What's the strangest thing you've seen in someone's house that they thought was 'normal'?

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I'll go first.

When I was 7, I went to a friend's house, and had bright red mashed potatoes for dinner.her dad always put food colouring in food. She thought this was normal, a d everyone had coloured mash.

ASA DN I had a patient who had 3 free-flying macaws in his house. I hate birds at close quarters and didn’t know about this until I was knelt on the floor dressing his leg ulcers when one landed on my head 🤢😱
I nearly died.
The smell and parrot poop over everything was utterly disgusting.
I unfortunately went into a number of houses where you stuck to the carpet, didn’t sit down and definitely didn’t accept a cup of tea!

@pheonixrebirth

Going for Sunday dinner at my friends house and her mum put a plate of sliced cucumbers in vinegar on the table along with the gravy boat. I've never seen or heard about cucumbers in vinegar before or since. Just weird???

My nanna always used to put sliced cucumber in vinegar to serve as part of the salad for when we had "celebration tea" at her house, but we've never had it as part of a hot meal before! Same as the sliced beetroot was always in vinegar too.

@Onthegrid

My grandparents did cucumber in vinegar and the are from the south east, I think it is more of a war or post war thing than regional

My family were from eastern Europe and they did cuucmebrs in white vinegar and a little bit of sugar. Still my favourite. :) mmmm

My two wierd things;

1. Going to a friend's house for a dinner party and being told to put coats on the bed in the master bedroom- to be faced with lots of colour photos on the wall of her father and stepmother completely naked.

1. friend's place for dinner again (different friend though). They had an Alsatian that pooed everywhere ij the house and they simply did not clear it up. Theer was poo on the floor that had turned white it was so old. We had spagetti bolognese and when her father finished it he picked up his plate and licked it clean.

@Bimblybomeyelash

Rice pudding with jam is a proper British pudding!

Rice pudding is a very Spanish dessert too - one of my friends was raving about her grandmother's recipe and when it was served up I said, yeah my mum cooks this most Sundays. I told her about my mum eating it with jam and she was skeptical until she tried it. Hahaha.

My friend had a bidet in the bathroom. I was only small and I came running downstairs and said "mummy they've got one of those things you was your knickers in!" My mum was mortified!

Oh! Just had a thought- were the cucumbers in vinegar sort of pickled and from a jar or fresh? We had fresh cucumber with vinegar and sugar, but also we used to get 'bread and butter cucumbers' which were very lightly pickled and thinly sliced out of a jar. I mjust look out for them as I LOVED them.

@Flyinggeese1

Just to say my grandma used to serve sliced cucumber in vinegar to eat with a salad.

Also sliced white onions in vinegar.

Not sure why there would be a snippy comment about ‘what do you think gherkins are?’.

It wasn't snippy.

It was genuine question. The PP said she thought cucumbers in vinegar was strange, and that she'd never seen them. so I asked her what she thought gherkins were. Assuming she'd seen those before. And some people don't realise they're pickled cucumbers.

Every single square inch of surface in the lounge had a cuddly toy on it . Piled up on the sofa , sideboards, window sills , top of tv….
Just enough space to perch on the sofa to sit .
No kids in the family.

@ForkedIt

Isn’t the issue with the rice pudding not that it existed, but that the family made a big deal of it being ‘pudding night’? If I went somewhere and there was a big fanfare over pudding I’d have been expecting something a bit more exciting.

Exactly my thoughts!

Rice pudding and jam was a meh pudding in our house and every day was a pudding day. Now a slice of Neapolitan ice cream from a slab…..

@Onthegrid - yes my Nanna was born and lived in greater London area all her life. Fresh cucumber slices in vinegar, not lightly pickled. I also agree that it was probably a throwback to "war on waste" after the restrictions of WW2.
She did stop it after I asked her to, because I would eat all the cucumber slices so they weren't wasted (after anyone else had had theirs, of course!). I much prefer cucumber au naturel without the vinegar.

@adeleh

A homemade lamp made from varnished turkey legs. The legs were the stand.

I've nearly wet myself laughing at that!

I don’t see how cucumber in vinegar is any different to putting balsamic vinegar , lemon or a vinaigrette dressing on a salad.

@SundaySheAteChocolate

Is there anyone not now craving home-made rice pudding with jam?

I’ve just been searching for recipes!

A couple of years ago me and my siblings went to visit a cousin we hadn't seen since we were kids who lives 200miles away...now all adults with families so took all the dc.

Cousin did a full buffet. Not just a couple of bowls of crisps - pasties and sausage rolls, sandwiches, quiche, mini sausages, coleslaw, salads sticks etc.

I took dc2 up to help him and looked around for a plate but couldn't find any. Asked cousin where the plates were and she kind of blinked at me and looked blank and said 'oh it's just a buffet, kind of all dig in and help yourself...'

No plates. That's what people did...kept going up to grab one sandwich or slice of quiche and eating it, crumbs everywhere. It was just so bizarre, me and siblings were baffled but it seemed the way of doing things in cousins house.

