Things that you can’t quite believe were the norm

[ItsNotAShopItsAStore]

What’s one of those things you think in 10/20/30 years people will go “WTF why was that acceptable?”

For me - the Jeremy Kyle show. I’m so pleased it’s off air - awful poverty porn hosted by a nasty little bully and enabled by god-complex shit stirring producers. Also who wants to watch so much shouting and arguing at 9.25am!

Yes me too! We used to go age 11 to an Olympic size pool ALONE with NO lifeguard or adults present ( was a local pool that families had membership to, a key 🔑 was in a coded box) and our mums happily let us go alone ( late 90s).

my friend and I used to have underwater swimming competitions trying to do as many widths as possible underwater. Imagine if one of us blacked out?! We never would have been strong enough to pull the other out . 🙀

Oh my god at 4???? my auntie (84) talks about "walking & walking....to school holy shit! Imagine?

Well for every one man that wasn't aroused, there were 100+ men having a wank over a naked 16 year old every day

Did I read that correctly.? She belted your 5 year old sister for not watching you 😭 bless her . She must have been absolutely terrified first to witness it and then to be beaten. 😢
what year was this??

No girls I knew in the 70s-90s or more recently have ever showered after school PE (there were communal showers, but no one used them). It used to astonish me though that the boys at school had communal baths after rugby!

Totally @titchy . As a new grad I was offered a very well paid job at a national newspaper - would have put me way far ahead of my peers in terms of earnings - but it was a massive open office and it had a fog of tobacco smoke from about 5ft up to the ceiling. I turned it down. I would have liked it, but could not cope with being in that much smoke.

The director of HR also had a bar in his office. You would regularly see people with a glass of wine on their desk instead of a cup of tea. I was assigned a mentor who was a very senior manager. The first time I met him he announced he had cleared his desk so he did not have to go back to work and put his credit card behind the bar. I got so drunk that an old man on the bus on the way home gave me a stern lecture on the dangers of drink.

I think the key word was 'sometimes'

Male circumcision for non medical reasons is another one I think people are realising is immoral.

Kids are more capable than we think.

Are you refusing to accept that this DID happen? I was at secondary school from 80-84 and we showered communally twice a week. Towels were taken away if you didn't get in.

I remember our local cinema having a smoking section...
Upstairs on the bus...
Being able to buy cigarettes at 13 years old.

Drink driving, as in adults having four or five drinks and then getting in the car.

Page 3! 16 year old girls topless in daily papers!

Child minders (!) that were 12 years old...

I do not think we have progressed since page 3. I think the internet means men have a discreet way of doing it and we get to pretend to have advanced. (this is a man writing).
I notice that things that seemed poisonous to me at the time tend not to last the test of time (Russel Brand, Jeremy Kyle and some of the Mare from Mars Women from Venus).

You and me both.

I did BLW my child never gagged on food. What do you think billions of babies have been fed in before blenders were invented if not just normal food?

My mother once sent me to the supermarket when I had just turned 4.
She rang ahead with her order, gave me the money in a little pouch and off I went on my little trike.

This was the 90s, she still sees nothing wrong with it as in her words 'I had no choice'.

i was at senior school 77 - 82
i never forget the large girl kicking my towel across the floor,
so cruel

And they're off! More Daryl Huff.
When today's mothers are slavishly adhering to the 'advice' from the numerous organisations remember that the 'advice' used to be to put babies down on their fronts. Just because the 'experts' say something doesn't make it right but using common sense seems to be out of fashion.

They just don’t shower at all now, to my knowledge!

A bit gross from a hygiene point of view (providing you’ve been doing actual exercise) but better for safeguarding.

Smoking in school staffrooms.

It seems mad now that teachers were allowed to smoke on school premises - inside the buildings. At the time it was standard practice and no one thought a thing of it.

There was a long skinny monkey in a tiny cage for years - we went in often to see it (thought nothing wrong with this at the time) 😢

My feet don’t sweat a lot, so I like going sockless in trainers. In the supermarket, you’d see people doing it all the time. Many people in my year went sockless for PE as teenagers. At primary, we were made to put shoes on our bare feet to walk to the assembly hall for PE, before doing PE barefoot (and in vest and pants).

Your child never once gagged in the process of learning to eat? That’s very impressive.

My mum didn’t have a blender either but she managed to mash food with a fork pretty well…

It certainly happened in my school. And if we kept our pants on or didn't get wet enough we had to go through again, it was a long line of maybe 8 showers and 8 girls had towels taken off them and given back when she thought we were properly showered

Ah no, where I grew up there was one path from your door to max 2 minutes to the lane that brought you to school (same school I teach in now) one small residential road to cross, my auntie grew up in Meath, so just a bit outside of Dublin but still rurual back then & I couldn't cope with that, especially because she was responsible for my other auntie & my mammy