Crap 'hobbies' you had as a child.

[DrMadelineMaxwell]

I used to go around the village where I used to live with my notebook and pen and write down number plates. I can still recall my Dad's car plate.

This is a cause of much mirth to my kids who have clearly never known the heady excitement of a long sunday afternoon pre internet days.

I had a startling amount of knowledge about the Jack the Ripper murders and old torture methods when I was about 10/11 😳

Oooh, just remembered another. Age 13, I tried to teach myself Italian by writing down all the words and phrases that were used in a Nancy Drew novel set in Italy.

It didn't go very well.

Shrinking crisp packets in my mother's oven

When she was at work

This thread is amazing and hilarious!
I love weaving with 5 sticks 🤣
The bar chart of passing cars 🤣
I don’t think these were boring childhoods, it was using your imagination.
I admit I made library tickets for my books and even had a stamp & ink pad if my sister wanted a book 🤣

@LaneBoy I subscribed to Murder Casebook Magazine as a teen.
As well as buying that terrible 'newspaper' The national enquirer.

Also the Argos catalogue - I would fully furnish an imaginary house down to the teaspoons and work out the cost.

Yep!

Spent hours going down the stairs in a sleeping bag (anyone else?)

Saturday evenings were spent watching The Fall Guy, The A Team and T J Hooker, I'm not sure why these programmes appealed to an 7-8yo girl!

Also loved watching Murder, Mystery, Suspense (some were really quite scary, one was about a woman who was locked in a college after dark by a stalker and she couldn't escape), again I was about 8, there's no way I'd be letting an 8yo watch that, same with Tales Of The Unexpected!

Oh and I loved looking up words in the dictionary of things I liked, like kittens, sweets, tombola etc!

My kids would literally never do that. (they do have a dictionary though!) but it would never occur to them, but then they have hundreds more kids things than I had in terms of entertainment. Maybe that's why. The world wasn't kid-centric back then in the way it is now and so you ha to learn use your imagination more.

I was a bit obsessed with making (really shit) bows and arrows from our spindly willow tree.
Not me, but I worked with someone who made a Wooden segmented box for bus tickets.

@PrivateSpidey yes!!! That's the one, it was landscape format, wiro bound and a blue cover, Art Deco, and the western fonts were favourites.

@Livebythecoast ha ha I mine was called cheeky, also very imaginative.. and thank you what a nice compliment.

Great thread! Yes, collecting smelly erasers, and stickers in a sticker album which you might swap with friends until they lost their stickiness and fell off. Porcelain Thimble collection. Stamp collecting, spending ages soaking any post that came our way in little saucers of water to float the stamps off. Spent all my pocket money collecting all the Flower fairies poetry books. Then later collecting Sweet valley high books. Collecting panini sticker albums, and " swapsies" Making homemade comics and magazines, and recording our own radio shows on cassette tape. The Argos catalogue "when I get my dream home" game. Writing out the lyrics to songs. Spending every waking hour roller skating everywhere, or looking for nice smooth tarmac paths to skate over. I might take up some of these again. Simpler times

@DrMadelineMaxwell

Oh my god, I'd totally blanked it out until now, but I used to do the same thing!!

@ElizabethMainwaring

Yep, brown stink water. You're not a child until you've made perfume out of flowers and given it to your mum as a 'present'

@MarthasGinYard

I hope your parents had good fire insurance!

I used to cut models out of the grattan catalogue and make them into families, all members of the family had to have a name starting with the same letter!

Collecting thimbles. Really? I even took them to school for the 'hobbies exhibition' - cringing to even think about how uncool that was.

Wow, yes, roller-booting everywhere. The boots weighed a ton, I must have had immense core strength and thighs of steel.

Sigh...

Flower pressing (we used blotting paper and books)
Collecting stamps
Writing to random pen pals (there used to be an organisation who matched you up with people abroad)

I tried to explain to my children how little there was to do in the 70s/80s and parents didn't really take us out all the time. So we had to find things to do. I do think we were forced to make up our own fun with no continual TV or internet to keep us occupied.

I did have normal hobbies too.

This is a great loving it all
I used collect little plastic frogs I don't know what happened to them
My friend and I used to pretend we worked in a library I found some of these books lately and had a chuckle to myself
I used to also love when Argos book came out i'd circle all the things I wanted when I was grown up, wish I'd kept it to see how bad my taste was.
I used to spend hours also spinning round and round my parents clothes pole. My parents neighbours must of been amused

@OhWhatFuckeryIsThisNow, you've just reminded me...
I spent far too much pocket money at the local garden centre buying those little green sticks and some thin bamboo canes to make bows and arrows! They never really worked, surprisingly.

I went through a phase of drawing and cutting out my own bank notes/money and giving them out to family. They even had a little drawing of the Queen on them! 😂

I had a tape recorder and used to make "radio programs" with myself making funny noises, playing music and imagining I was a radio presenter. Sometimes I faked interviews with famous people, trying (and failing) to imitate the voice of said famous person.

I also recorded children's program's start and credit music.

@BerryPieandCustard I have not got past the first page (no, no, I haven't RTFT), but am so freaked out by your post - either I wrote this post in my sleep, you are my sister pretending to be me, or we are weird doppelganger childhood hobby twins, as I also used to collect hedgehog ornaments, had a navy hedgehog jumper and used to obsess over the Argos catalogue ...

Spooky.

Was just saying to my mum the other day that if things got really boring for her, she could read the Argos catalogue

@smellbow I’m glad to FINALLY find others who shared my love of catalogs!!!

I thought my hedgehog jumper was ace and wore it as often as possible, thought I was so stylish!!!

@BerryPieandCustard I also had another hedgehog jumper that my gran had knitted with a big hedgehog in fluffy wool and baby hedgehogs "walking" round. I would still wear that today.

Who knew the Argos catalogues were such a thing?