STRANGE THINGS YOU USED TO READ

I thought I was unusual in reading cereal packets and phone books etc and when I was telling my daughter about it, I put it down to it being the 70s and 80s and I just had to read whatever was available!

My grandma’s Readers Digest / Woman’s Realm (which I called in my head Re-alm), Family Circle and Woman magazines.

My dad’s newspaper (The Mirror) or local newspaper. DH is always astounded at my depth of knowledge of news and celebrity events from the 80s, given that I was born in 1974. Also, The Sunday Sun, which I always thought was a Scottish newspaper because it had ‘The Broons’ and ‘Oor Willie’ comics in it, but a quick Google seems to imply it’s a North-east paper. My dad also bought me the annuals of both of those comics.

Loads of books about ponies and horses. Gymkhanas were very far from my world but my cousin loved horses and I inherited all her books. I never found them very interesting but they were better than having nothing to read.

Lace, Flowers in the Attic etc as a young teen. No idea where they even came from. I assume my mother’s bookshelf but she’s not a reader at all. I think she did get books from those monthly book clubs but no idea why?

Radio and TV times, holiday brochures, Argos catalogue and those free magazines that used to come with newspapers, full of ‘handy’ inventions, such as tap grippers to make turning a tap on easier for arthritic sufferers.

Postcards in the newsagent’s window. I always knew who was selling a fridge, lost a cat or looking for cleaning work.

The deaths notice in the local paper. I was 8 and unlikely to know any of the people.

Yes, why do these things stick? There was a Cub Scout Annual in our family when I was about 10 which had a poem called Post That Litter and, so help me, I can still do it from memory:

Five excited cub scouts had a picnic with the pack.
William ate an orange, threw the peel behind his back.

Jonathan had some chocolate, gave the other two a bit.
They dropped the silver paper into a sandy pit.

Bellamy had some biscuits and some chocolate wafers which
He shared with John and Gordon, dropped the paper in a ditch.

Then Akela saw the litter, said they'd quite disgraced the pack.
So now they put their litter in a proper rubbish sack.

Yes - I loved Robert Graves's Welsh Incident ('The populations of Pwllheli, Criccieth, Portmadoc (sic), Borth, Tremadoc and Penrhyndeudraeth were all assembled...'), so I got a thrill when I read the dialling code booklet and found there was a code for Penrhyndeudraeth.

What I liked in Reader's Digest was Buy-lines - that section where someone, first Alison Grey, later Madeleine McDonnell, would push products as if they were personal recommendations when they were actually paid advertisements. I remember reading a stack of them in a youth hostel common room on a family holiday when I was 14. Then, one time when I was doing A level French, we were given a French Reader's Digest to read, and there was the same feature, now called Sylvia a noté pour vous.

@Tiredpigeon Did you read Backchat on teletext (where teenagers could send in "short and snappy" comments)? I remember one from about 1997, which I think sums up the whole of modern social media: "Backchat is brill because of all the stupid things you write in about. Keep up the good work, everybody, it's so funny!"

@MarkWithaC I loved reading dictionaries. I also loved the "first thousand words" books, and was amused that in the original ones (before they were modernised and all the fun bits removed), the people would be in sticky situations, such as children sweeping tins off the supermarket shelves, or somebody dropping eggs, with everybody turning to look at them.

@Chesticov Did your parents blindfold you, or just tell you to close your eyes? And did they reveal what the eye was straight away? There were loads of other "joke" party games that I remember reading about, and I so wanted to take part in! But I didn't dare to stage these for anyone else. Some of them were real meanies:

Submarine. Putting an anorak over a child's head, zipping them inside, and holding the sleeve upwards for them to look through, telling them that it's the submarine periscope. Then saying "we're going under the water now, and lowering the periscope"; and then you empty some water down the sleeve.

Obstacle course, in which you blindfold someone, and tell them they have to find their way through the course. Then you quietly remove the obstacles.

I know someone who did this for an 18th birthday child, with their birthday money. Blindfold someone, tell them they have to find a small object in the room, and they can ask yes/no questions about where it is, and they can move about. When they're not getting anywhere, tell them to ask questions such as "is it behind me?". Eventually they realise that when they ask "is it in front of me?" the answer is always yes, no matter which way they are facing, and the object is hidden inside their blindfold.

I did experience this one: being blindfolded outdoors, and lifted into the air, and being told I'm flying very high indeed, with the tiny scenery below described, when I was actually only a few inches above the ground; and then being told to jump off what I'm standing on, which feels like miles, when it's actually something very low.

The dictionary
A thesaurus
The phone book
The Avon catalogue (baffling; I was not a 'girly' girl at all and was a latecomer to beauty products and make-up et al).
The Innovations catalogue ('useful' gadgets that, IIRC, were actually anything but!)

Wonderful thread! All of these, especially bottles in the bathroom, cereal boxes and Readers Digests. I regularly took a dictionary (English or French) to bed to read. I also loved the hatches-matches-despatches in the local, free paper...in fact I was the only one in the house that read that paper front to back every week. I loved any horoscopes or problem pages I could find, anywhere. I remember spending hours reading random stuff on Ceefax or Teletext. I still read anything and everything and completely agree that this is why I enjoy Mumsnet!

I used to do this!

