What's the weirdest thing you've done that you look back and think 'WTF did I do that for?'

[BarbaraVineFan]

I'll start - when I was in my first long term relationship at the fairly advanced age of 24, my partner and I used to regularly cook our dinner, then take it up to bed on a tray and sit there watching TV eating our dinner like Grandpa Joe and Grandma Josephine in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory! No discernible reason, there was a perfectly good telly and sofa downstairs 😐 I have no idea why we did it! Anyone else got something similarly weird to share?

At around 9 we rented a holiday home in the country with a little stream running through the garden and had great fun splashing about. One day I was playing with my little Fisher price people (although now embarrassed to do this) and one fell into the stream and flowed away. I was really upset and decided to follow the stream but couldn't see where it went from outside so I got into it and followed it to a tunnel / culvert. I walked on and on through this in the dark until eventually I almost fell out over waist high into some sort of swampy field with high weeds or reeds all around me. I couldn't even stand properly in the muddy ground and nearly went under. Luckily I saw my little toy caught in some weeds but then had to climb back up into the high tunnel with water flowing onto my head and walk against the flow home. Even then I knew it was insanely dangerous. I ran in and quickly changed then told everyone I had just tripped in the stream and gotten wet. I was always a risk averse sensible kind of kid but not that day. I often thought of what my fate would be if I hadn't climbed back up.

My mum collected Cordon Bleu magazines, we used to make extravagant bleugggh noises looking at them.

Before the internet or proper telly I used to obsessively read cookery books whenever I ate. My favourites were The Dairy Book of Home Cookery and all of Delia Smith. I can picture her squidgy chocolate log to this day, 'a bit wicked, as it contains no flour', and her frosted grape cheesecake.

I'm a very basic, unimaginative cook despite this deep encyclopedic knowledge.

Loving the thread!

I lived quite a sheltered life as a child, I was allowed to drink the occasional tea but not coffee. So when I got the chance to make my own coffee at a friend's house I was very excited.

Once it was made, I thought it tasted disgusting and asked my friend to try it to see if it was supposed to taste like that. She asked me why there was a tea bag in it too. I thought that the base of every hot drink was tea - so used a tea bag with coffee granules. Never lived it down.

😂😂😂

Probably lowering the tone, but I once shat the bed after a night out, about the size of a small dog's poo. My boyfriend at the time was asleep so I inexplicably threw it out the window to cover my tracks.

Downstairs neighbour knocked later that day to complain about foxes pooing on the doorstep 🤣 it was about 10 years ago but still makes me cringe!

That’s not weird. It’s a dinner party. More weird would be inviting people to dinner and then ordering a take away.

Once during my primary school days, me and my friend watched Wallace and Gromit, it was the one with the cheese moon. We became so inspired by what we saw that I stole my mums debit card and cycled to the nearest big supermarket to get out a tenner from the ATM to buy... Jacobs crackers and cathedral city. She was really cross when we got back, but when she found out why, I think she laughed. So rock and roll.
Me and the same friend also had an obsession with Queen. We sang the whole of Bohemian Rhaspody to the dinner ladies.... every single lunch time. I mean it's a long song, I remember them trying to leave but we just kept them there for chorus after chorus. Cringey.

Dairy Book of Home Cookery!! I know that one well too!!

When my brother and I were around 7 and 8 my dad got a sailing dinghy to sail in the muddy tidal estuary where we lived. To launch it you had to go down a concrete ramp at the yacht club, how far depended on how high the tide was.
The first time he got the boat out he had a friend to help him sort it out for the first time. They left my brother and me waiting on the ramp, told us not to move and sailed off then forgot to come back to pick us up.
We did not move.
We stood on the concrete ramp while the tide rose round us: first over our shoes, then ankles, then knees. Instead of just using our brains and strolling back up to the ramp to wait on dry land we stood motionless on the ramp until the water was waist deep by which time someone from the yacht club noticed what was happening and rescued us.
Obviously my dad wouldn’t win Father of the Year for that but I still can’t believe we did what we were told to the extent of just letting the tide come in around us.

