Random childhood stuff you have no explanation for.

I was an elastics queen.

”England Ireland Scotland Wales. Inside outside monkey’s tails”

We used to play a game called “elastics” - lots of rubber bands looped together to make a huge one and two girls would stand at each end with it stretched around their ankles and we’d take it in turns to do an elaborate jumping routine inside, outside and on top of the elastic with an accompanying chant.

Also we would use a long piece of washing line for a skipping game. One girl would take each end to “twine” the rope and the rest would join, one by one, until the whole group was skipping. “All in together girls, never mind the weather girls” (can’t remember the rest).

”Hot OXO” might have been a peculiarity of my mum. If you’d been ill, as you were starting to recover, you’d be offered a “hot oxo” - essentially a beef oxo cube dissolved in boiling water.

My brother and I would count VW beetles, or Herbies as well called them, after the movie franchise.

If driving in the bush, we would beg mum or dad to beep the horn so we could count how many resting kangaroos would pop their heads up above the grass line. Fun times.

I remember taking a square flask of juice into school and putting it in a crate outside for playtime. This was in the 80s. Also, there was a lot of milk drinking!

We had an escaped bull in our school playground once and had to stay indoors.

A dog wandered into my kids’ school recently- there was a big conversation about it. One of the children told the others about how it stood at the side door for ages, as if it knew ‘that’s the door you’re not allowed go into’. It apparently wandered the corridors, was shooed out, then wandered around the yard as one of the classes did pe. The excitement at something so everyday really was lovely!!

Does anyone know anyone who actually got their head flushed down a toilet? This was the rumour that went about when you started secondary school but I never heard of it actually happening.

We had one!

When our pet rabbit died, my dad wrapped him in newspaper and put him on the coal bunker awaiting burial. I was about 3.5, and my mum said he’d gone to heaven. But I could see his little foot sticking out from his shroud on the coal bunker.

For a long time, I thought going to heaven meant you’d be going to a coal bunker. I couldn’t understand why Sunday school made such a big deal about heaven when it was just a coal bunker.

When Woolworths still existed, they had a summer scheme going where if you collected up empty soft drink cans for recycling they’d give you 2p. It took nearly all summer but by the end I had enough for a Fruits of the Nature miniature bubble bath.

We’d play pub cricket on long journeys which involved counting the number of legs on the pub signage i.e. Red Lion, four legs, Horse and Hounds multiple legs. I don’t remember the rules but it kept us entertained.

At school, there was a craze for French Skipping at playtime which involved a very long piece of elastic, three people or two people and a chair. Loved that game as I was quite good at it. Happy days!

I still have a coal bunker in my back garden! Coal fire long gone now though and its full of random crap!

That’s right ! How can that possibly work ? I’d forgotten the chant - this would have been in the late 60s for me.

Yes! Do you know how that worked?

Wow! Are your toes unusually widely spaced out by any chance?

We used to go out on our bikes all day. You either knew the roads or had to carry a local map with you as there was no other way of finding out where you were! We totally relied on our watches to know what time to come back!

if we went out as a family, if there were too many kids, some of us would travel in the boot. I think this only became illegal in 1989! You would see loads of kids in the backs of cars making gestures at the drivers behind them!

I used to do this! Had a special little notebook just for collecting car registration numbers! The ice cream can was a good one to trade 😆

Did anyone live in one of those areas where there were random WWII concrete buildings in the fields? We called them bomb shelters but they barely fitted one person in and were sort of open at the front so would have been totally useless in a real bomb… also who on earth would need a bomb shelter in some random field?! It was clearly something else. Anyone have any idea?

I had a few I-Spy books and loved trying to complete them. If you completed one, you could send it off to Chief Pow Wow and he’d send it back with a certificate!

You didn’t imagine it. We had a photo of my two brothers (I wasn’t born yet or was a tiny baby) at the seaside with a dressed up monkey. Was late-Sixties or early-Seventies. I have the photo somewhere I think.

Does anyone remember coal bunkers? When I was a child every house had one, and the coal man would come every week with coal in a sack to fill it.

@3luckystars You need to read The Chimneys of Green Knowe!

Elastics games with songs: "England, [jump 180 degree turns] Ireland, Scotland, Wales; inside, outside, inside, scales [jump onto the elastic]" etc

Handball, played as multiple games at once by a whole section of the playground that was painted as a grid, about 30 kids at a time

Skipping with multiple people as a voluntary game, i.e. outside being made to (fail to) do it in PE.

Girls playing horse games, galloping round the playground having exciting adventures and neighing (ok that one was a bit weird and probably only done in places where everyone had read The Silver Brumby).

Now it seems to just be the boys all playing football and the girls all sitting down nattering so they don't get their clothes dirty... (and my son sitting up a tree...)

My brother had a photo took with tiny monkeys - he must’ve been about 9 months old (wtf mum?) and they were sat in his pram!

It would’ve been 1976, NE England.

We sometimes got random cows in the school grounds fields close by.

Ha ha, we used to live behind the school we attended as children. Our dog was a known escape artist. According to my Mum, she would often get calls from the school telling her our dog was there (again). So does that explain the mystery of the random dogs at school? 🤣

I've got a photo of me in a pushchair with one of those monkeys. Would have been early 1970s in the UK - either England or Wales.

Yep me and my Db did this too but we thought we were cleverer than other kids because we wrote down the colour of the cars too .

At about the same time , the early 80s we had a dog that was allowed to roam free so much so that she knew how to knock on the front door by lifting the letter box flap with her nose .
Our cat would stretch up to the window in the front door so he could peer in and we could see him and let him in .