Things from your childhood that feel like ancient history now

[Echobelly]

• 3 TV channels
• Everything shut on Sunday (and local shops often shut Wednesday afternoons for some reason?)
• 1/2 pennies
• Only asking 'What does your dad do?'
• A lot of people having black and white tellies
• Holiday brochures

These are some of the things that I think will seem inexplicable to my kids!

Not childhood, as it was when we first got married; our Woolworth's sold furniture, and we've still got some of the shelving units we bought in the early 80's!

I think I've posted about this before but it's so apt for this thread - learning about Apartheid in Modern Studies then year or so later witnessing Nelson Mandela's release. 30 years later DD1 studied the same topic - in History.

Cars without power assisted steering or air con, with only a two band radio for entertainment (if you had a radio at all.....)

@LeanneBrownsLonelyBraincell

Cars without power assisted steering or air con, with only a two band radio for entertainment (if you had a radio at all.....)

And a manual choke.

And also, older cars that actually rusted after a few years. You just about never see cars with rust on them nowadays, however ancient and battered they get.

yes, I remember reading that it was a good idea to paint the underside of a car with used engine oil to protect it from rust, supposedly a messy job but very worthwhile

This one is good that you don’t see it so much any more. I was just reading an article about a young woman who suffers from lymphoedema - when a limb, usually a leg, swells up with fluid. And it made me think of how common it was when I was young in the 80s to see older people - often older women as there were so many elderly women from that generation when many men had died during wartime - who had various visible physical illnesses and deformities like dowager’s hump, oedema in the legs, limps, etc.

I remember so many elderly ladies at church when I was a child, who were frail and had visible and sometimes disfiguring physical illnesses. It was such a culture of put up and be grateful at the time, and I think older women often had really very poor medical care and attention. I’m glad that this has changed (though it still needs to change even more...)

I remember old ladies with really bad bunions; wearing slippers with a slit cut over the lump.

'I've been ten year tested' signs in the back of old cars.

Going into the BT shop to pay the phone bill.

Getting money by cashing a cheque at a bank counter - I can remember how big an event it was when the first cashpoint arrived in town.

@Gladimnotcampinginthisweather nice to see Watford memories! We lived further into London when I was growing up but my mum often went to Watford to shop. She loved Clements, I remember it well. I used to admire the wedding dresses and I remember running up and down the ramp in ladies fashions while my mum browsed. And the carpet department - it was always empty and the big rolls of carpet scared me!

I also remember Trewins before it moved into the Harlequin. Happy days!

@hamstersarse

Smoking.

In pubs, restaurants, buses, houses, even remember teachers smoking in the staff room.
My first job, people just smoked in meetings and the office in general.

That really does seem like a different world and totally unimaginable

@hamstersarse and in cinemas and on aeroplanes - blows your mind now !

Bendmeoverbackwards love the name.
I remember that ramp in Clements!

I had a Midland Bank Cashcard.

It had dots on it and each dot would release £10 from the cash dispenser. When you'd used up all 10 dots you had to get a new card from the bank

Midland Bank itself is a blast from the past.

@PottingCompost

Going into the BT shop to pay the phone bill.

I remember when I was first married, all the services were paid for at their separate offices, gas, electricity, water rates, council rates, telephone. I remember I had a route through town that I could walk with the pram, that took in all of them, no wonder I was thin back then!

Having a visa Barclaycard and an access card.

@Bargebill19

Having a visa Barclaycard and an access card.

Here's a funny one, my mum got an Access card in 1988/89 and the only two places that took it were Rio Stakis' restaurant and Boots. So we went there loads and our Xmas presents came from Boots that year.

Eventually she used up her credit limit and when trying to make a purchase, the card was declined, and the staff PHONED THE POLICE, perhaps thinking it was stolen. So my mum was escorted home by the police with all her shopping to prove it was her card and it was declined because she'd over spent and not something more nefarious. Just made me realise how new the technology was.

Getting an email address that was like your first name.last [email protected].

What do young people do nowadays?!

Weekly trips to queue at the post office for child benefit with mum.

Items in Tesco (even large superstores were like wow!) that seemed new and exciting

• fresh whole white baguettes
• Tropicana fruit juice (awful stuff I think now!)
• getting one double chocolate chip muffin each from the bakery counter
• frozen chicken lattices (no idea why I thought these were great)

As far as I remember the first supermarket in Watford was Fine Fare. It was tiny by today's standards and the trolleys were not very big.
At that time a lot of shops were corner shops where Mr Knighton or Mr Allen served you and called you 'Madam'. My mother said supermarkets were an American idea and would never catch on over here.

I remember before libraries were computerised, you used to take little cardboard tickets out of the front of library books. They had the title of the book, and the author written on them, and you'd give them to the librarian to put alongside your name, to show which books you had borrowed. You used to be able to take 6 books out on your library card, when I was a child. Now, I can take 30 out in one go!

Also, I can remember when teachers would set you homework in secondary school, and say write a page on x subject... You'd go to the library, and find everyone had already taken out all the books on that subject. So, then you would look in an encyclopedia (the encyclopedias were never loaned out)... And there would be about 3 sentences on the subject you needed to write about. So you would make your handwriting massive, draw huge margins at edges of the paper, leave big spaces between each word, and try and embellish the little bit of info you had, to make it fill a whole page!

You also had to be very quiet in libraries. They are so much more child friendly than they used to be.
Our old library was on a steep hill on a busy road. DM was told to leave me in my pram outside. She refused, worried that a mischievous kid would let the brake off.
Speaking of which, it was fairly common to see babies left in prams outside shops when I was a baby.
Parks weren't very child friendly either. They had keep off the grass signs.

I remember in school the girl who sat nearest to the classroom door had to jump up and open it if someone knocked, and hold it open until the interruption was over. If it was a student who knocked, she had to wait outside the door until the teacher called her in with whatever message she had been sent with. If it was an adult he or she would walk in when the door opened, and we all had to stand up until our teacher motioned us to sit down. We had to sit in complete silence until the interruption was over. (Girls' primary, Dublin, run by an order of nuns). YYY to the smell of smoke from the staff room door .