What mundane item/experience was a luxury in your childhood home?

[FirstFallopians]

I remember being jealous that mum and dad had pillow protectors under their pillowcases. I thought they must be the height of decadence until we got an IKEA and I saw they were literally £1.50 each.

Real butter instead of margarine.

Ordering a takeaway and getting it delivered instead of picking it up. Debauched.

Buying any food whatsoever from Marks and Spencer’s was akin to doing your weekly shop in Harrods Food Hall.

Middle income family in the 1990s, no money worries and not otherwise frugal.

Anyone else grow up thinking very normal things were real luxuries?

Smoked salmon.

Levi 501 tshirts
Vienetta
Full fat milk with the silver lid from milkman even better if orange juice also came
Mums clinique eyeshadow
Dinners out
Takeaway food
Using the car. We had one but it was only used when the walk was more than 30 mins away.
Ribena. We only got this if we were ill.
Proper butter rather than sunflower spread
Soda stream

Couple people mentioned holidays abroad and I remembered a boy in primary school (c1973) going to Spain on a plane ! Unheard of ! So we spent the whole day as a class drawing palm trees, beaches, boats and planes and wondering what wonders lay in Spain ☀️

Proper home cooked meals from scratch. We were always hungry.

All of those seem like good healthy choices by your parents. Do you recognize that now or still resent them?

Proper central heating, "nice" new carpeting and laminate wood flooring - I'm turning 30 this year and we didn't have either until I was at least eight or nine. I remember eating my breakfast before primary school sat by the gas fire in the front room on a rug, on top of the freezing tiled floor. When my parents finally earned what was probably "only" about 35-40k between them and we gradually got a new carpet (that wasn't a completely flat low pile, as well!), laminate in the hallways, and the council finally put central heating in, I remember thinking our house was so swish. In the winter we started putting our clothes on the radiator during the hour or two of heating in the morning, so we'd feel all warm and cosy after our sink strip washes before school. We got our first car when I was ten or eleven and that was another revelation... 😂

I did go abroad (family in Spain) but we usually went there by ferry and car at non-peak times of the year. When I was seven we went to Alicante by plane and the thrill of a sunset flight was incredible. The taste of cherry drops, which I was sucking on take-off, will forever be associated with that time in my life.