with her overnight - we were only 8!
Her mum brought us fish fingers for tea and that was it. No TV or radio. We had a few board games and she locked us in for the night.
God knows what our parents were thinking, two little girls in a caravan on their own. We had to wee in a bucket as well.
It was a big deal being invited to stay in the caravan. I was so quiet and polite I got asked a lot and never said no.
They did have a little portable telly in it by 1980 which was pure luxury.

I loved rosehip syrup...it became popular during the war when people, kids mainly were paid to collect wild rose hips...full of vitamin C

Thats good. The other one was British bulldog...loved it soooo rough

Every time we got Imi the car to go a journey at Xmas time we would count the Xmas trees in peoples windows

I wanted some rosehip syrup this year, to take with my iron tablets.
It's really hard to come by now. I might make my own.

Ah… the good old days-not!

We played a version of that on long drives where we'd spot cars with the latest reg , let's say V, then going back in order to earlier and earlier regs.

Oh the fun we had.

In primary school we would sit in a group of about six girls around a friend who was laying on the grass - we’d each repeat several phrases such as ‘ we’re in a cave ‘ and then we could pick this person up using one hand each ? As I’m writing this it doesn’t seem feasible but I’m sure it was a phase for a while in playgrounds .

We used to count the number of new cars on new car day.
Always a competition as to who spots the sea first. We still do that now, even though we're in our 50's.
Counting the number of Xmas trees we could see in lounge windows, when they first start going up.

We used to enjoy falling all over the place on the back seat too, @asparagusheaven .

I also remember my dad steering with his knees whenever he wanted to light a cigarette (which was frequently, as he was a 60-a-day man). If my mum was in the car too, he would get her to steer.

We used to live on a very straight road which had a few pull in lay-bys. For fun, whenever we were passing we would all hope they were empty and if so my Uncle would floor the accelerator and drive through them as fast as possible with a big swerve and all us kids (no seatbelts) ending up on one side and then the other.

He was a bit of a nightmare in other ways (alcoholic, slightly sadistic) but that bit was randomly fun. Not sure what he was thinking tbf.

That reminds me of the drinking fountains there used to be in parks. And the shallow swimming/paddling pools.

Why didn't we all get typhoid/polio/etc from these? Parks were so much more in those days. And ours had a fearsome park keeper who basically hated children.

We used to know the letters of different towns where cars were registered.

So an O in the middle of the letters was Birmingham e.g SOR34T. UY at the end of the letters was Shropshire.

We even had a little book with all of them listed!