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

So because your experience was different, it never happened to anybody ever?

Riiiight...

God this thread has brought back some memories. I remember my geography teacher throwing the board eraser at the side of the wall and screaming at us when she lost her shit. To be honest, everyone behaved and worked hard in her class. She ruled with an iron fist but dare I say it, she was respected, even by the naughty kids. You'd never hear a peep from her class. And you had to put your hand up and wait to be addressed. You had to address her properly too - "Miss." And stand up behind your chair until she came in and told you to be seated. We learn more in her class than all the other classes put together because she just did not tolerate bad behaviour.

I remember watching the nursery teacher manhandle and vigorously wash out a boys mouth with soap as he cried because he swore. When they left the bathroom I licked it because I wanted to know what it tasted like 🙈.
I remember a school friend saying that she used to hear her dad rape her mum when they went to bed. I also remember overhearing my mum talking to my neighbour who had come round upset because her husband had raped her the night before. I remember feeling confused because I knew it was something bad but there didn't seem to be any talk of leaving him or going to the police. It wasn't till I got older that I realised that marital rape was a thing.
I do miss the parties at parents friends houses though and being carried up from the car to bed half asleep 😁.

@cupcaske123 Nobody arrested a domestic abuser or intervened in what was seen as private life, from my experience in the 70s. But it very much troubled many. I remember a man who was said to hit his wife, and the whole street discussed it with disgust.

Girls and boys lessons in school.
Boys got to do all the fun technical stuff like metal and woodwork whilst the girls all had to do fucking cookery and needle work. At the end of year 7 girls got to do the boys lessons and vice versa for 6 weeks- just to show us what we were missing and then from

No ID asked for in pubs. My DH went to the pub on a Friday night with his friends when he was 15. The landlord knew they were all underage but they were well behaved so he just ignored it. He also went on a camping / sailing holiday with his friends aged 16 with no adults around.

Smoking in school staff rooms- my first teaching job was in 1987 and the junior school staff room was always a fog. The head of the infants where I worked disagreed with this and used to light up in her office...

A lot of it wasn't seen as abuse and society normalised it. Look at some of the humour about women in the 70s. Murder was defended in the case of 'nagging'. Marital rape was legal. The man was the head of the household. Sexual harassment and assault was blamed on short skirts.

I remember that - sitting waiting with coke and crisps outside the pub. Very 1960s /70s.

But - it was probably better than kids today being left for hours every day on their own with smart phones from the age of five!

Hopefully people will look back on all the puffa goldfish lips and fillers/botox one day and think - were they crazy?

“Madness” is not in the past, you could argue it is present now, just in different forms. For example you could argue “Page 3”
of The Sun was weird and annoying, but you could argue over-sexualisation and self-objectification is much more prevalent and extreme today.

There was only 1 IT teacher at our secondary school in the 90s so we had him every year.

Everytime we had to fill in forms when it came to the male / female section he would say don't write yes please. Happened lots from age 11.

My Aunt just to hitchhike with lorry drivers as summer holiday entertainment. These were Primary school children!

My school had a smoking staff room in the 90s.

I'm watching old Waterloo Road from about 20ish years ago currently. First scene is teachers smoking in the playground...

Good point. Eg. people are getting so worked up about the smoking thing but really it didn’t bother most people at the time and had almost zero effect on people’s everyday lives.

Thinking back... was it more bonkers you could smoke on a wooden train... or that you could open the door when the train was moving?

YES

Our PE teacher was a nasty bitter racist piece of work. She genuinely got a perverse kick out of bullying 11-12 year olds till they cried.

My friend had bad asthma and the steroids made her gain some weight. PE teacher thought it would be good to teach her a lesson by making the whole class sit on the floor watching, while she screamed at her to do chin-ups. The poor girl was in tears struggling, with this awful teacher screaming in her face calling her fat etc, and we all just had to sit there in uncomfortable silence. Fucking horrible.

All these years later, if I bumped into her on the street I'm not sure I'd be able to control my temper

Hopefully shes burning in hell right now

😂😂😂 public transport back then was batshittery of the highest order 😂

I remember being terrified of sitting near the door on a train cos they used to randomly fly open

Also, remember the hop-on hop-off buses? No stopping for passengers or anything silly like that, you just had to run full pelt jump for your life and hope you made it, if not you were eating tarmac 🤣

The smoking on planes and underground does seem absolutely bonkers, and unbeleivable it wasn't considered a risk. The fire at Kings Cross was 1987, so not THAT long ago in the scheme of things.

We went to the pub regularly from the age of 16, I can't imagine my daughter going out and getting trashed to celebrate end of GCSE's like I did 😂

I think smoking seems more offensive now because we are much less used to the smell. I used to smoke and would happily light up after a meal in a restaurant (seems an awful thought now)- I've got a colleague who smokes and when he comes back in after lunch I can tell if he;s had a fag and it smells gross!

Buses with no doors so you could hop on and off when it slowed down. I know they were around in London for a lot longer but they disappeared much earlier in other parts of the country.

@cupcaske123 that’s true, but opinion in society wasn’t as clear cut as suggested.

Even into the 90's some teachers were still a bit hands on when they were pissed off. We had a science teacher with a short fuse and he would poke you in the bony part of your chest when dishing out a telling off. But back then parents werent as precious as nowadays and nobody seemed to complain, they probably thought you deserved it and needed the discipline!

PE teachers couldn't give a monkeys about inclusivity, it was purely based on skill. You could guarantee the fat kid was in goal unless there was a decent keeper in which case he'd be in defence and wouldnt get a touch of the ball.

Oh and talking of schools, I do remember older lads in boy racer cars hanging round at lunchtimes and after school picking up the older girls.

1990 my best friend had a 26 year old boyfriend, she was 15. Her DM did actually go to the police station to report him when she found my friend's pill packets and emergency contraception. Police advised her not to press charges as it could really damage her relationship with DD.

By society turning a blind eye, I mean doing nothing about it. I remember plenty of victim blaming and justification for it. Women were told to stop 'nagging'.

For some, the odd backhander was part of marriage. Women were told to put up and shut up and divorce carried a lot of stigma. It wasn't really discussed and often dismissed as something women just put up with like sexual harassment in the workplace.

Leaving the wains in the car at the pub with a bottle of Cresta as Mum and Dad went for a couple of drinks (and then drove home).

Absolutely this

My neighbour used to batter his Mrs, and I clearly remember his DM telling her she was "Driving him to it" we saw this woman black and blue on multiple occasions, even with a plaster cast on her arm. Police were there all the time telling them to "Keep the noise down" but never once did we see him get arrested

Rita, Sue and Bob too.......need we say more

The police weren't interested in 'domestics'.

Yet nowadays it's the bulk of their work. Go figure!