Batshittery that was normal back in the day

[Pleasetakeaseat]

Smoking upstairs on buses

Smoking / non-smoking areas in restaurants

Smoking rooms in hospitals

Teachers going for boozy lunches and teaching afternoon classes pissed (my English teacher was always smashed by 1pm 🤣)

Chopper bikes with that brake thing in the middle that could easily disembowel you if you weren't careful

White van men picking up their underage girlfriends from school

White van men thinking schools were a good place to pull

Little kids being sent to the shop on their bikes for their parents booze and fags, and no law against shopkeepers serving them

😂😂😂

Think that was The Sport, a quality newspaper if ever there was one.
Still, its double standards AF as a society to moan about a 16 year old going topless in a newspaper when you look at the pressure on young girls and availability of cosmetic and surgical procedures to look like clowns, idolising and normalising looks like those appearing on Love Island.

It wasn't unusual. Maria Whittaker began posing topless at the Sun at 16. She was one of their most popular models. Debee Ashby was expelled from school. Linsey Dawn McKenzie had a countdown from the age of 15 and was finally exposed on her 16th birthday. I believe she was also encouraged by her mother who took shots of her in lingerie.

Page 3 was considered a 'national institution.'

Aren't those on Love Island adults? I've never watched it.

Girls being taught to sew, very useful and practical. Looking through patterns that Mum had. Taking it with you and a friend to the Market on Saturday morning, buying some material and on Saturday afternoon making a dress (with Mums help) and wearing it to local dance in the evening.

That simply isn’t true.

I gave birth to my children in the 1970’s. There was no smoking allowed.

1989 I was in a maternity ward which had a smoking room at one end.
It was always busy

Haha I'm afraid it was. As I posted to another mnetter who questioned my post it must be dependent on area.

I remember flying myself Scotland to London aged 10 and being taken into the cockpit and given a go at wearing the pilots headphones.

I flew on my own when I was 11, it was no major thing back in the day. Also used to travel the length of the northern line on my own and I was no more than 8 or 9.

Generally I think that before the university expansion in the 90s, people just got on with life a lot sooner. Go on the wiki page of a famous actor, celebrity, sportsman, war veteran etc from the last century. Not only were their lives incredibly varied, they achieved so much by their early 20s. Nowadays kids take a gap year, go to uni, then a masters , then a PhD; they're knocking on 30 before they actually get a job! Adults from yesteryear were working half their lives by then.

I remember going to the shop at eight for 10 number 6 tipped for my mum😩

My mum was, she was asked by the doctor if she was having some Guiness / milk stout every day and told to carry on smoking to help her sore throat.

Interesting. This is in no way a thing of the past round our way, the stuff is all over the pavements. Much more than I can remember in the past (I’m 50). Increase in dog ownership, and increase in generally twatish antisocial behaviour has way outstripped any deterrent in the toothless threat of a fine. Something needs to be done, it’s appalling.

On smoking, it was also allowed in the canteen at the sixth form college

Teachers shaking pupils, hitting knuckles with board eraser, cane in assembly

Kids should be “seen and not heard” being hit if daring to disagree with parents or say no

No ID checks at cinema, pubs and clubs

Flashers being seen as funny and a bit pathetic rather than identified as sexual predators

Having to eat everything on the plate and having to ask permission and wait to leave the table

I was about to post this, really vile, I remember Sam Fox, she was really young

There were topless pictures of women all over the place: The Sun newspaper, on walls in many offices and garages, it was really ubiquitous and accepted.

Re smoking, there was a smoking room in the hospital my father died in (of lung cancer) in 2001, I promise smoking was allowed in hospitals then, albeit confined to one awful room

I'm not that alarmed at smoking rooms in hospitals given we have the "choice" agenda and some people are holed up in hospitals for months. They existed in some care homes again up until very recently (possibly some still do), so although you cant smoke in your own room for safety reasons you could pop along to the smoking room.

Does anybody remember the days when you could win live animals at the fair?

I remember frequently winning goldfish from hooking a duck at the fairground.

When I was in France my friend won a hamster at the fair and she already had a hamster. There was no internet to find out stuff then so they just bundled them up in the same cage and quite quickly they had a lot of hamsters, and then the hamster parents fell out and it got a bit complicated.

