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

[AlternativelyWired]

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.

Sugar puffs, was only allowed them at Christmas

Growing up in the 1970s I considered luxuries as being :
Fresh fruit , especially oranges
Liquid soap
Cosmetic tissues
Hair conditioner
Duvets
Cushion covers
Make up remover pads, and makeup remover come to that
Owning more than one coat and one pair of shoes
Tumble dryer
TV in the bedroom - I didn't have that until I left home and that was a second hand portable TV.

Mr Kipling French Fancies
Frozen Potato croquettes - well frozen anything - that was our special holiday food. If we were really lucky we got frozen beef burgers, or birds eye chicken pies. Utter luxury.
Vesta paella
Cheese footballs - the height of sophistication
After Eight mints

A colour TV!! I was born 1975. My parents only got a colour TV when the B&W TV conked out. All my friends had colour TV already . I think we got one when I was about 13 yrs old and a VHS player too.

All the mentions of avocados reminds me of one of my favourite stories. It was in the M&S magazine (do they still make that?) and part of a “British food tastes through the years” piece. M&S had been the first big UK retailer to sell avocados back in the 70s, which were always called avocado pears then. A customer had written an angry letter to their customer service department saying “I’m never buying those avocado pears again. I had them stewed with custard and they were disgusting!” 😆

Literally never had takeaway as a kid apart from fish and chips - every week! How we were all skinny I have no idea.
I was about 18 I think when I first had a Chinese takeaway and was embarrassed I had no idea what a chow mein etc was. Was a bit wary of avocado and didn't have it until my 20s (in the 21st century!) I'm fairly adventurous with food now so making up for lost time.

I remember the first time I tried Sugar Puffs and thought they must have had something wrong with them as I found them utterly foul

Cotton Wool. Never had it in the house, always had to make do with toilet roll to remove make up (Constance Carrol)

I was a child of the 50s/60s, so:
Indoor toilets.
A fixed bath (not a tin one hanging on the back door).
Running hot water.
Heating in any room apart from the front room - we had fireplaces in the bedrooms, but fires were only lit if you were ill.
A front garden with flowers, not a back one with veg and a coal bunker.
Clothes that weren’t home made.
Shop bought cakes or pies.
Televisions.
Electric mangles.

Cars and telephones weren’t even on the radar.

We weren’t poor, all this was quite normal. We actually thought that people who were lucky enough to get a council house, with indoor plumbing and decent heating, were the height of poshness. 😂

We did have Sugar Puffs though. I remember a competition to name the Sugar Puffs bear. Apparently they thought Jeremy was better than my attempt - Theresa, after my doll.

When I was really young,
Upstairs bathrooms, bonus posh points for a coloured suite,
Carpets and wallpaper, my parents were poor and hippies so we had bare floorboards and walls painted with coloured stripes,
Imperial Leather soap, we had Wrights Coal Tar I used to peel the sticker off my Grandma's Imperial Leather and stick it on ours,
Anything gold or gold coloured, my friends parents had gold coloured door knobs and bathroom taps,
Same friend had ox blood red leather sofa and chairs, and those book covers you could get for video tapes, I thought they were so fancy,
Shoes which weren't T-bar sandals, I didn't really wear any shoes except wellies until I was five and subsequently developed food issues and had to have orthotics put into my shoes and they could apparently only go in t-bar sandals. I longed for patent mary-janes,
We visited a colleague of my Dad and they had a dresser with loads of those pendelfin rabbit ornaments, I thought they were posh!

As I got a bit older,
We moved and got real beds instead of camp beds and white melamine furniture from MFI you could choose the colour of the door handles red, grey or pink I think. I thought this was so luxurious compared to all the old brown wood furniture we'd had which looking back was probably lovely,
Central heating,
Rag rolled walls,
A school friend had a phone on her room and could use it to get her Mum to bring snacks upstairs!
Matching home furnishings, friends Mum had everything in Eternal Beau she even got the pattern painted around the walls,

The mention of Imperial Leather soap being posh surely makes everyone of a certain age think of "Simon - Bermuda"

Fresh orange (or any kind of juice you don't add water to)
Asparagus, courgette, aubergine, olives
Croissants, seeded bread
Houmous
Chicken kiev
Philadelphia
Every nut except peanuts
Butter, salmon, meats like pastrami and salami (still think these are posh)

Butterscotch angel delight - I thought it was the food of the gods!

We also had as a treat tinned fruit salad - they only ever put two cherry halves, which naturally meant us 3 kids would row as soon as the tin was opened

We went to a 'posh' neighbours which was the first time I had seen edam (we had cheddar or dairylea).....we were always brought up to eat the whole meal and so I ate the red wax!

Pizza hut

Soft fruit, so grapes, mangos things like that.

I thought they must be really expensive but it was because they came from South Africa and my mother was boycotting them.

I too remember 'rise and shine'

This

A dishwasher.

More than one pair of shoes at a time. 😀

I saw orange juice as a starter at a hotel in Scotland in 2002. Can anyone beat that?

I worked in a hotel that offered oj starter in 2006.

Fruit juice of any kind. Spirits other than whisky or gin. Any restaurant starter that wasn’t grapefruit segments. Colour TV. BBC 2. We had central heating, and indoor kazi and soft loo paper. So fairly posh!

We had grapefruit spoons with a serrated edge. Do they still sell them?

Big bottles of fizzy drink. We had a soda stream )which was probably considered aspirational by many) and it made fairly rubbish fizzy drinks that never tasted how they were supposed to, but I remember one Christmas probably around 1986ish my parents bought some large bottles of lemonade, cola and cherryade and it was the most exciting thing ever. And REAL Coke or Pepsi from a bottle was mind blowing.

Phileas Fogg tortilla chips. They were the only ones you could buy in the 80s. Small me would have been shocked to see the array of Doritos and knock offs that you can buy now.

Oh, and I remember the fresh fruit juice as a starter thing. It was usually the cheap sort, not the nice freshly squeezed sort. My brother always had it as the starter in a restaurant because he was a fussy eater.

Which made me remember how posh I thought my grandparents were when they had an electric Dolphin shower box installed on their bathroom wall. We had to make do with one of those rubber hose contraptions you rammed onto the taps and struggled to balance the temperature and maintain decent pressure without it flying off.

So many things but I remember being envious of people who had their ‘pop’ delivered by the ‘pop man’ 😊

Broccoli. We only had it at Christmas. I think it was frozen and in a cardboard box.