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.

Goldrush bubble gum that came in little bags and was meant to look like gold nuggets!!!!! And of course, Spacedust!!!

I had friends who went to the orthodontist, i didn't know what it was.
Then I had a child who needed a complicated course of treatment, which involved a lot of visits to a very posh clinic. I can confirm it is full of yummy mummies with swishy hair. I was out of place in the waiting room. Despite middle class credentials.

Spacedust was another of the things on my mothers; Banned Forevermore index. I think I ate a packet once and was sick all night.

Apparently some chocolate company wants to revive a vintage chocolate bar. I'd either want it to be the Pink Panther bar or the Texan!

I once ate 3 Pink Panther bars while my mum was putting the shopping away - she knew I had taken them but I had hidden the wrappers well so she couldn't find the 'proof'. As she became increasingly annoyed I decided to play on the garden swing and promptly projected pink vomit.........she had her proof!!!!!!!

Erm…how could you tape without the telly?

The video recorder box is what does the recording, not the TV.

Well, I’ve learned something utterly useless today!

😂

Aztec or Cabana for me.

Plastic square ham, a girl at school had them in her sandwiches... We had old fashioned unshaped meat at home, from a farm, how uncool (how times have changed! ).
Saying that the kids on sandwiches not dinners were all more affluent, daily chocolate bars, you what?!

And of course orange juice and stationary. I still baulk when my kids use a whole sheet of cheap printer paper for mere scribbles. This is where my save for best issues come from!

Yes, you can imagine what the taping without the telly did to my daft 16 yr old brain.......but then I did regard cfax as technology!!!!!

own bedroom (had to share with my sister who smoked 🤢)
family car
holiday abroad
fitted kitchen i.e. not having the fridge in your hallway
duvet
a proper shower (not just a hose pushed on the taps)
your own bath water

To echo the above, not me but my DM.

She grew up in a rural working class NI family, the second eldest of 6, not uncommon in the 1940s/50s. She shared a bedroom with 3 of her siblings, all brothers, right through her teens (you can imagine what that was like at a very personal level), washed and dried her 2nd pair of stockings every night in front of the fire (so it constantly smelt of the following morning’s breakfast), loo was across the yard, bath was once a week after the little ones in the same water. That was nothing unusual for the time and the place she grew up.

Fast forward to nursing training. She had a room of her own and a hot bath at least once a week. They worked very, very hard, but her living conditions felt like luxury to her. And yes, it is a bit Four Yorkshiremen!

Another 30 years, and we all move into a detached house with 3 loos: one downstairs, one main bathroom and one ensuite. It seemed pretty good to me being used to one indoor bathroom, never mind my mum who grew up with one basic loo across the yard.

The actual branded toy rather than a market knock off

We always had second hand bikes for Christmas

Dinner parties

when I went to middle school there were many mc children and their parents had dinner parties

My mum went to one of their dinner parties and later told me the food was Le Cordon Bleu my mind was blown oh the sophistication

Pippa Dee parties.

I have no idea what they were or who Pippa Dee was, but the woman over the road from us used to have them, though my mother was never invited. They could have been wild and Dionysian husband-swapping orgies for all I know.

Beef olives

Nuts in their shells in a bowl with a nutcracker

Taking your shoes off in someone else's home.

Lunch and dinner - it was dinner and tea round my way. Supper was a slice of toast or similar at 9pm.

Oh wow that brings back memories!

They weren't a thing around here because there was a Pippa Dee outlet in the town that sold their old stock for a song. They were the modest equivalent of Ann Summers in that the demonstrator would show dresses, skirts etc and women would try them on and order them and the host would get a commission or free clothes.

I went on my first proper date at 15 (with a very sweet boy of 19, and yes he was a boy and was never inappropriate, we were together 3 months and snogged!), to the pictures in a lemon dropped waist cotton Pippa Dee summer dress that would now be called Midi (then mid-calf) complete with permed hair....both of us ...it was 1988! 😁

Oh just clothes parties then.

Those companies really knew how to exploit female socialisation, didn't they - you went along to be Nice and not Odd, even if most women didn't actually want a cupboard full of tupperware or aloe vera or Avon!

My posh dentist was full of nannies. Not even joking!

Definitely nuts in shells with a nutcracker! I had a friend whose parents had them, it was posh, they were posh.

Also they had classical music playing a lot.

There was always a smell of freshly brewed coffee and home baking in the air.

They regularly had a cheese course after dinner, so different cheeses, crackers and grapes were commonplace there. The closest I got to a cracker was my mum's Ryvita.

And the friend's bedroom was scented by rose pomanders.

Friend also had posh bubble bath as standard, not just Matey or nothing.

As a proper grown up with a husband and a baby we were invited to dinner by a couple in their forties. They had grape scissors. Are they posh, or are they like fish knives and pastry forks ...a bit try hard? Should i have grape scissors?

Exceptionally try-hard, and completely unnecessary I'd have thought.

Grape scissors...not sure about try hard but definitely unnecessary. Perhaps they were a gift, they are the sort of thing I can imagine an ex boyfriends mother gifting, she was very "Hyacinth".

Being 'ex-directory' was a mark of being exceedingly posh. And those little printed stickers that people put on their personal letters with their address on, and the house always had a name. And the notepaper was a pale pastel shade with a watermark. That meant you were a cut above the hoi polloi.