It's the summer of '76 and I'm off to the corner shop on my bike....

[barbedwired]

And I'm getting an orange mivvy, and some fruit salads

Old English Spangles - I'll have all the yellow ones- for me please. And don't forget to tuck your flares into your socks or they'll flap into the chain.

I'm 13 and have a Mediterranean tan from doing my paper round in this incredible heat. I'm usually in my tie waist cheesecloth shirt and brown denim shorts. I will use paper round money to buy Jackie mag, save for clothes at Tammy Girl and stock up on cola cubes, sherbet pips etc. Later I will go to my Nana's and we will have Birds Eye crispy pancakes for tea while we watch Starsky and Hutch. After I will play in the fields next to her home. The fields which are now the M23

I've "caught the sun" so I'm red and will have lots of calamine lotion put on which will hurt when I want to get it off as it has to be scrubbed off.

The seat of my dad's car is vinyl and burns my legs in this heat

I can't decide if I want a cherry brandy lolly or a darlek lolly! If I don't get sweet cigarettes I might get the sweetie necklace, bracelet or lipstick.

I am walking through the park with my mum and can see the big girls sitting on tin foil and covering themselves with oil, so they go brown. We are going to my nan's and she will give me a home made lolly made on a cup and it will take me half an hour to chip the surface with a spoon!

We're driving down from London to Kent to go strawberry picking and a picnic. Three families crammed into two cars, my sister and me along with at least two other children will get to ride in the boot of my mum's Renault 4.

Then tomorrow we might set up a stall in the front garden and sell the contents of our parents' drinks cabinet for 5p and maybe invite strange men into the garden to watch us perform a circus do some cartwheels in our nylon leotards while our parents are out somewhere for the day.

I've just learned to swim!

Aw this thread is making me so nostalgic! Not only for the sweets and clothes but remember my parents and neighbours (most of them dead now) sitting outside every evening cos it was so hot! Great memories.

Loving the photos too!

I don't like going out in the sun; I prefer to sit in the shade and read.
My mother wishes I was like Karen J down the road who's always out playing in the road and is "brown as a little berry".

I don't go brown; I go red, like a holly berry, and very sore 🙁
It's fun peeling off all the dead skin a few days later, though 😀

I am wearing my current favourite t shirt which says ' lip smackin', thirst quenchin', ace tastin', motivatin', good buzzin', cool walkin', high talkin', fast livin', cool fizzin', ever givin' PEPSI!' on it. (I've done that from memory), and I am looking forward to watching Starsky and Hutch tonight.

My best friend and I scrounged a couple of cardboard boxes from the local Spar, flattened them and used them to slide down the dry grass on the railway banking. Perfectly safe as the passenger trains had been discontinued by 1976 and there were only a handful of goods trains a day. We may not have mentioned this activity to our mothers.
Sweets came in little cone-shaped 2 ounce bags. My favourites were midget gems and floral gums. A quarter was a rare treat.

I'll have a packet of Tutti Frutti please.

I'm just walking home with my sister, so cool walking through the woods. I am 8 and she is 10. There's nothing scary about walking in the woods by ourselves.

When we get home first thing I'll do is see if our ladybirds are ok. We caught them, put them in card board chocolate egg boxes. We put breathing holes in the boxes and left them a bit of grass so they should be ok?

I'm a redhead so I've given up ever trying to get a tan. I always cover my legs with long cheesecloth type skirts, loon pants or my new straight legged Levis's but people keep asking when I'm going to put flares in the seams. Punk is just around the corner folks.

I'm 6 and have also 'caught the sun'.

My skin is peeling off like a leper's and my mum keeps saying, 'I told you to put your jumper on' (in 90 degrees).

Next door neighbour has coated herself in cooking oil and foil and is sunbathing topless.

I'm 8. Lucky the standpipe is at the top of our drive so we don't have far to get the water.
It's so hot!
Can I have a quarter of Rainbow Crystal please?

it's so hot our local news had a reporter cooking eggs on the pavement.
I'm off to school camp, think they call it outbound centres now.
Soon to start secondary, wonder what that will be like?
Until then, lots of lemonade, traditional spangles and bike rides.

This thread has made me yearn for 1976 and I wasn’t even born til 1980

Can you please get me:

Pacers
Mixed toffos
Spangles
Sausage & tomato flavour crisis
Carton of juice
Bunty comic
Beano comic

Make sure the shopkeeper wraps the change in paper so you don't lose it.

Can I have an ice pop please?

I'm 6 and I'm in my back garden playing swingball. The grass is scorched yellow and my mum is lying on a blanket her asleep turning bright read. The icecream van comes and I run outside with bowl and get a bowl of whippy icecream.

later on I'll be in my white nightie trying to sleep but won't be able to as it's just too hot.

We've just bought our first house and are painting the outside woodwork - a condition of the mortgage - and wondering if anyone will come and check that we've done it.

Can I have a Mini Milk please (or a Cornetto if my mum's not looking), cos I've got really horrible whooping cough?

(was too ill to have the jab as a baby. My parents are still traumatised. Playing out wasn't a thing any more thanks to cars and a nearby serial rapist)

I'm 12 and have just started a love affair with Radio One that will last at least a year. My favourite hit of the summer? Parisian Cafe Blue. When I can be persuaded to leave the radio behind, I'll bike to the river with a mate or two and be frozen from the waist down sitting on the rocks. My top half is veritably sizzling. Nan may have bought a kunzle cake for tea, but I hope she's put it in the fridge or it will be stuck to my favourite lime green riches top for many twin tub washes to come.

I'm 10. I'll have any magazine with David Soul on it please, even the TV Times.

Nicola and I will probably spend the day practicing our Brotherhood of Man dance routine in the garden, I'll get too hot and sweaty, she'll remain her lovely cool self ( still the same 44 years later). Sometime this summer my poor little guinea pigs will succumb to the heat

I'm five and we spend every day down at our beach hut, a man cycles past every so often selling toffee apples and peanuts which he shouts out as he cycles. Very occasionally I might be allowed a toffee apple.
My favourite from the corner shop was King Kong banana ice lollies so I'll have one of those please!

My mum won't let me or my brother watch The Sweeney on telly as it's "too violent". I watch Starsky and Hutch instead.

I forgot!!! I met dh that year he had long hair & a long droopy moustache - v sexy! he wore cheese clothe shirts (it would have been great to have shares in importers or makers who made them as everybody under 30 wore them!)