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!

@WeBuiltThisBuffetOnSausageRoll

Skodas that were truly rubbish cars - as opposed to modern Skodas which are among the best and most reliable cars you can buy.

Also Ladas - but they were no longer for this world.

We had a Moskvitch - a Russian/Soviet car! They were quite rare in the UK, and all Moskvitch drivers waved to each other when they saw another one.

We actually had our own Roneo machine - my mum edited and printed a quarterly magazine for her local Iris Society. It was a real performance to print it - my mum had to type it in portrait, because she didn’t have a typewriter with a wide carriage, and then cut it in half, rotate each half 90 degrees, and then stick them back together, so it could be printed in A5 booklet form. Then mum put the stencil onto the roneostat, churned out the copied, and we helped collate it.

We once got all the way through the process, and noticed a major typo, so mum had to redo a whole page. The article was an account of a visit to a garden that, according to mum’s typo, was “...near the home of the late, great Bong Crosby...”!

@MissAmandaLa1kes

Being ever so proud of the badges on my Brownies uniform which I had earned and the ones my brother kindly added. I was the only one in the Wribbenhall pack who had the Iron cross first class, a panzer destroyer award, an Eastern Front service award, was a luftwaffe pilot, u boat sailor and held the rank of sturmanfurher! Until i was sent home With A Letter.

That's actually rather sweet!

We didn't have a washing machine when I was a child. Large items like sheets and towels were sent to the laundry, and returned ironed the following week.
We used to embroider our surname on each item.

Oh yes, wages in cash. At my first job as a temporary admin assistant at the Inland Revenue they were brought round in a brown envelope on a Friday afternoon. Just over £70 and it felt like a fortune.
Grange Hill - had some quite shocking storylines for the time.
A drama (and book) called Break in the Sun - about a girl with a miserable home life who joined some actors and actresses making their way by boat from London to Margate.
Blue Peter - showing kids how to make little presents for their parents for mother's day etc - usually with the aid of "sticky tape."
Bullseye on a Sunday evening was followed by Songs of Praise, then Last of the Country Wine, Darling Buds of May, Heartbeat or something equally gentle, then That's Life with Esther Ranzen.
Occasionally on a Sunday I'd be let off Sunday School to go with parents on a run out, ie a drive to some boring (to me) place like Evesham or Ludlow. If we took an elderly friend as well, I'd have to sit in the front between my parents, on a cushion over the handbrake. We'd get there, have a picnic and a gentle stroll along the river, and come home.
I agree with a PP that Sundays were so awful then that it's hard to enjoy them even now.
The carnival, or gala as it was known then - I think it's now changed yet again to a festival - was a huge annual event. We would sit on the front wall to see the parade of floats go by. A few times I was in the parade with the Brownies or Guides. Then entertainment and displays on the park, with a funfair. Despite being a massive rip off, there is still something magical about fairs - the lights and the noises and smells.

I can see some current 'ancient history in the making' right now in the form of those toy 'tablet' things, that often cost as much as an actual cheap tablet, but have 0.001% of the functionality and the graphics.

I'm amazed that parents are still buying them - it's 2021 and yet a 'computer' which isn't much more advanced than a Speak & Spell is still on sale!

Swings tied up in the park on Sundays.
North Wales, early 1960s. Thou shalt not have fun on a Sunday.

Fun activity for a 3 year old when my grandparents visited - going to the shops in Grandpa's car (we didn't have one) to get his daily paper.
One of my earliest memories is standing up in the passenger footwell so that I could try to see over the dashboard as we drove home, eating from a box (not a tube) of Smarties, in a haze of pipe smoke.
Happy days!

Blimey, @Scarby9, 3 is a bit young for smoking a pipe!

Just thinking today, when we're looking up something specific we want for the house, and when I was a kid you'd just have to go looking round loads of shops until you found what you were after - you couldn't just google it and find people who sell it.

The excitement when my grammar school got 2 adding machines (the sort with a roll of paper) and we all had a lesson on using them.

