Things that make me realise I'm actually ancient (lighthearted)

[lightlypoached]

I don't consider myself 'old' but a few things popped into my insomniac mind that made me think, 'blimey I've been around a while, and probably longer than I realise' (like saying 'blimey' for starters!). Others include :

• Saturday job at WH Smith where I sold red wax sticks for sealing documents, car in paper, and typewriters. We used one of those slidey machine things with 3-layer paper receipts for the very rare credit card transactions.
• I learned how to use a slide rule at school for my maths O level
• when I carried on working after getting married at 24, was called 'a career girl' (mind you that was old fashioned even then I think)
• taking delivery of a PC at work and saying 'yes, it's very nice , but what exactly is it for?'
• having paper rail and bus tickets, and travelling on bushes with a bus conductor (who had a fascinating ticket machine and a leather pouch for all the money.

(I'm 55 with teenaged kids).

What are yours?

I would have been 7 and learning how to light a fire was a big scary step for me.
I learned to lay and light a fire at about the same age. We lived abroad at the time - no central heating, and all hot water was heated by a coal boiler.

@TwoZeroTwoZero

Oh the coal! They used to bring it on a truck when I was little and leave it in big piles outside people's houses so the occupants could shovel it into their coal sheds themselves. I'm sure my mum used to love it when my sister and I would climb on them in our clean clothes before she could stop us. They bring them in sacks now.

Our coal man used to carry the hundred weight sacks on his back down the path round to the back of house to dump it in the coal cellar which was not a cellar. It was a kind of stone cupboard off the back porch with the back door on the opposite side so you could get the coal in without going out. The coal had a very strong chemically smell I seem to remember. We would play hide and seek in there in the summer or the cats would get in and be lost for a while. And yes getting a fire laid and going was a vital skill on cold winter's afternoons. It took hours like everything else did then (1970s).

The other part of the porch was a larder with stone shelves opening onto the kitchen instead of a refrigerator. It was always stone cold and kept all our food and stored the hundred weight sacks of potatoes my Dad would bring home on his bike. We had potatoes every day with our tea cooked in different ways but the chips were fried in thick slices in dripping and lard. The first time I ever made them I totally burnt them as no-one ever said how long to fry them but they were all still mad at me.

We didn't have a car in 1970, my brother ran me to the station and I took the train to the city to start college. How I managed to carry a suitcase without wheels with all my belongings from the station to the other end of town to the digs (YWCA) I have no idea.

@PinkyParrot

We didn't have a car in 1970, my brother ran me to the station and I took the train to the city to start college. How I managed to carry a suitcase without wheels with all my belongings from the station to the other end of town to the digs (YWCA) I have no idea.

Ah yes, the suitcases with only a handle, and no wheels!

And if you didn’t have a lot of money, the suitcases would be made of sturdy cardboard made to look like leather

@HelebethH

Just remembered my mum saving the coupons from packets of Embassy Cigarettes and being able to exchange them for goods from a booklet. My leather school satchel was bought with them. Green Shield stamps that tasted awful that you licked to stick in books. Also does anyone remember the cards from the packs of tea?. I collected many a set . Remember having Animals, Fish, Birds, Flowers, Trees, World cup, Kings and Queens, Flags , to name a few

Yes I remember green shield stamps, embassy coupons, tea cards and free glasses from the petrol stations Does anyone remember buying saving stamps. Spending my pocket money on a stamp ..eight 2/6 ones on a page was a £2 I saved up every year for my holiday money

I remember watching the sweet maker make sugar fishes..he’d have the molten boiled sugar, he’d shape it and pass it through a kind of mangle. Like a manual pasta maker and turn the handle and sheets of sugar fishes would come out and as soon as it started to go brittle , he’d break the sheets up into the individual fish.

Loved watching that.

Next door was the smelly fish monger, with the roll mop herrings and soused herrings in trays.

@BarbaraofSeville

When I worked in Greggs in the 1990s we had to add up all the prices by hand then type the total price into the till, it didn't do it for you. Luckily I'm quite good at mental arithmetic and could remember all the prices.

Customers would also give extra bits of change to reduce the amount of coins you got back, eg if the bill was £1.20 and they had a £5 note, they would also give you the 20 p if they had it.

I still do things like this now, a few years ago, I bought a couple of drinks that I knew would cost £6.50 and I gave the young barman £21.50 because I didn't have a smaller amount.

