The Bluestocking, a unique location for daughters and sisters of earth, frost, feathers, fur, scales and spines

We didn’t have central heating either. For quite a bit of my childhood no phone, car or fridge. TV from Radio Rentals.

The first TV DH1 and I bought, while we were still students and had no money, was an ex-Radio Rentals appliance. It had lost the knob you used to change the channel so you had to change the channel by gripping the spindle with eyebrow tweezers. Every now and again it would start misbehaving, which you dealt with by thumping it two inches from the bottom on the left hand side.

I remember going into Radio Rentals on the way home from school to make the payment with a logbook of some sort each week - for some reason I am certain it was a Thursday. Beginning to feel old, because I now also remember collecting green shield stamps … but for the life of me cannot remember anything we cashed them in for? I am guessing I wanted to exchange them for a toy, but can’t actually recall ever doing it.

I remember getting three books of Green Shield stamps when we bought a bed from what was then Tesco Home and Wear but I can’t recall what we used them for! But it was in 1972 so…

On the way home from school usually with an adult - but I also remember being sent alone with the book and a pound note, so must have been sent out in the holidays. And yes - given the threads asking whether its okay for y7 child to walk to senior school - I am sometimes taken aback at what I used to be allowed or was made to do as an 8/9 year old.

My mum used to send me to the off-license (which was a side entrance into a part of the pub, next to the ‘ladies lounge’) with a letter and 50p to buy her 20 Benson and Hedges! In fact, I’ve just had to look up the ladies lounge bit - they were legally challenged in 1982 in light of the 1975 Sex Discrimination Act. I’d forgotten we were still segregated into the 80’s!

More drama in the arena! Hence my late night post. I discovered a major discrepancy in a legal document and everything must be halted until it is fixed. This is actually terrific news and means I may yet be triumphant.

We had central heating but my father refused to put it on, so the house was freezing. Six of us in the living room around a gas fire. Telephone in the hall. No TV for years because of cost and licence fee. Duvets without covers because we couldn't afford the continental quilts and covers. Coats and blankets piled on top. Plastic covering the inside of the bathroom windows as cheap double glazing.

As a result I do not care how much my heating bill is, I will pay for warmth. We also had Green Shield Stamps.

Different days.

We never had Green Shield stamps - I thought you only got them with petrol?

Certainly had all the rest...and before the Co-op stamps, we had the dividend - I still remember Mum's number.

I used to be sent down the High Street to get Mum's shopping...or sometimes to make a complaint about an item!

I've just remembered: my teachers would send me to get their shopping when I finished my work early, I kid you not - certainly from the age of 10 for the High Street and from the age of 9 for Mary's General Store, the wee shop on the corner, opposite our ground floor flat. The High Street was a bit further away.

I'll add that I remember being sent to Boot's to buy migraine tablets for one of my teachers!

Crumbs. I'd have been struck off the teaching register for doing that.

Good luck Myrtle!

After a brief detour to read all the Abbey Girls books on fadedpage.com, I’ve gone back to Sarah Dunant’s books about the Borgias (thanks @PastaAllaNorma!)

Thoroughly enjoying them & it was also interesting to realise that Pope Alexander VI & Henry VII were around at the same time.

I've still got a plate that came via Co-op stamps. For what felt like years they did some quite ugly but robust crockery, and half the district ate off it, including the very well-off family I babysat for (two cars!)

We had an open fire, a couple of fan heaters, and a coal boiler to heat the water when I was at primary school.

As for freedom - at 9 I was allowed to roam bloody miles, climb trees and fences unsupervised, paddle in the river with no adult in sight... It was just assumed that you'd learn from experience, and that a few bumps and scrapes were nothing to worry about. In the holidays we were all just booted out for the day after breakfast and expected to entertain ourselves while our mothers went to work, did the laundry, whatever.

I'm still worrying about those poor little gerbils...

@MyrtleLion ooh good luck - What a result!

@WearyAuldWumman and I agree. I know lots of people who run their homes cooler than us and just pop a sweater [or two] on, but I hate being bundled up in the house.I remember wearing a coat to bed over pjs in the depths of winter, too, and the picking the ice off the inside of the windows because the clingfilm diy double glazing didn’t really work. But I do think the normality of everyone having to be in the one room together - as it was the only source of heat - fostered a togetherness that we don’t get anymore with our teens up in their bedrooms on devices all day. Admittedly, it also meant you couldn’t get away from abusive parents (or the chain smoking ones 🤢) but life seemed a little less complicated in many ways.

