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.

Set up sticks on flowerpots around the garden for "jumps" and then pretended to do either a gymkhana or some type of olympic hurdling events. If I couldn't find enough sticks/pots I would run laps around the garden as different horses and time myself on each lap, and then set up my own bookies to try and get people (my parents, random neighbors) to place bets on the horses. I did this for YEARS as a child

I also was obsessed with collecting things where you had to save up tokens and then post them off for the rewards. In the 80s I remember being really excited for an olympic medal set (I think the tokens were on weetabix). This became a critical component of my garden hurdling. And I also collected these clay miniature cat figures that came with tokens from some kind of cat food. Then I would spend hours in my room organizing and rearranging the cat collection.

I used to love playing ‘Through the Keyhole’ with my house (3 bed new build in a housing estate in the East Midlands). I’d go through every room narrating what I saw in a Lloyd Grossman accent. Did this loads.

Pretending my bike was a horse.

Cycling into woods/old railways and half hoping to find a body/mystery to solve (read a lot of Enid B) or going round graveyards to find a headstone to ‘focus’ on. I wanted to clean it and take flowers and maybe it would be the start of an adventure.

I liked getting house sale papers from Estate Agents too, then I’d try and draw my own out, I loved a floor plan. I also really liked holiday brochures for places like Haven or Pointins, mainly so I could look at the floor plans of the caravans.

Life was dull in the 80s.

Pouring sugar in patterns or letters to see if I could create ‘ant’ art. Can’t even remember if it was successful or not.

I wanted to collect china pigs, they were called Piggin, but my mum thought they were too dear. Instead I had a collection of china birds my grandma got me from car boot sales.

I used to collect frog ornaments. As above, didn’t particularly care for frogs, just wanted a thing. It meant I had to tak all sorts, some proper crap ones. Recently found in garage at home including soaps which date from circa 83 and were hideous. Binned then, but my Dad rescued some, I think for sentimental reasons, which is most unlike my 70s Dad who hated them at the time I think.

I started making an index for Lord of the Rings. (But stopped after a few weeks when I found an edition with an index in it!)

I used to collect a lot of ornaments (or rather I was given them every Christmas and birthday) which needed a great deal of organising, rearranging, and dusting, let me tell you.

My sister and I had an entirely made up world where we had alter-egos, families, children and jobs. The level of detail was crazy, we drew a map of the town (which was in America to be glamorous) and made up all the street names. My sister also set up the doctor’s surgery and made around 20 ‘files’ for a whole new cast of local patients . I wrote the local newspaper (only 2 pages and just the one copy as it was quite time intensive).

Most bizarre thing we did was play ‘conservationists’ in our tiny back garden which involved digging up my mum’s plants. We also killed a tree accidentally but hacking off all the bark of a silver birch with little hammers. It slowly died over many years and Mum was furious.

@Redglitter my friend and I used to go through the Argos catalogue, pick one item each from each double page spread, then add up who had spent the most.

I made “perfume” by crushing up rose petals and adding water.

I also remember counting cars going past the house, making a note of their colour, then doing a bar graph! Not for homework or anything, just for something to do.

@ElizabethMainwaring I also used the typewriter to make pictures, and later the Amstrad daisywheel printer. I noticed that the full stop tended to emboss the paper, so that you could feel it on the other side; so I once tried to use it to write Braille, having learned about it at school. Of course, the whole thing had to be written back to front.

I kept wearing my shoes without socks, because I liked how it felt, and we were made to do so at school when walking from the classroom to the assembly hall for PE; but my mum wouldn't let me try them on like that when buying them.

I liked recording; for nostalgia I recently bought the "Usborne Cassette Recorder book", which I didn't have as a child, and felt a pang as I saw things I should have tried to do, such as putting a microphone inside an open umbrella to record wildlife.

I loved activities for which I had to be blindfolded: taste things while holding my nose, guess objects by feel, point at someone making a sound, find out which parts of my body could feel whether they were being poked with two pencils or one. Most of these were from science books (the last one being about nerve endings), but then I started inventing sillier ones: guess which socks someone was putting on me, get someone to paint my toenails, and when they were dry to put shoes on me, so I would then spend as long as I could guessing what colour they were. In the summer, I once got someone to blindfold me and spin me round in the garden, and leave me sitting in a chair, to see if I could work out which way I was facing simply from what I could hear; and also challenged myself to stay like that as long as I could. I managed an hour and a bit before I got bored. I was easy to entertain!

