Things you didn't know weren't normal

[Applescruffle]

What are things you thought every one or every family did until you became an adult or entered a new relationship?

I'll start. I thought that everyone ate the leftover yorkshires after a roast dinner as desert eg: fill them with cream and fruit or custard or something, basically use them like you would a pancake... no?

I thought everyone peeled mushrooms, I didn't know that not only do people not peel mushrooms, lots don't even know they have peel!! 😱

I'll probably think of more.

Nb: I'm not meaning to trigger anyone's childhood or relationship trauma, I just mean lighthearted things x

I didnt realise people buttered both slices of bread when making a sandwich, I thought it was just for parties. I spoke to my mum about it when i was older and she said she would always just butter one slice as part of a diet.

I dont butter the bread with choc spread or peanut butter but do with Jam.

Growing up we shared hand towels but not bath towels. Then i got a skin condition and the doctor told me not to share towels.
My family now have our own hand/bath towels.
We dont have visiters so dont have a guest towel but only now realise thats why its called that.

I can remember my mum cutting a little bit off the end of a mushroom and peeling it.
My kids dont like mushrooms so i dont have eat them much now. But when i do i buy already sliced as i cant be bothered to peel and slice them.

My nan used to give the kids a digestive biscuit with butter on when they were little.

I know someone who mixes up an oxo cube in hot water and calls it 'gravy'. No thickener, nothing...tastes rather like you've run your roast dinner under a hot tap. 😂

@SpanielsMatter think you probably should have started your post off with culture shock in New Zealand as a lot of people are missing your point!!

Spring onions. I used to cut away the bulb bit and think the ends were the bit to eat. Now I cut up the bulb bit and still bin the ends... the other ends! Spring onions confuse me 🤣

🎶 Singsong pleasemayileavethetable, thought every family did this.

(Veering traumatic) Other families like each other & like eating together 🤯.

Lots of culture shock stuff arriving in late 70's Scotland, especially around food. Rice only featured in hot milk puddings 🤢, also no mangoes 🥭. Mum coaxed me to eat with bowls of long grain and ketchup eaten with my hands.

Fairy bread for parties! Half saw it as exotic and magical, half bullied me for being poor.

My father told me they grew bananas on oil rigs using natural gas converted to heat 😂🤣. I really missed our fruit trees & well, we've all seen the gas flares, and banana trees are tall, and so are the rigs. I went in and told my entire school class. In an oil community. 🤭😆

ps. Scotland Yard bugs me every time.

No they aren't. The little black bits are spiders though.

😂😂😂

Oh I can't believe the towel thing keeps coming up! Growing up there were two bath towels in our bathroom that me/mum/dad/sister used. Drying yourself on a towel you know your lovely (but hairy old man Dad) has just used is gross. I got to around 11/12 and insisted I had my own (pink) towels-1 bath & 1 small hand towel- we were not that hard up a a family and I think I asked for them as a birthday present!
My own DS has had 'his' big red bath towel for 20 yrs (it's been 3 big red towels in that time)

I’ve always been able to “turn on and off” my sense of smell. I would always get confused when people kept complaining about bad odours and wonder why they didn’t just stop smelling.

Finally when I went out with my friend and we popped into a fishmonger she complained about how badly it stank. When I told her to just stop smelling she looked at me like I was mad.

Turns out my father can do the same, but not my mother or siblings.

Australian - My mother wouldn't let us anywhere near fairy bread, she thought it was disgusting, and we were told not to go near it if we went to any party it was served at.

She also never put dressing on salad. Family of 5, communal towels...I think she would have thought I'd been dropped on my head if I suggested we have our own. You'd just grab the driest looking one when you got out of the bath/shower.

Only girl so I was the only one expected to do housework, setting table etc. Neither myself or my two brothers were ever allowed to have a key to the family home...my mother didn't work so let us in after school and when we started going out at night - and that wasn't allowed until we were in our late teens - myself and my older brother used to throw stones at my younger brother's window (his room was above the front door) or we'd tell him to leave the back door unlocked (highly dodgy looking back but we were never burgled).

I thought cars were for middle class/well off people. I kind of still do, even though I am now well off and have a car. I feel wrong driving, as if its not for people like me!

Also we had separate face flannels and body flannels. I've since learned that this isn't common, apparently.

Oh and we were never encouraged to buy presents for our siblings...to this day - I'm 55 next Monday - I've never had any sort of present, Christmas/birthday/wedding etc from my older brother. I was the only one who ever bought Christmas/birthday presents for my parents from when I was a teen.

Everyone has their own (white) towel in a certain spot on the towel rails here. Yes, there are several big towels hanging in the bathroom at any given time.

Popular where I'm from in the NW.

Oh. My. God. About 8 years ago a friend of mine, who happens to be a lawyer, said the same thing. I had to bite my tongue. 🤦‍♀️

I recall my first boyfriend making me breakfast after I'd stayed over.

He produced a steaming bowl of wheatabix made with boiling water, whipped up nice and thick with a spoon sticking straight up. A steaming mound.

I actually thought it was a practical joke and the real breakfast was out of sight. No! That was how they prepared breakfast in their family.

As children we always ate wheatabix with cold milk and sugar and quickly before they became too soggy.

You look completely normal and lovely. Teenagers can be arseholes. Maybe they thought you were staring at them and their insecurities turned into nastiness? I avoid eye contact on public transport!

This is a Dutch breakfast thing. I think they call them 'sprinkles'.

I never had Yorkshire puddings as a child and don't like them now. We had baked suet pudding with roast dinner - usually with a handful of sultanas baked in it.
When visiting my aunt in London she gave us weird thick milk to pour on our dessert and called it cream. No! Cream is really thick with a crusty yellow top and made by scalding milk...

(I grew up in Devon and had only ever had clotted cream - and the suet pudding is a Devonshire dish too)

The fairybread is an absolute revelation, I had never heard of or even dared to dream about such wonders. Cannot wait to make these for DS's next birthday it will blow his mind.

I didn't realise until I started dating that some families have the TV on all the time in the background. In my family we turned it on to watch a specific thing, watched it in complete silence, and then turned it off again. To this day I struggle to talk through TV and find it really distracting when it's on in the background.

Oh another one. My house was a terrace where the front door opened.straight into the living room, no hall or porch just step straight in. I had lots of friends whose houses had halls and entranceway, but also lots whose house wee like mine. So I thought both were completely normal. A friend visited who came from Kingston on Thames, not from a particulately well off family, and she was visibly shocked that we didn't have anything separating the living space from the entrance. It was a bit embarrassing really.

I was used to cooked bananas.
Probably takes care of the spiders 😉

I learnt about Fairy Bread from the soap opera "Neighbours".

Are either of your parents Irish by any chance?

Warm 7-up is an Irish mammy cure-all that we had all the time when we were sick. I still have it now if I've had a sickness bug, DH thinks it's bonkers but it works.

@ReadingSoManyThreads
But isn't the tenant paying the LL and wouldn't they include charges like that in the rent?