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.

Ah great thread!

I LOVED filling out forms. My idea of heaven was a trip to the bank or post office. Id collect a pocketful of blank forms from the counter and once home spend hours filling them in for whatever game I was playing.

I mainly work in administration as an adult and I still love filling out forms 😂

I catalogued all my books and made my own library. They all had their own tickets.
I collected smelly rubbers.
I also collected ladybirds in a golden Virginia Baccy tin with holes punched in it.
I used to run down the field and chat to the cows every morning.
I would gallop through the fields on my imaginary horse on my way home from school.
I used to pretend I was a DJ and record myself saying stupid shit on my little tape recorder.
I belonged to the Dennis the Menace fan club. And Deperate Dan fan club. And some sort of Jaffa Cake fan club too.
I would send off for or join absolutely anything. Collect any tokens I could. Cos I loved getting shite through the post!
I had a farming scrapbook. I was obsessed with living on a farm. I blame Enid Blyton!
I had a treehouse and I would sit in it with my pea shooter and catapult thingy. I think I thought I was Minnie the Minx.
I was obsessed with football and once broke into my teams football ground after watching a film called Those Glory Glory Days.
I used to pretend my Mums swiftly blue 70s carpet was the sea - I would scatter pink shrimp sweets on the floor and 'dive' off the sofa into the sea in the manner of a mermaid, to collect the shrimps.
I was really rather feral and spent most of my time in dens, or solving made up mysteries.
I drove my parents mad asking them to follow clues I had hidden in the garden for various reasons.
I also had the home made 'show jumps' in the back garden and jumped over them with my rabbit. Who used to be taken for walks on a lead.
I sat in pub car parks with my I spy books in the car on holidays in scotland whilst my mum and Dad had a pint. And I traced pictures out of books with Izal toilet paper.
My absolute favourite haunt on holiday was the Camp Site Gift Shop. So much tat to be had!
My friend and I had a gang called the Toucan gang. Because 'toucan do anything'
Height of excitement was Christmas catalogue coming out time. Af other times of the year I nust made do with Kay's or Grattan. Choosing outfits I would wear if i was a 'sophisticated' adult
Just realised how weird and nerdy I was.

Snails seem to feature quite a lot! I kept them in those big empty jars you used to get boiled sweets in from newsagents. I made air holes in the lids with a screwdriver & got particularly excited when I found baby snails to add because they were "so sweet". Or I'd rescued one with a broken shell. I thought I'd be able to observe them through the clear sides of the jar but couldn't even see anything as the walls got covered in slime or condensation.

Rather than an amazing snail zoo, in reality it was just a load of smelly old plastic containers filled with rotting dandelion leaves, sad snails & their poo. There was a surprisingly large amount of poo for such small creatures.

I remember collecting the lead out of pencils, the longer the better oh the excitement! And we kept them in empty TicTac boxes... It was the 1970's, need I say more. Used to compare collections with friends

I used to have a big pack of felt tips, about 36 of them and my hobby was devising stories with them, their characters came from their colours. For instance, maroon would be the grandad, brown an uncle, pink the youngest girl child, blue a teacher. I did have friends I promise you.

I also went through a phase of collecting confers and putting them in a biscuit tin. I did nothing with them but add them in a tin. I pushed them to the back of a cupboard for a few years, frightened to look inside after such a long time. Eventually just binned them.

I also collected marbles. We all used to. Traded them in the playground. I had some beauties.

I remember fuzzy felt, I had a farmyard set. It was a bit limiting.

Confers, not confers!

Sad to say I was always trying to catch blue tits as they fed on the red net peanut feeder (30p of my pocket money). I would make ill-timed swipes with a fishing net but was always unsuccessful.

The obsession with blue tits also led to many pieces of art work where I would draw their shape and fill them in with screwed up pieces of coloured tissue paper. At Christmas I would do the same but with a jaunty striped scarf around their necks!

Conkers!!!!!

Bloody auto fill.

Collecting rubbers. Making potions out of elderberries and anything else I could find. Making perfume from rose petals. Making up really shit games on our bikes and skateboards. How I miss my childhood.

I also get an Argos catalogue and Casio calculator and pretended I worked there, the calculator being my till. I gave excellent customer service.

I had a friend who had gerbils, and we spent many a happy hour building mazes for them out of video cases, and seeing which one would find their way out first. His parents weren't too impressed when one found its way out too quickly and disappeared behind the fridge, and chewed through the cable, but it was fun.

We also got into serious trouble when we discovered the wonder of reverse charge calling, and would call our mums from the phone box for a chat. Huge bollockings for that.

