What’s the funniest thing you’ve seen/ read in Take a Break/ Chat/ That’s Life etc?

[TeacakesFTW]

Prior to the internet and the likes of Mumsnet, I used to love these trashy magazines, especially their real life stories and top tips. It’s still my guilty pleasure when I’m in a waiting room/ hair salon TBH.

What’s the craziest thing you’ve ever seen in one?

The most memorable for me was one where a woman had moved in with her new boyfriend and the boyfriend’s disabled son. The son was in his 20s, non-verbal, in nappies etc. The woman got involved in his daily care, changing his nappy and so on, and it later turned out that the whole thing was a scam for disability benefits! The man had nothing wrong with him. He could talk and everything!

https://www.vice.com/sv/article/tips-for-a-terrible-life-tumblr-sanitary-towels-life-death/

If you want a big laugh - check out the sanitary towel slippers

A story called 'My parrot came back as a crisp!"

What had happened was, this woman had given away her pet parrot - it wasn't even that the parrot had died - and a couple of weeks later had found a vaguely parrot-shaped crisp in her packet of cheese&onion.

That was it. It was such a ludicrous non-event that either the editor was taking the piss or they were really, really short of stories that week ...

😭😭 nothing to add myself but following, I love seeing the headlines on these magazines in the shops

Would they even pay people anything these days for a story

Someone who worked in our wider company appeared in it after running off with his (new,adult) stepdaughter

I came here to mention the sanitary towel slippers. And I saw “make coasters out of flattened mince pie foil trays” like it was a solid design choice.

Just wanted to say that I drastically improved my English skills by reading those magazines any time I was in the UK when I was in my early 20s.
It's also how I found out about people's weight being calculated in stones (?!??)
I had a soft spot for this country before, but they made me love it even more and now here I am, 45, living in London for a million years and considering a quick trip to the Co-op to by Take a Break and who knows, maybe I'll splurge on some sanitary pads to make myself a new pair of slippers.

One about their being a ghost in the woman's house and she ended up having sex with the ghost...I was probably about 15 when I read that its stuck with me over 2 decades

Some of those are worthy of Viz Top Tips!

One about a woman who caught her husband shagging the frozen chicken she’d bought for Sunday lunch. Never looked at a chicken the same way since.

There was one tip once where they said if you had puffy eyes to slice an onion in half and put it on your eyes for 15-20 mins.
I can only imagine that the resultant burning regret would erase all worries about puffiness??

My favourite was my wedding dess ate my bum. It turned out that her nylon wedding dress and her nylon underwear had made her bum sweat so much that she'd developed an awful rash that made her skin peel off.

I loved the suggestion of sticking plastic milk bottle lids to cardboard to make place mats.

The top time-saving tip for busy weekday mornings.... put the kids to bed in their school uniforms! 🙄

The woman who wrote into the top tips and won tip of the week. She simply couldn’t find a fascinator to wear to an upcoming wedding so settled on one of those mesh shower sponges which was the PERFECT match

The one that sticks with me is the lady who put her husbands ashes in tea bags and drank him

I also came to mention the sanitary towel slippers. 😂😂

A woman's husband had bad diarrhoea on holiday so she made him massive nappies out of carrier bags!
Also,if you don't have after dinner mints at your posh party,just freeze toothpaste and thinly slice!

Something that really stuck with me was one of the craft tips, which was to use a flattened Mr Kipling Bakewell tart tray (the round metal ones) as a coaster…

Look for the thread in Classics called 'bride's agony- bum torn apart by wedding dress '!! (Promise I am.not making this up, someone cleverer than me might link it)

There was a 'top tip' that for a fancy dinner party, you could freeze blobs of toothpaste and serve them as posh mints, a great moneysaver! About a fortnight later, there was a retraction in bold print advising very firmly NOT to do this 😂

I came here to say sex ghost as well! My friend and I used to buy these magazines in uni and fall about laughing reading them to each other- especially the "tips" page. We are in our late 40s now and everytime we meet up we buy one for each other for old times sake!

Vanessa two stone bigger, friends fear she’s drinking custard again

The string belt was laughable too. Some really stupid ideas there!

Len’s pants

Oh, I remember one - to make Brillo pads last longer, cut them in half and then you’ll have twice as many!

There was also a highly disturbing Chuckle Brother kiss and tell story in Take a Break in about 1996. It used to be uploaded somewhere on Tumblr but I can’t find it anywhere now. Imagine the famous Mumsnet Mr Tumble erotica, but toned down slightly and with Barry Chuckle.