What can you remember that makes you seem ancient?

[CormoranStrike]

I remember us getting our very first colour TV.

I can remember a rag and bone man coming up my granny’s street - can’t remember if it was a horse drawn trailer or not.

Granny had an Anderson shelter.

I remember not having to wear seatbelts.

When everyone used to smoke at work and in pubs.

My children had seat belts too. You could fit them yourself drilling holes in the car or pay for a garage to do it. There were Britax car seats too, which any child with a modicum of manual dexterity could undo (and often did). I don't think they were compulsory though.

Power cuts

Penny sweets

Lucozade in a glass bottle with the orange plastic on top

Really really bad winters

Playing out

The Fonz

I remember queuing with my Mom outside the local bakers shop for a loaf during a bread strike in the 70s, I think it’d be 1978, and having to pretend to not be with her so that I could get a loaf for my Grandad.

Buying ha'penny sweets and I was born in 1980 so an early memory for me as they went out of circulation in 1984.

Very shallow baths by candlelight in the 70s, during the powercuts. The water was heated by gas, but shallow baths (not above the ankle) were a throwback from the war, I think.

I remember the joy of my first deep bath!

Think I am age of op. Our rag and bone mannhad a horse cart - his call was ‘any old iron’ (sounded like ‘aoern’ which became a family word). Rand a handbell. I feel bloody Victorian writing that !

In the very late 1960s getting the occasional Queen Victoria penny in your change.

I was chatting to a friend today who is the same age as me and was telling her that I had taken 3 year old grandson on a double decker bus , he was so excited to travel on a "big bus", and commented that when I was his age it was a treat to get a ride in a car and until the early 1960's not many families had a family car, so you went everywhere on buses and trains.

HeronLanyon, I think we had the same rag and bone man, or his twin.

– First colour TV.
– Britax seatbelts that we had to wear and none of our friends' cars had. (Dad's rules.)
– But it was also normal, when the car was crammed with children, to travel in the boot of the hatchback. (Mum's rules.)
–Sawdust on the floor of the butcher's. "Under or over, madam?" as he sliced the ham and bacon on the terrifying slicer.
– Taking the lemonade bottle back to the shop for the penny deposit..
– Foot x-rays at the shoe-shop
– It was 2p for the phone box when I was at Brownies. And the same for a packet of crisps for break-time, from the shop on the way to school.
– Phoning people's parents to exchange messages when you were trying to meet up. "Oh, she's just rung in and left one for you: she's says missed the train but will meet you outside the hall at 6:30 instead."
–Nylon nighties! The horror! The sparks!
– My father in law was a cockle-seller. Used to travel at night from the Lancashire coast to sell them in London pubs; then back in time for his day-job as a milkman.
– Brown wages envelopes with the notes visible at the fold and little holes where you could jingle the coins into view.

tressilliansstones remember all of those other than your father in law obvs ! That image of him doing that is extraordinary ! Although have a fisher friend who does similar with hand fished sea bass - think the ‘cockle’ made that seem amazing to this current Londoner.

I’m from The Netherlands and I remember:

• ice skating to school along the roads during “proper” winters
• cycling along the motorway during the car-less Sundays during the oil crisis in the 70’s
• when Twix was still called a Raider
• playing Pong for hours and thinking it was super cool
• when the first MacDonald opened in the Netherlands
• my mother careering down the roads in a vanilla yellow Fiat500 which I always thought looked like a sweet bun
• only kids TV on a Wednesday afternoon from 4pm
• going on holiday and mum making up beds in the back of the car (backseats down) so my Dsis and I could sleep (and roll around!) during the journey

Gahhh....I’m officially old...

Taking your own squeezy bottle to Woolworths to get it filled with hair lacquer.
When you squeezed the bottle the lacquer came out in big droplets, nothing like the fine mist you get nowadays.

Going to the newsagents with Nanny on a Saturday afternoon to get my weekly copy of Twinkle and a bag of penny sweets before settling down to watch Big Daddy and Giant Haystacks wrestling every week .

Oh yeah, I remember the Rag n Bone man. I didn't realise he was calling out "any old iron" until years later - as a child I just thought he was foreign or something!

I also remember some plastic toy thingy that you put in the oven to shrink??

