Random childhood stuff you have no explanation for.

Yes, this! We were only rarely even allowed to use the water fountains on the way back to the classroom after lunch break running around in the sun! One afternoon I was seeing stars I was so thirsty, tongue like the floor of a budgie’s cage, begged the teacher for a drink, bfn. After a couple of hours of this, I fainted - and was treated like a massive inconvenience by the school nurse! No mollycoddling in those days..

Using a phone box to call when you were ready for a lift home. They all had a combined smell of paper (from the MASSIVE set of paper phone number directories housed in each one) and piss (from the pissing men pissing in them).

2p for a short call, 10p for a long call. Or you could dial 100 and ask the operator for a reverse charge call.

Dunblane happened when I was in my last year of school and the changes (I went to a duel campus primary and high school) that happened between Easter and when I went back after the summer to use the pool (it was open in the evenings for locals) were massive.

Six foot high fences, gates that locked once the pupils were in and door intercom systems. One part of the playground was technically a public right of way and it was basically lost to the kids for over a year as they had to fence next to it but not impact it until they’d been to court to get permission.

Even with that, and now 20 years of working in and out English schools, I still find the determination of some English schools that they are allowed to dictate when a child is allowed to leave without an adult bizarre. It’s a parental decision legally.

Rosehip Syrup
Virol
Lucozade as an actual form of medicine.

I don't think we had any specific objective in mind, beyond just collecting the numbers.

It was a bit like those I Spy books, where you just had to 'collect' your observation of different objects in the same category. I had an I Spy book of horses I think??

Collecting worthless data was a big thing in the analogue age, because it required so much more effort than it does now

We're gonna need more info here

Liberty bodices - what were they for? I remember mum stuffing cotton wool soaked in camphorated oil( for my poorly chest) up my liberty bodice. The embarrassment when it dropped down in the aisle at Sunday school!

The village policeman was hired to play Father Christmas at the school Christmas party- didn’t fool me!

I used to go out to play in the morning and my mum would expect me back 'when the street lamps started to come on' 🧐

Does anyone else have a memory of being late home and either hearing your mother yelling your name angrily from miles away (round the block?) or, worse, a friend coming up to you and saying 'your mums looking for you!' eeek! 😳
That sinking feeling that your going to get a telling off! (or a clip round the ear)

Why did dm's insist we tuck our vest into our pants?took me forever to get used to wearing a bra and feeling the knicker elastic!
And have any paramedics ever commented on dc having none matching/ not clean underwear?

We used to throw punches for Minis and yellow cars! We also played slaps a lot, you know where you hit the other person's hands. And sliding coins along a table to hit their knuckles. The things you come up with when there's nowt to do 😂

As a 73 year old granny, I find it weird all the heavy security around schools and not letting children as old as 10 leave school by themselves. I was walking to and from school from about 6 years old, and there were no locked gates during school hours.

We would watch ‘ police 5’ ( it was like crime watch on itv with Shaw Taylor ) and try and see if the stolen vehicles they featured were in our street! They never were.

@NotAnotherScarf But I don't think "What's the Time, Mr Wolf" has vanished: I walked past a nursery yesterday, and I could hear the children playing it on the other side of the fence.

@NotAnotherScarf I was chatting with some people in their late twenties about playground games, and I mentioned Blind Man's Buff.

None of them had even heard of it! And this is even though it's often mentioned in classic literature, such as A Christmas Carol. I ended up explaining it, and we even played it. (And yes, I know it's sometimes spelled "bluff".)

Being boys we would thump each other if we saw a new car or a VW beetle.

Street games like Queenie ball, ball, ball; polo; What's the time Mr wolf; sleeping lions; etc seem to have vanished.

We had a location specific game in the lower school at senior school called grids. The school was built in the 1930s on a hill so one side was lower than the other...to keep it flat a huge storage space was built under half the school with air grids in the wall. The game involved throwing a tennis ball at the wall. If you hit the grid you were through to the next round. If someone caught the ball off of the wall, you missed the wall or were the last person you were out. Now we never played with the older kids when we started, nor did we play the game with the younger ones....but everyone played it at some time. Even my uncles who went twenty years before so who invented it and how were the rules passed down

Gosh yes, I remember doing this with a friend. I think she got excited about it as her mum made it sound like fun (I am sure now it was just a way to get us out her house).
I think the challenge was to try and get a reg plate with different letters at the start?

Yes! I was talking about this yesterday. We used to start at the playscheme then head off wherever (weren’t signed in or out, just a drop-in) but never had a drink.

It was my dog 🙄.
1976, rural Ireland .
One failed sheepdog who was our family pet , increadibly intelligent but borderline obsessed with me and my brother. He was an incredible escapologist and no matter where he was left would escape and track us down.
8 year old me tying my school tie to his collar and walking him the 15 mins home then returning to school . Happy days.

If it was in the 70s it would’ve been because Shaw Taylor on Police 5 told you to look out for the cars of criminals 🤣 I used to do this (probably wrote the numbers down from the programme and tried to match them too). I loved the thought that I could go on holiday AND solve crime on the journey!
When I was a little younger than this I always worried that we’d run out of road going on holiday - that there would be a point that it was still being built.

Why weren’t we dehydrated? No one carried water with them, and you only really drank at mealtimes and elevenses, and then as a child it was usually squash, and the squash flavours were lemon, orange or Ribena.

Fizzy drinks were party drinks only.

My cousin put a pitchfork through my foot and all the adults there screamed. No reaction from me.
When they cut my shoe off in A&E it transpired that the fork had gone through my shoe and between my toes. I was completely unscathed.
I have no idea how that happened.

And out - my dad came to school one lunchtime and told me at the railings that my new baby sister was home from hospital! I went to the teacher to ask if I could go home, she said no so I just squeezed through the railings and ran 🤣

We had the Ladybird book of car games, one of which was searching for words in number plates, and then trying to make a sentence with them. "Our cat can fly", for instance.

One childhood enigma I had was: when a colourful scarf was tied over my eyes, why could I only see black, and not the colours? When I was blindfolded at school, I was so distracted by this that I forgot what I was supposed to be doing (guessing who was speaking in a funny voice). Yes, I do know the scientific answer.

Also, when I wore shoes without socks in the summer, why I stopped "feeling" them on my feet after a few minutes. And it was a puzzle why when we changed for PE, we did PE barefoot in the assembly hall, but were made to put our shoes on our bare feet to walk from the classroom to the hall.

In France the car regs used to show the area they'd be registered in. While travelling on our caravan holidays we used to have a map to colour in as we saw each area- was a highlight of the holiday 🤦‍♀️