He looked at the money in his hand several times, kept looking at me with suspicion and confusion, eventually typed the £21.50 into his till, only to gasp with amazement at the witchcraft performed by the slightly drunk woman in front of him, that probably looked a bit like his mother, when his till told him that I needed exactly £15 in change.

I still do that today..give them the extra pennies from my days in woolies

@sueelleker

I used to send mine off to York Film Labs, in the little envelopes.

Yes I remember york Laboratories and truprint. You got a big photo and two at the side for your wallet 😂

56. Still think in feet and inches (not sure why, I think we did metric at school).

If I need to know something I still look it up in a book, internet usually occurs a few hours later.

I still don’t understand why people carry bottles of water when they’re going out for an hour or two.

I’m sure there are hundreds but I’ve forgotten them for now. Talking of which, there’s another one

@Tangledtresses

Ha ha I love this thread I do remember the coal man coming round with his horse and cart and filling up the coal cellar! Sawdust on the butchers floor

I did o levels and GCSES in the same year, I think our school was a trial run.

Tube stations all had wooden escalators and people smoked on buses and trains! Including the wooden escalators I do remember the awful fire at kings cross.

Going to the shop for my mum to buy
Fags
Milk and vodka 😂😂

Trying to avoid IRA bombs in London... and hearing the Hyde park bombing it shook our windows. But I was a teenager then.

And going into pubs with ,y parents and them ordering a half cider for me when I was about ten. It must’ve been seen as fruit juice..and now I didn’t end up an alcoholic either

Five shillings got me a night out..that was two baby hams at 2/6 each.
A pint was 1/10d
Guinness was 1/11d
When o worked behind a bar in 1970
I had to add all these figures up in my head, work out their change ..and my first night was New Year’s Eve.
I lied to get the job. I’d never worked in a bar before.

@Dowser

Five shillings got me a night out..that was two baby hams at 2/6 each. A pint was 1/10d Guinness was 1/11d When o worked behind a bar in 1970 I had to add all these figures up in my head, work out their change ..and my first night was New Year’s Eve. I lied to get the job. I’d never worked in a bar before.

Not a snipe at spelling, but I've just worked out you meant Babychams.

The need for ham on a night out was baffling.

The Ladybird children's books with cassettes being prized possessions (now going for large amounts on eBay, especially with the cassettes). I think those were my introduction to classical music, which accompanied the stories. The opening of Beethoven's Sixth will always be "Snow White" to me; the second movement will always be "The Star Child", and the storm will always be that moment in The Wolf and the Seven Little Kids: "they opened the door wide, and there stood the wolf!!!"

“Trying to avoid IRA bombs in London... and hearing the Hyde park bombing it shook our windows. But I was a teenager then.“

Thanks a lot, Tangled. Was in my twenties. Feel even bloody older now 😁

What a splendid trip down memory lane! I must confess that I remember outdoor toilets in the back yard, mum washing using a washboard and mangle before she got a twin tub, which seemed the height of modernity. Until I was 5 we had a tin bathtub in front of the fire, and no telephone as dad didn't want work calling him. We had the rag and bone man with his horse and cart, giving donkey stones in exchange for old clothes etc. We moved to a more modern house, where I remember having central heating put in. One of the neighbours got a colour tv and we all went to look at it. When I was a teenager I saved up to buy a typewriter, then later on learned to use an electric typewriter, then a word processor. My first husband came home one day with a very expensive computer, the huge chunky kind with green text, and he spent hours typing in what looked like gobbledegook, to make it perform the simplest of tasks. I thought it was a complete waste of time and couldn't imagine what use it could be.

Being so excited when I first got my mini stereo for my bedroom
Feeling very cool when I first got my Walkman
Foru-star petrol
Residential phone book
Landline being just 4 digits (answer the phone with &village name” and then 4 digits)
The confusion, following expansion of phone numbers, for London going from 01 to 071 then 0171 etc!
Tower 42 is always the NatWest Tower to me (and when I bought my east end flat in 1999 it was the only high rise I could see from my balcony)
Lots of clubs in London that are no longer around
Beejams
Paying a little bit more to sit in the balcony at the local cinema
Cash registers that looked more like typewriters
Parents having coloured disc tokens that were used as “payment” for babysitting between neighbours

There are loads more in pp that I remember, so just trying to think of different things.

Knocking on the staff room door because you needed to see a teacher and a big cloud of smoke coming out.
The Northern line with the guard shouting down a hose pipe to speak to the driver.
Paraffin heaters.
String bags.

@Tangledtresses
Trying to avoid IRA bombs in London... and hearing the Hyde park bombing it shook our windows. But I was a teenager then.