Our house wasn’t too cold, dad would rise early to clear out and relight the fire in the living room (which was really the dining room but had a couple of big ‘utility’ chairs by the fire), then bring us all tea and turn on electric fires in our bedrooms for us if necessary. At some point we got electric blankets so we didn’t have to get into chilly beds but I do remember having chilblains.

The ‘sitting room’ had a stove which mum hated and when the family income increased when she returned to teaching as soon as I was five it was replaced by a stylish and effective gas fire.

Just realised I need to drag myself out of memory lane as I need to get ready to go out volunteering today!
HAGDAPA

I'm going to use a pattern AI provided, without me prompting it. It's a bottom up pattern that means you just keep knitting until you run out of yarn.

There is a side to side method that means increasing on one side only until midway, then decreasing on the same side. Midway is when you've used half your ball of yarn, and I'm not sure I could judge that. I might well end up with yarn left over, or a bit missing at one end where I've run out too soon.

There are some photos on Etsy here
https://www.etsy.com/uk/listing/4577747151/easy-small-triangle-scarf-knitting?ref=elp_anchor_listing&pro=1&dd=1 The main one and then more if you scroll down to 'You may also like".

I’m getting to a complicated bit in the cat blanket where in order to do what I want, I think I’m going to have to turn it over & work backwards to plan it out, & add lots of stitch markers as guidelines. Once they’re in it should be easy.

We had a coke-fuelled Rayburn range in the kitchen (similar to, but cheaper than, an Aga). As well as having an oven and hob, it also heated the water for the tank upstairs in one of the bedrooms. So that side of the house was always warm in winter, in sharp contrast to the front of the house, which was always freezing unless the electric heaters were on. In the summer, we used an immersion heater for water and an electric cooker which lived in the scullery with the washing machine, as the Rayburn would have created too much heat. Electricity must have been much cheaper then!

Free The Gerbil Three!😬

I remember the sound of the curtain coming away from the ice...

My neighbour has - irrc - a wood-fired Rayburn (or something similar). There is a currently a massive lump of oak by their gate awaiting the attentions of a chainsaw. I don't think they use oil at all.

Your dad sounds lovely, Errol, very caring and considerate

Tending to the fire in the kitchen was my job as soon as I was big enough - nobody told me to do it, but I was always the earliest riser in the family so it just became something I did.
I learnt not to rake out the grate first thing, after a few experiences of irate bleary-eyed family members opening the kitchen door saying 'It's only 6, I could have had a whole extra hour's sleep!'

Green Shield Stamps came with groceries. They were considered wonderful because you appeared to be getting something for nothing, and my parents' generation never got nothing for nothing, ever, in what was then one of the most impoverished countries in Europe.

One of my uncles used to try to explain to my mother that they were a false economy, that nothing is ever free, the cost was added on somehow...
she wouldn't listen, she was getting things she didn't pay for - a mug, a soup ladle, a tablemat - and that was wonderful, full stop

I do indeed. The only permanent source of heat in our small stone cottage was the Rayburn in the kitchen, which also provided our hot water. Otherwise the front room fire would be lit in time for it to be warm for the evening's TV watching and bedrooms only had fires if we were actually ill in bed in winter.

Whereas I prefer to wear an extra layer or two in the winter, Anony, and keep the room temperature very moderate. As a lifelong asthmatic I find hot rooms make my breathing worse. I especially hate hot bedrooms and whenever we visited my dear MiL in cooler weather, the first thing I did was turn off the radiator in our bedroom. Warm bed, but cool bedroom is my ideal. 🙂

I grew up in a very warm house - my mum liked the temperature to be set around 22⁰ at least. She'd grown up cold and hated it. My brother and I lived in T-shirts all year around when inside.

The first house I remember had central air, so I could stand on the grill set into the floor in my nightdress and it would balloon like a hooped ballgown. I thought that was the most fun you could have when I was 4.

When I moved to the UK and lived in my grandmother's tiny unheated terrace stone cottage - where the windows were completely iced every morning - over I nearly died of shock.