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.

Brace yourselves; I used to collect owl pellets, dissect them, then draw and list the contents. I was in a club at school and everything.

I used to rate my shoes by how comfortable they were to wear on bare feet. It was thrilling trying on a new pair of trainers without socks after we’d come home from buying them (my mum wouldn’t let me try them on without socks in the shop).

An older cousin liked to paint my toenails; sometimes I’d be blindfolded while she did it, so I could then put shoes or slippers on and see how long it was before I gave in to the temptation to see what colour she’d done them. I liked having “a part of me that I didn’t know about”.

I made up a code for my books (I assume copying what I'd seen at the library), labelled them all and arranged them on my shelves. Every so often I would come up with (what I considered to be) a superior way of coding them and change the labels/reorganise. My DC found one of my labelled books in granny's loft not long ago and I pretended not to know why it was full of stickers with numbers/letters!

When I was small my aunt had lots of hobbies and I was sure I would do exactly the same when I was an adult (unlike my parents who stuck to boring grown up things like work, cleaning etc). Her hobbies included collecting scented rubbers, listing the top 10 music charts every week (in a very impressive hard backed note-book and coloured pens with meanings I never really understood) and best of all collecting car number plates. I think her version of this involved something like seeing them in number order (but it seemed more complicated than that) and every time we were out with her we were all told what she needed next and had to keep looking for it. She was know to travel miles to see a number plate if she was tipped off by a friend that someone in their street/workplace had the one she needed next. I suppose you made your own fun back then.....

I used to spend hours ‘designing’ house plans. I would draw an outline of the floor plan, fit in the rooms and windows (not an easy task!) and then draw in the furniture. My houses always had a library and a ‘party’ room - and I’m the least party person ever 😀

Owl pellet disectioning is amazing!

The only after school club I went to in primary (a looong time ago now) was computer club. Where they wheeled all the BBC micro computers into the hall for us to use. Exciting times!

What a funny thread. I always think my kids childhood isn't so different from my own but having read this and remembered all the dull things I used to do to pass the time, I've realised they don't know they're born!

Lots of fun random things on here, but I remember doing the rose petal perfume, like so many others. Also horse jumping over flowerpots and sticks and what we called french elastic. My DM bought my daughter one recently though and she really enjoys it. It was called a Chinese skipping rope as PP said.

A highlight of my childhood was when my quarterly Rail Riders membership magazine would arrive. Those were the days.

I used to ride my bicycle around the garden and pretend it was a horse. The shed was the stable and I would tie it up, feed it grass and give it a bucket of water

The thread is a joy to read!

I’m 41 so also an 80s child.

-loved creating scenes from catalogues. The people who lived there would have huge back stories, mostly stolen from ‘Neighbours’.
-make endless lists about whatever. I also had a notebook and pen.
-loved French skipping
-the poster who wrote about making up clubs before activities actually made me Lol. I used to make up clubs except I always played on my own so the members were fictional.
-would spend hours roller skating back and forth along the bit of tarmac on our estate and make up stories.

I have 2 children now and my DD is 8. Although the activities I did were very ‘80s’, I can see she has a perchant for note making and creating. She has hundreds of note books. If we’re going for a meal out for example, she likes to google the menu, write it out and survey us on our top 3 choices. I’m so proud.

I used to pride myself on knowing the makes of all the cars I could see on boring car journeys or going by on a busy road!

I then got quite good at recognising makes of cars just by their headlights in the dark. . But my interest petered out before I got really good. I think I must have finally discovered boys or something

I used to love adventure game books (relics worth a lot on eBay now!), which had numbered paragraphs, where you moved from one to the other by throwing a dice, or by placing transparent cards on the book which would reveal which paragraph to go to next. There were some Famous Five ones, which were frustrating because if they ran out of provisions for their lunch boxes, the game was over, and you had to start again. This could happen if Dick tripped and broke his bottle of ginger beer, or if Anne fed some cucumber from her sandwiches to a tame rabbit. I loved programming in Basic, and I wrote programs of these. The computer I had didn't have enough memory for the complete text (which I would have typed out), so I wrote shorthand versions, and even did a few diagrams.

There was a brilliant one called "Suspects!" which was set on the "Olympic Express", clearly based on a famous train with a similar name, where you were the detective trying to find out which member of a film team had murdered the unpopular director; it would be a random murderer every time you played the game. That book needed some skill: you had to study a picture, then turn to a different page to answer a question on it. If you got it right, you got a clue to the murderer's identity. If you were wrong, the murderer would try to kill you. Some of the ways this could happen were vividly described, and were absurd. "The murderer had smeared oil on the cabin floor for you to slip on, and then pulled the emergency cord to make the train suddenly brake!"

My favourite part of all in that book was when you are watching one of the suspects snacking on a burger at a station stall, and the narrative comments "he seems to enjoy this burger much more than he did the top-class cuisine served on the train! Perhaps he's not used to being a big star yet, and yearns for the life he had before."

I used to have a book, it was quite big and hard backed, where you could write to places with a stamped addressed envelope and be sent something back in said envelope. It was called Free Stuff For Kids
God can you imagine kids being bothered now?

Ooh scraps! What a memory jolt! The sparkly ones which we hoarded jealously - the swaps - the hours spent over them.
My goodness. Takes me back

@ArthurDentsSpaceTowel
I used to do all sorts of crafty bits and bobs. Tatting, macrame (I used to tie the string on the back of my bedroom chair) and weaving little scraps of cloth using improvised cardboard looms. And I had a flower loom type kit as well, but that was a bit of a one trick pony

You are really Kirsty Allsop, just admit it.

@BoredInLockdown My brother and I had that book, Free Stuff for Kids. Our mum tried to steer us towards the sensible things in it like "knit a worm", but we went for the catalogues where you could order practical jokes.

Another one that played with the Argos catalogue. Used to pretend i had won a competition where I got to pick one item from each page. Hours of fun! My sister and I used to get really excited if there was a thunder storm too, we'd count how many seconds between the lightening and thunder and write it in a little notebook and watch it from the upstairs window. If there was a lunar eclipse we would stay up all night waiting. Writing ever changing lists of my top 100 songs..God we were so bored in the 80s!

@BoredInLockdown omg I had the 'Free stuff for kids' book! was obsessed with it! Think I wrote to everyone..Got so many random things. I ended up with alot of those funny things that were like a strip of white material with the company name on and they had a furry head with googly eyes on.. you could stick them on things. Oh the excitement!

We had a spectrum zx81 first. I remember Mum spent a whole afternoon inputting the code for a game to play. Where a line slowly descended to the floor level and you had to press a button to make a different line slowly emerge from the right. If it met the line Hooray, you saved the world and won the game.

I think I got as far as
10 PRINT "My sister is annoying "
20 GOTO 10
RUN

Much more exciting when we got our Commodore 64 and we could load actual games from the cassette player. Especially when you found out in your impatience that stopping it before it had fully loaded your space invaders to the end made for fuzzy invaders that were much easier to hit.

Too sweet this thread.

Lots of the above also enjoyed crime fighting by spying on parked cars, setting up clubs with badges and rules and pretending our book shelves were libraries. If you (ie one of my two younger sisters) wanted to take a book out it was stamped and noted. I had a proper library stamp and everything.

We also enjoyed ice skating inspired by torvill and dean by sliding in socks on laminate floors. All pretty tragic in hindsight!

I'm jealous of your library stamp @MsTSwift ! I could only dream of having one. I used a tiny jar as my stamp. But there was no corresponding ASMR from the push down and the noise of the stamp!

I used to collect buttons! It was my Nan's suggestion. It was between the ages of about 9-11.