I seem to remember making lots of clothes for my dolls. One memorable outfit sticks in my mind... an unfortunate two piece made from dark green upholstery weight velvet from Nan's sofa. A fairly structural piece, I think it's fair to say.

Does anyone else remember the thrill of the Christmas and New Year Radio Times? We never used to get the Radio Times any other time of year.

I also used to colour in the line drawings in my story books.

I used to race snails. I kept my finest racers in a rabbit hutch

I also used to write lists of names in the form of class registers - all girls, because I’d been reading Mallory Towers and boys smell. Obviously.

I had pages and pages of a family tree of the royal family of a made up country, complete with advantageous marriages, military coups, revolutions and wars, inspired by Horrible Histories. I sellotaped them all together and rolled them up into a huge scroll. I remember being crushed when I proudly showed my mum and she said “but you’ve just made it all up. It’s not true.”

I loved filling in forms too. I grew up on a farm with cattle and was allowed to use left over MAFF cattle movement forms (before it became DEFRA and went online) to make up my own herd of cattle. I remember diligently filling in the ear tag numbers, breed, sex, dob, etc of cattle that didn’t exist

I also used to make flower potions and natural perfume. I had totally forgotten the joy it used to bring me!

I did this with DS2 today.

DS2 has been a bit down in the dumps the last few days and it has really cheered him up.

He's still out there

My husband used to collect his empty Easter egg boxes. When I helped him move out of his parents at 26, we found dozens under his bed

I used to tape the chart show on a Sunday then play it back and write the lyrics down to my favourite songs by hand. I’d have to pause it after every line, spent hours doing it for very little reason .

Stamp collecting

Collecting little porcelain thimbles from places we visited (I recently sold my entire childhood collection on eBay for the princely sum of £8)

Collecting weird looking dolls in the national dress of each country

Mine wasn't crap I don't think

But I used to kite buggy! I was 16 and only the 2nd female competitor. I was on tv a few times!

This thread had me in stitches this morning - particularly the home made ice rink and the romantic snails. I keep picturing snail couples entwining while 'Let's Get it on' plays in the background .

So many memories previously mentioned - the bee jars (didn't really do it myself because I was afraid of getting stung but it was a big thing at one stage ), the Dublin Horse Show in a friend's garden with milk crates and branches for the jumps, the 'library' books, 'perfume' from flowers mixed with water, scented erasers etc.

A few things that haven't been mentioned:-

Making 'knives' out of ice cream sticks by scraping the top of the sticks off a wall to form a point. Having mock fights with said 'knives'.

Making mud pies in the back garden with some rusty old tins

Making witches' talons by pulling petals off fuchsia flowers and sticking them to our nails with spit

Buying books with sheets of transfers. You'd scribble over the image with a pencil and it would 'transfer' onto a piece of paper or a page of the transfer books. If it was a figure, you'd often lose a limb when transferring the image. I loved these - Mam disapproved and thought it was a terrible waste of money.

Playing ball games with two tennis balls - you know the ones where you throw the balls against a wall and sing some tune. We'd play this for hours and hours.

Ha, just remembered another one!

Nan had a gravel drive, the big chunky sort of gravel. I used to spend HOURS pouring over it looking for nice stones, which were then lovingly Mr Pledge'd and arranged on the stairs in a shop, and she and dad would have to visit my gallery and buy them from me.

@Fuckthiswind
Your childhood sounds idyllic.
I would have loved to have been your friend.

Oh, and we'd create our own 'Olympics'.

We'd put two chairs back to back and do 'gymnastics' - the top of the chairs would be our 'bars'.

We'd use the sweeping brush for 'weightlifting'.

Both activities involved rubbing flour over our hands and wrists for extra grip. Mam was less than impressed that her good flour was being wasted in this manner.

I used to cut people and stuff out of catalogues.

I’d make a little house on the floor with the cuttings, complete with kids and toys , Mam used to go mad her Argos was cut to bits.

Also used to play with 2p coins and pretend I was teaching, line them up for assembly etc.

My brother and I loved The Crystal Maze. Having memorised all the episodes from the first series (recording them and watching them endlessly), we once tried to make a cardboard model of it, using the map which was always shown on TV (lost heart with that one though). But we were always inventing crystal maze games, complete with being locked in; yes, really, in our attic. Once someone gave us a paperweight shaped like one of the Crystals; we were delighted!

I used to do line drawings of things I wanted to buy out of the Argos catalogue, and make perfume from flowers in the garden! We also covered one of the knobs on our bannister with string to make a hair braiding thing, like those life sized doll head and shoulders you can buy nowadays to practise hair styles. I remember one rainy holiday teaching myself to write in mirror imagine for something to do 😂