Things you thought were posh/exciting/unattainable as a child that are actually everyday items

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I'm just searching for scotch tape on Amazon ready for Christmas. It got me thinking how double sided sticky tape was but a dream back when I was little. Blue Peter used it all the time but it was something I'd never have. The same with play dough. I only ever had plasticine. Scotch tape was fancy too, we only ever had yellow sellotape. Ribera. I'm sure I'll think of others.

Crepe flambé and quiche in restaurants; both seemed so exotic in the early 1980s. Having a new school sweater which wasn’t a felty hand me down. Tights and pantyhose that didn’t roll down and need hoisting. My father was dead set against cable when it arrived locally in 1992. He changed his mind when I pointed out the defunct Nashville Network showed all NASCAR races. In my family, we worshipped sports cars.

When I was a kid we had a biscuit jar and every night we were allowed to choose 2 biscuits for our supper. They were never, ever chocolate.

Shop bought biscuits were a rare thing when was a kid!

Mum often baked though- jam & lemon curd tarts I especially remember.

My goodness could she make pastry!

Gold taps! My aunt had a kidney bean coloured suite with a round bath and gold taps and they were the height of sophistication to me.

To be fair I think if I moved into a house now with a coloured bath and gold taps I’d keep it, it would delight the 7 year old inside of me!

Muesli
Neapolitan ice cream in a block
A soda syphon

A dress or clothes bought in a shop.My mother sewed all my clothes and I think I was about 13 before I got a 'bought ' dress.

So many of these things. I grew up in the 80s and at the time thought the following items were dead posh📧

• A car phone
• Having one of the first brick Nokia mobile phones
• Going out to a restaurant (even if it was McDonalds and Pizza Hut)
• Owning a family car
• Going abroad on holiday - even if it was Europe. Long haul was unheard of
• Owning a commodore 64 or a ZX spectrum
• Owning the full set of the Encyclopaedia Britannica
• Vienetta
• Apple strudel
• Coke (only served when guests were visiting and we were only allowed 1 glass for the evening)
• Vol-u-vents
• Trifle
• Having your own bedroom if you had siblings

I often wonder what my dc would think as not so posh now as they did then.

Ready made curtains. What?

Tins of paint which hadn't been on top of the bench for 25 years and had a depth of skin on top which was about an inch thick. When I grew up, and started earning, I could afford my own NEW paint.

We always had those as a treat on holiday in the caravan!

I remember our first fitted carpet as a kid.

Before that one large square(?) with the wood flooring varnished just around the edges.

the first brick Nokia mobile phones - these cost the equivalent of £1000, so they were posh.

My cousin (many many years ago) always had tinned fruit and carnation milk for her Sunday tea and she did not have to have bread and butter with it. I thought it was so posh.
We always had Sunday tea at my Grans who lived a few doors away from cousin and I would always go to theirs after we had eaten where my Aunt would get my fruit and Carnation out of the pantry that she had saved for me. My Gran never found out why I went there straight away.
When I got my first wage packet I bought a can of Carnation and drank the lot on my way home from work.

Colour TV, then a few years later, a video recorder. We used to watch colour tv at the neighbours' sometimes.

I used to look forward to “posh” things at my grans. The soda syphon seemed huge to 6 year old me. Vienetta or Arctic roll. Mini boxes of cereal for breakfast. After Eights. The smell of furniture polish everywhere. She was so houseproud. 😍

I remember my gran having one of these in the same colour!

@TurkeyTeeth that sounds like seconds (returns) or second hand.

Yes! My parents never took us, it was occasionally a relative that treated us to a Little Chef or coffee shop in the local town. I loved an ice cream float

Different time period than most of the previous posters (was born in the 90s) but for me, using the internet on your mobile phone.
I had a mobile phone with Internet access, but if I ever clicked the Internet button by accident, I would frantically hit the back button to close it before it took all my credit.

Fast forward to 2022 I'm sitting and typing this on my smartphone!

Going to the hair dresser. Till I was about 12 my mum cut my hair. I never even considered going to the hair dresser. In those days a professional hair cut was about £10, which was a lot of money. None of my friends went to a hair dresser either. We all had our hair cut by cut by our parents. I sometimes got a hair cut when we went to visit my country of origin, where hair cuts were very cheap and I remember my friends' parents being very impressed whenever I did. When I was 12 I started growing my hair. No more mushroom cuts for me.

A 'Snowball' at Christmas time. Advocaat (?) lime juice .....lemonade ..very very grown up. Revolting though!

an ice cream from the ice cream van was a massive luxury, as was going to Blackpool ☺️

We always used a massive bottle of Boots own brand shampoo (bottle probably wasn’t a big as I remember) I loved the smell. Parents never bought conditioner- couldn’t get a comb through my thick hair😂

My friend had a book of cut out dolls and clothes that i envied mainly because the clothes stuck on with little magnets, i pestered my mum for one but all she could find were the ones with little fold back tabs that never really stayed on properly.

-As a kid, I never realised that people could actually buy in ready made/frozen food from the shop. So I thought that only rich people did this.
-We never got fizzy drinks at home, and rarely had squash (I thought squash was a vegetable, not a drink) or chocolate/crisps. I used to think my packed lunches were "boring" (the other kids had exciting things like chocolates, crisps, shop-made cookies).
-people who would change their cars so often, or have two or three cars: my parents had one car, and my Dad would cycle or use his motorbike to get to the train station for work).
-eating in the cafe/restaurant in a theme park or when out and about. We used to take a packed lunch and Thermos from home. Or if we went to the cinema, Mum would make popcorn at home and put it in bags for us to take with us.

So - as a naive, clueless and silly child - I thought that we were "poor". How bloody stupid was I?!

NB I was bloody lucky as a child: my parents were affluent, but they were also sensible with money (i.e. they didn't buy the "newest/most expensive thing" just to show off wealth. They were very much of the "make do and mend" generation). There was food on the table, heating/AC, we didn't go without. Mum (who taught dressmaking, Royal Icing, crochet/lacemaking etc) cooked and baked everything from scratch. She made a lot of clothing, and things for the house. A lot of our food was home grown (parents had a large property, with lots of land. They kept goats, ducks, geese, hens, etc).

I’ve seen it mentioned a few times but Vienetta! We used to have it for pudding on Christmas Day. Not quite everyday now (and we do still buy it for Christmas) but definitely not posh!

In the 60s we would sometimes have those Lyons fruit pies, apricot was my favourite, as a very special treat. They were like Mr Kipling pies only a bit bigger, in an individual square box and I recall them being much nicer.

Soft loo paper and viscount biscuits