We heard the bombing at Hendon barracks from our house. Also my first ever tube journey on my own there was a bomb scare and we were all kicked out at Baker Street. I was ten years old and had no idea at all about how to get home!

I also remember the wooden escalators, the wooden carriage floors, and the awful fire at Kings Cross. And having black snot every day after you'd been on the tube.

My husband moved here as an adult and I'm always trying to tell him how filthy London was when we were kids and how different it was trying to get around without all the maps, announcements, google maps, uber etc. I think it was useful to grow up like that - set me up well for travelling and being able to deal with places that are not as easy as London is now.

when I was teaching, the class lap top did not have enough memory to save the kids computer drawn pictures onto it.

hap'ny sweets
candy cigarettes
getting ten p back on your bottle of pop
first class stamps for 7p
banda machines printing school worksheets being passed out and the whole class sniffing their copy.
2p for the phone box
the witches hat in the park and the slide with the cage on teh top, also in concrete
the flammable nighties campaign as well.
coal fires and the clean air act change to gas. no more chimney sweep and going outside to look for the brush out of the top of the chimney and no more coal man droppiung coal off to the coal shed at the back of the house.
miners strikes and power cuts in the early seventies
three channels on the TV in black and white
that's life programme campaigning for soft flooring under playground equipment dropping a water melon onto concrete.
the school climbing frame getting moved off the concrete to the grass as it was supposedly softer, but then it was summer 1976 so it was also set like concrete
proper snow to the top of your boots send home from school.

aunt's phone number was four digits. you rang the village area codes from the town.

@SomersetHamlyn oh wow that was quite far away... we lived just off Ken high st an awful time!

I also remember black boggies 🤣🤣 yes London was filthy back then

My mum went to Harrods and left minutes before that bomb, her actual words were 'thank god I was on the bus by then'

Honestly my teens just don't know the half of it, when I was your age I was dodging bombs in bins etc ... our school was evacuated many times as it was 2 minutes from Hyde park barracks

Weird times.... no wonder people think I'm coping with covid remarkably well, although I now live in the middle of know where

@IhateBoswell

Oh yes I remember the Yorkie adverts, bloody cheek!

Even in about the late 90s (or maybe even later) I recall a Yorkie advert with the slogan: "Yorkie! It's not for girls!!"

Rotary dial telephones as a child, then slimline wall phones as a teen, then Nokia bricks, now smartphones and ipads!

Cassette tapes, videotapes, winding the loose rape on the spools with a pen or pencil

Mix tapes from the top 40

Kickers shoes

Shops like C and A, Kookai, Jane Norman, Pilot

When bands like Supergrass and Oasis were also the rage

Virgin Vie crackle body mousse

Dewberry and White Musk ranges in The Body Shop and it being the go to place for birthday gifts

That carbon copy paper which had an indigo sheet on it and smelled of the copier

The Puffin book club a t school and ordering books from a little catalogue

Matey bubble bath

BLackboards and whiteboards at school instead of PowerPoint. sometimes overhead projector

Junior Praise books at school assembly

snow days

Nits and not inspections

[quote Tangledtresses]@SomersetHamlyn oh wow that was quite far away... we lived just off Ken high st an awful time!

I also remember black boggies 🤣🤣 yes London was filthy back then

My mum went to Harrods and left minutes before that bomb, her actual words were 'thank god I was on the bus by then'

Honestly my teens just don't know the half of it, when I was your age I was dodging bombs in bins etc ... our school was evacuated many times as it was 2 minutes from Hyde park barracks

Weird times.... no wonder people think I'm coping with covid remarkably well, although I now live in the middle of know where

[/quote]
If anyone listens to Radio4Xtra, there was a fascinating compilation programme this morning built on memories of the sights and sounds of London as recorded by the BBC from 1920s to 70s I think. Sorry I can't remember the presenter or title but they repeat programmes , it was made in the 1980s . It featured recordings of people speaking of their experience in WW2 dockers talking about working on the river and in the docks, Covent Garden when it was a market and many others but one point repeatedly made was that London was dirty unti the clean up of buildings began in the sixties. One man talked about cleaning Nelson's Column and finding hundreds of dead pigeons at the base of the actual figure on top of the column. Imagine the stink.

Old money.
Seeing a play and one of the actors was the grandson of the first Doctor Who I remember.
Seeing a film and remembering when I met one of the actresses, 25 years ago.

Coal being delivered by the coal man (Peter the Coal). I think there was a free allocation to miners. I am 45.