Even coleslaw! People went up, picked up a sausage roll or sarnie, had a spoonful of coleslaw which they smeared on top of it and then wandered away trying not to drop or drip any

@youvemademyshitlist

My friends parents had nothing out on the worktops in the kitchen. If you wanted tea, they got the kettle out of a cupboard and plugged in, toast? The toaster came out of another cupboard. They were always put away afterwards.

That is so bizarre!!

@Acarerformum

My nana was from Yorkshire, she used to serve Yorkshire pudding, before the rest of Sunday lunch! She made a salad of cucumber, onions, tomatoes and a little bit of lettuce all in vinegar to serve with Sunday lunch, especially with roast beef, she called it wet salad. We all love it.

Could anything sounds more depressing than a food named "wet salad"?

I wonder if the bedroom nudes were the result of MN advice on a "MIL/stepchildren snooping in my bedroom" thread?

holes in the door.
from son discharging his weapon when his mother annoyed him.

he would only sleep in a sleeping bag on the floor, no mattress or pillow

[quote Eralos]@youvemademyshitlist my dad does this and I actually do it with the toaster. I love having a clear kitchen I hate seeing kitchen counters filled to the brim with clutter.[/quote]
Do you have to clear toast crumbs out of the cupboard as well as off the counter?

My friend’s mum had removed all internal doors to avoid the children misbehaving behind closed doors.

My neighbour’s mum had built an enclosure around her open plan living room to avoid the kids using it, she also had all the sofas covered with transparent plastic to avoid them getting dirty. The fact she was a teacher made it evening weirder.

Years ago I went to the CEO’s elderly father’s house with my immediate boss who thought I should see it (I’d only just started working there). There had been a recent fire upstairs hence my boss being asked to go as CEO lived abroad. Elderly father was a hoarder, in the most extreme sense. We are talking magazines to the ceiling throughout the house, you could barely get in the front door.
I went just after a few of these things had been cleared away. Amongst all the magazines, the mouldy out of date food in the fridge and the cupboards, the burnt down ceilings upstairs, there was a room downstairs in the basement where the floor was covered in strange sex toys, opened wrappers etc and thousands of girls calling cards that the elderly father had collected from the London telephone booths. The elderly father had come in to the office one day, friendly enough, couldn’t talk (previous stroke I think), you’d never know it. Strange days!

@sadeyedladyofthelowlandsea

The duckling. My very lovely friend can't help herself from 'rescuing' wildlife and found an abandoned duckling which she took home to tend. It was very happy in the garden and the bath. Bit weird when I first went to her house and it watched me go to the loo...

But she worried that it might not be ok without her, so every time she had to come out for work events, she brought the duckling. In a bucket. We were supposed to be holding a VERY serious conference with all sorts of visiting academics doing powerpoint presentations in front of a very serious audience. At every small silence, you could hear the gentle quacks of the duckling as it rotated itself around a bucket at the front of the room.

I absolutely love this!! 😂😂 That would make my year!

I know someone who washes minced beef before cooking it.

And someone else who pees in empty milk bottles at night to save it for watering garden plants.
the second part is not an issue, pee is full of ammonia so a great fertiliser.
the weird part is not using it the next morning but saving it up until a 4 pint bottle is full..

(also rice pudding is very common in Hungary too and so is sliced cucumbers in vinegar or vinegar & sugar.
they are not the same as pickled gerhkins)

[quote Eralos]@youvemademyshitlist my dad does this and I actually do it with the toaster. I love having a clear kitchen I hate seeing kitchen counters filled to the brim with clutter.[/quote]
Same. Toaster and microwave lives in pantry (plugged in)

I was invited to tea by a school friend. I was offered a slice of bread and butter, and said no thanks as I didn't like it.
My friend and her mum looked at me as though I was mad, and asked what I was going to eat, as tea was literally bread and butter with the option of jam.
Yorkshire salad was always served up in a sandwich when I was little, we were a large Catholic family with hardly any money, but when we were flush we had tinned salmon with it.
Grew up in the SE.
My Dad let his eccentricity run wild when my Mum died and would serve up pie sandwiches, jam sponge where the jam was mashed pickled beetroot, and all cups were saved for best and we drank out of old pot noodle containers.
He was a cook in the RAF, and insisted he'd killed Hitler by sending him a dodgy food parcel .

Firstly, I have to disagree with everyone about rice pudding! It’s the WORST dessert EVER! It probably doesn’t help that as a kid I was fed the tinned stuff and would gag, plus I don’t like milk.

I have a couple of stories about weird houses though. One is my hubby’s aunt and there are pot dolls EVERYWHERE. I’d never seen as many in a living room and it is a big room at that. Dolls in prams, cots everything. So chilling having them watching you.

I also remember visiting a house of a woman who a new friend i’d met knew and she had two kids and a couple of yappy terriers. Well the smell was horrendous and realised what it was when we were going in the kitchen, it was dog poo. The woman was allowing the dogs to poo in the house and wasn’t cleaning it up! One of the kids had just been baking too! There are quite a few stories about that woman too and her versions are very fantasy based which just tops it all off really. I was about 14 when I was introduced to her and the stories were entertaining from her when you weren’t focussing on the smell!