I remember my parents doing this party game for us. Our eye was an orange instead of a cucumber. I remember squealing!

Also another party game where you followed a torch light through a sheet with your nose. Then got a wet sponge in your face as you appeared at the top.

I bet they came from this book!!

I used to memorise notices around my school, such as instructions on fire extinguishers, although I didn’t know what they were for. I remember this notice, full of big words: “The authority does not hold any responsibility for any item of property left by any person on these premises”.

In the bath, I loved reading shampoo and bath foam labels. I used to collect leaflets from places we visited to read.

Anything. Absolutely anything. But as a teenager growing up rurally in the 80s, I loved the Observer property ads. All for lovely houses in London. I used to imagine what they looked like. Still love property websites. (I don't live in London though.)

The strange notices in public loos about venereal diseases. My little head just couldn't fathom out what they were & I found them slightly disturbing. I used to read them out to my mum and ask umpteen questions.

Yes I had the Fireside book. Loved the pictures as well. I used to make up songs using the poems as lyrics and my brother would play the drums at the same time 😆😆

My parents had a lot of popular psychology books, such as Families and How to Survive Them, which I loved reading

I can recall reading my mum’s copies of How Not to Be a Perfect Mother by Libby Purves and The Parents’ Survival Guide by Laurie Graham. Can’t think what I got out of them, being a child myself!

You’ve just reminded me that I also loved reading books of party games. I was also very fond of a party cake recipe book belonging to my mum and can still recall some of the pictures to this day!

I liked books of party games as well. I was fascinated by one called "Nelson's Eye", which I never saw played, in which a blindfolded child is given Nelson's hat and coat to feel, then told "here is where Nelson lost his eye", and made to poke their finger into the centre of a cucumber, or bowl of jelly.

Also, I loved factual Ladybird books: always beautifully illustrated, and written in a short-and-to-the-point style. I learned about grave robbery, or "body snatching" from the book "What to look for outside a church".

"This chap 'Anon' is writing some perfectly good stuff, but nobody seems to know who is agent is." (Flanders and Swann)

I loved the Highway Code as a child, and I memorised all the road signs. There was one really long sentence that just didn't make sense to my eight-year-old mind, though: "A green arrow may be provided in addition to the full green signal if movement in a certain direction is allowed before or after the full green phase."

My parents had a lot of popular psychology books, such as Families and How to Survive Them, which I loved reading. I devoured a book "Children are people too" on my parents' shelves, which argued strongly against smacking, and noted that English has developed a remarkable vocabulary for this, listing about twenty synonyms.

This.
It took me years to realise that anon wasn't the same name constantly being repeated.. and what was their surname? 😂

I loved looking through the phone book too!

The Observer books;constellations, flowers, gem stones etc. Parents Home Doctor book, Some random 1920s or 30s book about handy household tips & home management. I remember one gem in it said female chauffers should be of attractive appearance, oh and how to resole your shoes with old tyres. I loved Exchange and Mart, cars, caravans and bondage gear 😂

@ClemmyTine, yes!

Any printed material whatsoever (as well as my usual library books and books ordered from a magazine that came round school with a green bookworm on it, anyone remember that?)

I read Reader’s Digest too (why was it so popular over here?), the local paper, my parents and grandparents old books (medical dictionaries, Atlases (still fascinated by maps), some of my mother’s college course books (about law and democracy and the constitution, or why Britain doesn’t exactly have one).

The good stuff: parents got me a full set of junior Encyclopaedia Brittanica (anyone remember the red covers?) and I devoured it. Learned an awful lot; some of it dated now but Greek gods never age! The Beano every week - Bash Street Kids Lord Toffy Nose must have been a role model for Rees-Mogg, and I loved the Numbskulls with the little people inside a brain - a bit like Inside Out! and as I got older I grew up on the Grauniad and its Women’s page, which is why it makes me so sad and angry that the Guardian has sold out women over trans identifying men. Later on I bought Just 17 and then Cosmopolitan which was most of my sex education!

The bad: comics like Jackie and what was the other 70s one with lots of illustrated stories - there was one about a Victorian “angel” girl who wanted to do good all the time - looking back, strange reactionary values which may have been a backlash to 70s feminism.
My Dad’s photography magazines which back in the 70s and 80s had a lot of nude photography in them, and I also found his porn magazines, tame 70s stuff but shocking to early teens me.

So many of these are making me LOL. I read, amongst many other things: old ‘Giles’ annuals; Readers Digest (a friend of my parents gave us old copies and Mum was too polite to tell her to stop); Exchange and Mart; every woman’s mag going plus my weekly ‘Jackie’. Dad was a crossworder so we had several old dictionaries, notably a Chambers Illustrated from the 19thc, instilling a lifelong love in me of browsing any and all books containing lists of words and definitions.

In my first adult job my friend and I got hooked on American women’s magazines like Ladies’ Home Journal and used to hoot with laughter over the ads for incomprehensible foodstuffs and recipes involving cans of soup. Then we chanced on a book about the Victorian ‘Girl’s Own Paper’, whose ‘Answers to Correspondents’ pages are hilarious and tragic, and I started buying bound volumes of the originals. I still have probably ten or so volumes and it’s a guilty pleasure to browse through them. Actually, any kind of old - especially Victorian - magazine is like catnip to me.