The big one was when my friend in the Scottish borders entered a raffle at the county fair and accidentally won a horse. The horse turned out to be pregnant. They only found out when their DD came in from looking at the horse in the morning and said "there is a big dog with the horse, and I can't get it to leave". The "big dog" turned out to be a foal.

Also back in the day, I think the pet shop used to have stacks of tortoises in a basket and you could just pick one out and buy it. That's a very distant memory for me so it might be wrong. We had several tortoises, and they all died in hybernation. There was so little information about pet care then, and so little understanding that they were living things that could suffer.

That was also before rabies and feline leukemia vaccinations, and so my cat had to stay in quarantine for a long time when we came home from living on the continent. She must have been so confused. She developed feline leukaemia while she was there and was put to sleep. It doesn't bear thinking about now.

Sorry that's not such a cheerful lot of batshittery is it?

On smoking, it was also allowed in the canteen at the sixth form college

We were allowed to smoke in the sixth form at school. Only in the common room though.

I remember winning gold fish at the fair.

Also dolphinariums - so cruel looking back.

Litters of puppies or kittens in pet shop windows! Unimaginable now.

I am getting heartily sick of posts on this, and many other, threads which insist that parents of earlier generations didn't care about their children or what they were doing. Anyone would think everyone bringing up children now is a saint, while those who came before were sinners!

I never said that because my experience was different that it never happened to anyone else. However, those who it did happen to seem to think it is okay to portray it as though that was just how things were in the day, and those who didn't experience it must be outliers. None of my friends had parents who would have let their daughters be picked up from school by much older boyfriends. My parents, and my grandparents, would have been horrified, and none of them would have stood by while domestic abuse was happening. There have always been people who abhorred it.

I'm sorry that some of you had shit parents, but in my experience parents like that were not the norm.

Maybe a misremembering from me but Im sure on a trip to France in the early 00s they still had puppies for sale in shop windows. Those crazy continentals were often more bonkers than us, as anyone who's watched Eurotrash will remember. Talking of which, late night TV was incredibly smutty in those days, much less so than the wokery now. I find it funny how Sara Cox was such a sweary ladette back in the day but is now all sanitised for Radio 2.

1. white dog turds in parks (late '60 to mid '70s) 2. irate teachers throwing pieces of chalk at children in class. propelled as hard as possible and painful if hit, as i was. one chemistry teacher was known for throwing a blackboard duster (for wiping chalk from the blackboard) with a wooden back at a child. seriously dangerous missile. (mid '70s) 3. before my time: my father (born in 1909) going to a car showroom, buying his first car (i'm guessing this was around 1928), and driving it home despite the fact that he hadn't passed a driving test (the concept hadn't occurred to anyone; never mind the requirement for a driving licence). without exaggeration he learned how to drive on the way home (very few motor cars on the road at the time, of course) 😂😂😂. arrived unscathed.

Yes it was. Early 1970’s I remember being in the last yr at primary so 11 yrs old. A group of popular girls had been chatting to the builders / painters who were doing work in school. One of the workmen was caught kissing one of the girls. All girls in the year were called to see the head teacher and told we were dirty sl**ts for enticing the builders.

We had the slipper for very naughty boys in our school, never used on the girls, though. You had to be very bad to get it, and we only had one teacher who gave it.

Sometimes, he would have a kind of 'joke' whereby boys who were being a bit unruly, but not necessarily really misbehaving as such, were told that they were getting the slipper (in front of the class) and told to race forwards towards the board and bend over... but the teacher would actually use a balled up paid of sports socks, rather than a slipper. Obviously, it didn't hurt, but in retrospect as an adult, I wonder if he did get rather too much enjoyment from the whole humiliation and pretend punishment thing to not be suspicious of him.

On the cigarettes subject, this one might seem extremely trivial, but when we were little kids, all of the sweet shops would sell packs of 'candy sticks' - which were so very obviously designed to look like pretend cigarettes - white sticks, packs of 20, identical flip-open style box. Great way to associate the idea of cigarettes being cool, fun things from a very early age.

This poster was from 20 years ago. Can anybody ever imagine them running a similar campaign nowadays? It wouldn't just be seen as shockingly ridiculous; it would be viewed as grossly offensive and discriminatory, and so many people who believe in the ideology would either claim (or even genuinely) not to be able to see anything at all clearly absurd about it.

while the relationship between Wyman and Smith was ongoing, at one point Wyman's son was stepping out with Smith's mother - i recall this from the tabloid newspapers of the day