I was telling ds the other day that when I was his age we only had four tv channels and cartoons at weekends were confined to Saturday morning with a ten minute slot of tom and jerry if you were lucky in the afternoon. That's all folks.

Rotary phones
Half penny pieces
£1 notes
The test card
Shops being closed on Sundays
Playing computer games that came on cassette tapes (ZX Spectrum)

Having a black and white telly in my bedroom as a child. Didn't have buttons, just a dial that worked a bit like a radio tuner.

Pop man on a Sunday afternoon.
Glass lucozade bottles wrapped in brown cellophane.
My dad getting a mobile phone the size of an actual brick and never once using it. Lord knows how much he was paying for it.
Worksheets in French lessons at school (but bizarrely no other lessons) having the nice purple ink from the thingy that came before photocopiers.
Those flat cameras.
Kodak cameras where you could slide a button across depending on whether you wanted a panoramic or normal picture.
Outdoor Girl and Collection 2000 makeup from the market.
Starting my period and all of the pads being those super thick ones. No slim design then.
Ice on the single glazed windows in winter.
Supermarkets closing at 5.30 Pm and it being a Big Deal when Morrison’s started staying open til 8.30, but only on certain nights.
My grandma’s pantry. I’d love a pantry now.
My mum cooking all sorts of dishes that were proper ‘leftovers’ food and mainly made with ingredients to fill us up.
Cars with just lap belts in the back.
Those traffic light car air fresheners where one of the lights looked like a big diamond.
‘Proper’ dustbins.
Dog poo everywhere.
The milk man dropping off a calendar every year, and a new price list, and NEVER BEING ALLOWED TO EVEN ASK FOR ORANGE JUICE OR CHOCOLATE MILK from the milk float. I think we were quite poor.
Velvet sofas. I don’t understand this current fascination with velvet style headboards and sofas, perhaps because I had to live through the hideousness of it the ‘first’ time round.
Being convinced that a war was starting every time a plane flew over and running inside screaming.
Kerching tickets on the bus.
Buses being stopped one winters day when it started properly snowing, and loudspeakers being used to announce it. It felt very strange.
Hand me downs. So many hand me downs.
Sunday opening being introduced and it being really exciting.
My dad going to the bank to withdraw cash (he still does - refuses to use a card most of the time!).
Having to find a bank on holiday to cash in travellers cheques.
My dad’s business cards having a telex number on them - I don’t even know what that is!
A dial phone that we only replaced because it was properly broken and the BT engineer laughed when he saw how old the connection box thingy was.
Wanting to write to jimll fix it and not being allowed as ‘hes A bit strange’.
My last job had a weird thing on the wall in the toilets where you put your used sanitary pads. I think it was called an incinerator. Did it burn them there and then? I have never come across one before or since. It was an old building though, never modernised.

Ooh and 4 star petrol!

I remember going swimming and seeing signs for the ‘slipper bath’ - what was this? They’ve gone now of course.

I was a teenager in the 70s but my mum was a war baby, brought up poor and frugal so she was (and is) incredibly careful with money and resources even when she became relatively well off. We were never allowed a bath with more than 5 in of luke warm water. Once I turned 15 and got a Saturday job I used to take myself off ro the ‘slipper baths’. You got a private cubicle with a big deep bathtub that you could fill as deep as you wanted with lovely hot water, they even threw in a nice clean towel for an extra 10p. I could lie back and wallow with no recriminations.

Eventually mum was embarrassed by my doing this and got dad to install an electric shower.

Who ran these baths? Were they in leisure centres?

Lol! Leisure centres! We had counci swimming pools in those days and the slipper baths were (at least in our area) part of the swimming pool buildings.

It used to cost 4p a swim in the big pool and for my birthday when I was in my early teens I used to get an annual season ticket so i could swim every day. I seem to remember it cost about £3.80.

Writing my dissertation by hand (pen and paper) using real books from a library for reference and then having to pay someone to type it up on a type-writer.

My Grandma had to go next door to use the phone, you had to get up to change the TV channel plus the "pop" bottles went back to the shop for a couple of pennies refund.

Re seatbelts - we were made to wear them before they were compulsory and we HATED it. That said, my sister as a baby just went in a carry cot on the back seat.......