Not having a bath or shower in the house and using public baths
Not having a phone in the house
Walking to and from school with friends and no adults from the age of 5
Not knowing anyone who'd been abroad

Woolworths and the Xmas brochures from there, BHS etc
Treasure Hunt with Anneka Rice on a Thurs night,
Mint crisp and toffee crumble ice lollies
Roller skates and boot skates
Towns having carnivals with lots of different floats and carnival princess
Thinking the girls at my school who wore 'proper tights' were really grown up
Judy Bloom books
Taping the top 40
Paying £249 for 2 weeks holiday (1st without my parents)
School discos with local boys school
Using the line 'need to go and phone friend from phone box down the road' to meet boyfriend...
Going to 'Brown Owls' to cook a full breakfast for cooks badge and serving tea to random Bishops etc (including Desmond Tutu) for hostess badge.

Catalogues. Freemans, Kays, Gratton etc. There was an autumn/winter one with loads of toys in, and a spring/summer one

Yes, the A/W one was great with all the toys and the spring/summer one was really boring!

I can remember 3 channels but remember C4 being launched.

Father telling me to get off the phone all the time.

I had a ZX81 computer. Not sure why. All I could do with it was programme it to say

HELLO
HELLO
HELLO
HELLO
HELLO

you get the idea

I still have my school calculator from Texas Instruments that I got in about 1986 and it still works!

watching childrens tv after school until crackerjack then that was it-none of this 24 hour roling tv

The talking clock

2p sweets
Children running the streets
Tuck shop at school for Break and after school only selling crisps, biscuits and drinks
Nokia phones
Argos/little woods catologues
This was 90s/early 2000s
Even that seems like a different world

A friend's top class primary (Top Juniors then, Y6 now) teacher used to send her to the local shop to buy him cigarettes during lesson time. 1971.

Index catalogue, and Argos catalogue. Flicking through the pages and circling the toys I liked.

So many memories on here 😁

My main ones are:
Chips cost 5p and were wrapped in newspaper, and tasted so much better than chips today
Crisps were 2 & half pence
I loved ice-breaker bars (mint chocolate)
Sweet cigarettes and I ate the paper too (not sure if it was meant to be edible?)
Sugar butties
Our bath being in the kitchen and covered with a board when not in use (once weekly baths)
No washing machine, carpet or home phone
Putting money in the meter
Having the gas and leccy cut off on a regular basis
Candles
Playing with Ouija boards
The witch who lived up the road (there was always a witch somewhere)
The endless number of cats and dogs we seemed to ‘find’ and home
Puppies and kittens for sale in pet shops
An advert warning about the dangers of playing on rubbish tips, especially as you could get trapped in an old fridge and die
The Lesley-Anne Downey case

Sitting in the smoking section on an aeroplane.

Buying cigarettes from the corner shop for my DM, must have been 8/9.

The joy that was getting cable tv around 13 and suddenly having hundreds of channels to watch.

Spending hours on a Friday night picking films in Blockbuster.

Meeting boys and having to give the landline number and dreading anyone else answering the phone when they rang!

The Webb Ivory Christmas catalogue.

Soaps in which unmarried couples never had sex. Couples got married ridiculously young instead. Charlene (Kylie Minogue) was 16 or something when she married Jason Donovan. Sharon in Eastenders made Wicksy sleep in a chair when they spent a night in the same room.

Rotary phones
Crossed lines
Penny sweet displays of dusty sweets in every newsagent
The Webb Ivory catalogue
Digital watches being the dernier cri of fashion
Saying grace at the end of the day in primary school
Bringing 2p for a biscuit (fig roll) to accompany your warm school milk that had been sitting in the sun in its dinosaur carton for so long it was almost off
Pots of jelly with sugary cream on top at children’s parties
Being given ten pence by random old people in the street for good luck

Oh I remember the puppies and kittens in the pet shops.😍😍😍

Buying three sweets for a penny.
Having to turn a dial to tune in a tv channel.
Children's TV such as Mary, Mungo and Midge, and The Clangers.
Telephones with a rotary dial (I have one still!)
Everyone knowing everyone else on a street, and not because they were nosey.
Ice on the inside of the windows on a winter's morning.
Lino on the floor (with a rug in some rooms).
Coal fires.
Ringing the bell for children to come in from breaks and milk in glass bottles at school (warmed near a stove). Oh! and outside toilets, with a wooden seat over a stream of water to wash waste away.

Can you tell I'm having a trip down memory lane here ?