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?

Renting TVs. No telly for most of the day.

Also, found an archive tv listing from the 70s/80s where BBC2 came on at 11.00 am for Play School then shut down until about 5.00pm.

If anyone is as weird at me there's a great website where you can look up old Christmas tv listings:- U.K. Christmas TV

@letsgomaths

@SomersetHamlyn I too remember "Backchat" on Teletext, and 'Zine on Channel 4. I often wrote in to both of them.

Ah well done for remembering the names. And here we are posting crap on MN 25+ years later. How we have moved on

Did you also play Bamboozle? The slowest game in the world.

Bamber and Bambette Boozler and their children!

That's the one. What a lot of rubbish we store in our brains

I remember when women were getting married, on their last day at work, often a Friday as weddings were usually Saturdays, they’d be dressed up and taken around the premises on a trolley. It was also acceptable to go to the pub at lunchtime and have a few drinks. Everyone left the office at 5pm on the dot, even the managers.

Remembering (born 1944):
Man with a pole turned on the street gas lights in the evening.
Bottles of concentrated orange juice and tins of dried milk from the Food Office.
When chocolate was taken off "points" and we could get a tiny bar of Cadbury's for a penny, and a sixpenny bar was a full four ounces.
Bus conductor had a little rack of different coloured tickets.
Having to queue at each separate counter in Sainsbury's for meat, butter, etc.
Listen With Mother, and wonderful programs on Children's Hour - Jennings, White Boots - and Uncle Mac's sign-off "Good night children - everywhere."
78 rpm records - even now I faintly anticipate the continuity breaks in long works.
Cold in winter. Chilblains. Poor exposed little legs. The E Nesbit girls had sensible long skirts and red flannel petticoats, and the boys wore knickerbockers and knee stockings.
Going to see the Christmas lights the first year they came back on - cold cold cold!
My Mum's Co-op number (still remember it)

@RosesAndHellebores
Tills where the person had to tap in each single price and work out the change.

I could never do the subtraction, so I used to count upwards from the price to the amount given by the customer. Say they'd bought half a pound of cheese (another Woolworths deli Saturday girl here) for 67p and gave me a pound note: I'd count the money out loud as I put it into their hand "1p plus 2p makes 70p, plus 20p plus 10p makes £1".

My first job as a Saturday girl in woolies was 2/6d an hour
12 and a 1/2 pence in new money.
Even then I didn’t get a £1 in my pay packet
I paid 3d National insurance

[quote ImpassiveVoice]@RosesAndHellebores
Tills where the person had to tap in each single price and work out the change.

I could never do the subtraction, so I used to count upwards from the price to the amount given by the customer. Say they'd bought half a pound of cheese (another Woolworths deli Saturday girl here) for 67p and gave me a pound note: I'd count the money out loud as I put it into their hand "1p plus 2p makes 70p, plus 20p plus 10p makes £1".[/quote]
That’s how we were taught to do it

@hagsrus0
Do you think you might be the oldest mnetter?

Oh yes I remember people doing that ImpassiveVoice.

Braziers with sweet chestnuts. There was one on Regent Street and my gran would always buy me a little bag on the way home. A winter treat in the dark.

Bolsters. My grandparents had one under their pillows.

My grandma had a shampoo and set every week.

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

When Sainsbury shops had black and white tiled floors, separate counters and the staff wore long white aprons and black shirts/blouses.

When train compartment windows were opened and closed by means of a leather strap (steam trains of course!)

The only shops open on Sundays were newsagents

Children's Hour on TV

Yes, I remember the cards in packs of tea & ones in cigarette packs.
And saving the paper golliwogs from jars of Robertson’s jams to send away for the metal badges, lots of different ones to collect.
Radio Luxembourg that used to fade in & out & the Ovaltinies.
Muffin the mule on the black & white TV.
Going to the pictures where you could pay once & stay in all day if you wanted as the films, usually the main feature & a B film went round & round on a loop so if you went in half way through you could stay till it got to the same place. No separate showing times. Intervals when a girl came round with ice cream on a tray & when the last showing finally ended, in time for the last bus, everyone stood up while the the National Anthem was played

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.