Me and my best friend had some weird games looking back.
We had an insect graveyard, with some unwilling victims.
We found a manky hedgehog and tried to nurse it back to health. It didn't work out but he got a good send off.
We used to attach lost property to bushes and see how long it would remain there, checking it each day on the way home from school. Some were there for years!
I used to collect porcelain dolls and they freaked me out at night. Too many staring eyes. My friend had the pigs and I loved them!
When I was about four my mum used to encourage me to go play Playmobil in an old caravan in our garden for hours. Wish my kids would do that!!

Also played with mercury a lot. " quicksilver".

Collected hedgehogs, national costume dolls, fans ( ), Cabbage Patch babies (little plastic figures), Garfield stuff and old or foreign coins.

I was basically a little hoarder. Mr Trebus in a ra-ra skirt.

I used to collect number plates too.... Would take my little notebook and pen with me everywhere. I remember getting very excited when we went on holiday or when new cars came out in August.

babygroot has just reminded me, we also built the show jumping course in the back garden but we didn't run around jumping over them, tsk no, we did it on spacehoppers!

My best friend and I used to have lots of what we called "jelly monsters," spooky items or animals made out of a jelly like plastic. Once when one lost a limb my Dad mended it by putting each end into the flame on the gas cooker and joining them back together. A revelation! Thereafter we thoroughly enjoyed our "toy hospital" where our patients who had um er accidentally lost a limb got them re-attached.

We also used to draw people on bits of paper and burn the pictures in the open fire. Not pictures of anyone real but Christ Almighty if one of my kids did that I would have a child psychiatrist on speed dial. But we didn't do it for long and both grew up into nice people, honestly.

This is hilarious!

When I was about 6, I used to look out of my mum’s bedroom window and do a tally of the different coloured cars that drove past. Tragic!

I also loved trawling the Argos catalogues; I’d pick a playhouse from the kids’ section, then go through the household items picking everything I’d furnish it with.

As I go older, I collected gemstones which I’ve still got in an old toolbox upstairs (my mum kept it ha!). Now my DC love looking at them and cleaning them with baby wipes: the next generation of weirdos!

I used to cut pictures out of the Argos catalogue like furniture and lights and tables and things then stick them in the inside of a shoebox to make little rooms. I'd cut in a door and windows and stuff and eventually make a dolls house full of rooms all kitted out by Argos. Did all this and played with it along side my beautiful multi story fully furnished Lundby dolls house. I was odd.

Playing calculator games. Which obviously included writing 55378008.

My friend and I collected discarded bottle tops. The were some really 'rare' ones such as Britvic tomato juice 😂. My mum once even asked the local pub to keep aside a bag full of them for me and I was so excited. I can still imagine the smell of them so accurately in my mind!

I used to stalk people and pretend to be an investigator solving crimes they had done.
I had a notebook and would put people's description and movement in it.

Never anyone I knew, just random passersby.

I remember spending ages knocking rocks together trying to learn how to make stone tools like a caveman. I was very persistent at this but never managed to make an arrow head. Also spent one summer learning to walk on some very low kids stilts we had.

I collected stickers- I used to put them in sticker albums (do those even still exist)?
I also used to make things out of FIMO modelling clay - you baked it in the oven and it went hard.

I catalogued all my books and made library tickets for them.

And I had a set of the Flower Fairy poetry books, which I seemed to think were pretty much spotters guides and thus spent hour with books in hand searching for the fairies...

My daughter has been keeping a spreadsheet of her dolls and teddies since she was 6 or 7, with their birthdays and other important data. She is 16 and still updates it occasionally.

Oh god, this has brought back memories.

I used to collect soaps, mostly from Avon. I remember having one that looked like praying hands and another shaped like a ballerina. I was very proud of the and used to bring them downstairs to show anyone who visited

I spent a lot of time listening to songs line by line and scribbling down the lyrics, then painstakingly rewriting them in my best handwriting and being very upset if they took up more than 1 page

I wrote a lot of registers and spent time pretending to be a teacher. I was beyond excited when my dad bought me an account ledger type book because it has all the little squares for me to mark attendance like they did in school