This story makes me laugh every time I hear it 😆

I did something similar (although not as painful!) I was terrified of my DS suffocating on bedding and used to 'safety check' blankets/baby sleeping bags by wrapping them around my head, breathing and seeing if they made me feel oxygen-deprived 😬

I felt bad about not wanting to talk to the Jehovah’s witnesses, so told them to come back on Saturday morning. They did. Every Sat morning for weeks they would keep ringing the bell and my flatmates were furious.

I was so scared of large rowdy groups of teens when I was a teen and always thought they would batter me if I walked passed them so I would stick my stomach out as much as I could and pretend I was pregnant! I was about 13 when I started doing it. I thought if they thought I was pregnant they would leave me alone! I absolutely cringe now thinking about it!

@catscalledbeanz 🤣 - sorry!

Mine is that when I was an older teen, I couldn't be bothered to wash my clothes often. I had enough clothes to get through the week so that was fine but not enough socks so I'd wear each pair a couple of times. They stank! I thought people didn't notice but once someone commented. Whyyyyyy did I do that! Putting a load of clothes in the washing machine is the easiest thing on earth! I'm now 40 and cringe at least weekly remembering this.

@jay55 ooh - were you going to Utila??

my dear friend and I used to hide in empty wheelie bins and jump out the lid and moonie at cars passing on our country lane ( they always passed by with their mouth gaping from surprise / shock). We were 14 yo otherwise sensible ish girls🤣 we were just bored I guess 🤣

This is quite sweet, in an obscure way: I cannot imagine a) getting so attached to a fly which b) stayed in the dolls house!

When we were about 13 a friend and I used to go to the big shopping town nearby and each Saturday we'd pretend to be foreign, one week French, next week German etc. We had a great time pissing about with it all until the week we went into Mcdonald's and pretended to be Japanese at the till. We were both white English...

Downstairs neighbour knocked later that day to complain about foxes pooing on the doorstep 🤣 it was about 10 years ago but still makes me cringe!

why would a neighbour knock on the upstairs flat door to complain about fox poo. Did you keep foxes?

Got married up a tree one night.

Everyone involved in the situation, including the officiant, was extremely drunk.

@WontYouRideMyWhiteHorse that genuinely cracked me up and made me laugh out loud, is 100% something I would do right down to the “what are you doing!!!”

Met some bloke in a pub. I live down south and he said he was from Wolverhampton. He was some sort of contractor here for work and we ended up having a bit of a kiss etc.

Anyway I didn't know his name or anything and we only spent about an hour together. He mentioned he lived opposite 'the big Tesco' off a roundabout in Wolverhampton in passing

Fast forward a few weeks. I decided to track him down. I couldn't drive at the time and it was way before mobile phones or the internet

So I hopped on a train to Wolverhampton and spent ages trying to find the big Tesco and identify nearby houses

I mean - what was I going to do? Knock on every single house in the vicinity? Who even knows if he lived in Wolverhampton?

I came home the same evening on the train and even now, 30 years later, I still cringe at this memory.

I'd like to say it was a one off. T wasn't. I did similarly dangerous things all around the same time.

Why? I can't answer that. I'm now boringly married and settled with kids and I'd go absolutely spare if any of mine pulled this sort of madness!

I absolutely cringe at this memory, but out on a walk with DH and baby DC by our local stream, we saw flowers floating down, beautiful long stemmed roses. We were so happy to find them that DH waded into the river and collected them up and we took them home and put them in a vase. It wasn’t until I mentioned our lucky find to my mum, who pointed out they’d almost certainly been thrown in in memory of someone or similar, that I realised how weird it was that we’d taken them. I’ve never gotten over the worry that we walked back past the people who’d thrown them in with them proudly displayed in our buggy. Awful!

That does sound like the start of a crime drama series where a child's body is found early next morning by a dog walker!