@TwoZeroTwoZero

Getting your photos developed at the chemist and waiting a week for them to come back, with a free roll of film, and excitedly opening the little envelope with your photos in only to find that they're all dark, wonky, blurred and have a finger in the way or a head chopped off. Can anyone remember those stickers they used to put on them that essentially said your pictures were crap? They still went in the album though!

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

People leaving dogs at home all day while they were out at work add to that dogs let out in the morning to roam all day. They went home when it suited them and there was someone home to let them in. Dog trainers? Barbara Woodhouse was the only one I had ever heard of...SIT!
No trainers, behaviourists, doggy day care, walkers.

When I was little latch key kids were normal from 5 up. Kids walked to and from school. That was just starting to change when my kids were little, early/mid 90s. A relative was horrified that she had to go and pick up her 4 yr old reception aged child. He walked himself to school from the first day she couldnt be bothered to get up.

As a child the only people we knew who used 'childcare' were those in really good jobs and it was a childminder. Those childminders only looked after a child in the same way they did their own. No early years learning.

sueelleker
TwoZeroTwoZero

Getting your photos developed at the chemist and waiting a week for them to come back, with a free roll of film, and excitedly opening the little envelope with your photos in only to find that they're all dark, wonky, blurred and have a finger in the way or a head chopped off. Can anyone remember those stickers they used to put on them that essentially said your pictures were crap? They still went in the album though!

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

I think we sent the films off after a while too and the photos were delivered a few days later. Getting my Freeprints prints through the door reminds me of that but it's not quite as exciting because I already know what the photos will look like!

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.

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.

@Snooks1971

Thought of another one.

When you mention a website that you’ve visited recently to someone and you have to resist the urge to tell them “www.” etc including the full domain name rather than it’s called say, Lakeland. Because how would they find it otherwise

There’s a great clip of Pete Tong reading out his show’s website for the very first time, we’ll worth a listen to!

Remember watching my parents build a fire as we had no central heating. Learning how to tend a fire too.

Had a toasting fork, bread toasted over a real fire with salty Welsh butter is a food of the Gods.

I absolutely hated Saturday afternoons as sport took over both main TV channels. If you were lucky you could catch a good black and white film on BBC2 as long as no man in the house was wanting to watch sport.

Same films repeatedly shown. The Great Escape was shown every Bank Holiday (or felt like it)

Pencil rubbers that smelt of fruit.

I hated the news. I always wanted to watch Happy Days on BBC2 but the bloody news had to be on. Drove me nuts they couldn't for once not watch it.

I remember seeing the Challenger Space Shuttle disaster on Newsround. I was so shocked. A few years back I went and paid my respects at the memorial in Arlington National Cemetery.

Some that I've read on here I can relate to and I'm 36!

• Going abroad on a group passport with school, as children just used to be listed on their parents. We went to France in Year 7, probably 100 of us. Would have been mid-nineties. With paper E111 booklets too (later replaced by the EHIC card).

• no mobile phones until I was sixth form age

• Smoking in the workplace. Smoking at desks had been banned by the time I started work, but aged 19/20 (so early 00's) I worked for the MOD and they still had smoking rooms indoors for the office bods!

• Taking physical cash to the bank from work. I worked in a shop and once a fortnight I, the part time teenager would be sent with £1-2000 in cash just in a shop brand carrier bag with the banking book to the bank a 15 minute walk away. This wasn't a little corner shop, it was well known shops in a shopping centre. How I never got mugged I'll never know because everyone locally knew all of the shops did it. They later changed to cash collections by security firms.

• Writing cheques a day or two before payday to pay for very essential things like phone credit vouchers because they took a few days to clear

• Queuing for the cash point on a Saturday night to get your drinking cash out, no one used cards! £40 would always do it, covered drinks, buses, entry into a 'club' and chips on the way home!

I could go on, there are loads. I'm older than Google, something that shocked my friends 9 year old when I told her!

Remember watching my parents build a fire as we had no central heating. Learning how to tend a fire too
My Mum used to keep a diary and one day she proudly noted "Voice lit her first match today". I would have been 7 and learning how to light a fire was a big scary step for me.