Things you'd forgotten about

[CharliesAngles]

String art.

Remember those pictures that hung on walls in the 70s/80s (? I'm guessing)
They usually had a black background and coloured string making geometric type patterns.
I had totally forgotten (most probably for the best 😂) that they had ever existed until I looked through some photo albums at my auntie's house.

Anything else of that ilk you can recall?

Hello breaker, what's your handle? Ketchup Kid here...

Potpourri seemed to be a large feature of my 80s childhood. It only ever smelled nice if you stirred it up and was generally just another thing for us children or the cat to knock over, and the cat got bollocked a lot less than we did for it.

We used to have a book of Thelwell cartoons in the toilet, and next door had Giles cartoons with "Grandma" - toilet reading material also being something I had forgotten.

plastic toys in cereal boxes
those metal pictures with set on a hessian background framed
plastic flowers mum had hers free with Daz washing powder
London scenes on table mats and canisters again from Daz

‘Buy one get one free ‘ offers. Now it’s all buy three for 12 pounds and get less than two pounds off ( if your lucky )

Many faecal fingers had turned the pages of those books. Reading in the toilet is a no no!

Can’t remember any.

Anyone remember that wall 'art' that had patterns of real butterflies mounted behind glass - absolutely horrific but once considered very chic.

'Tinkerbell' perfume and nail polish for very young girls is another thing that's just occurred to me. Would have been late 70s/early 80s.

Finding your teachers in the telephone directory and ringing them for a dare.

Also, shrinking crisp bags in the oven and piercing holes in them and wearing them as necklaces. 🤣

That's pretty cool! I'd love intercoms in my house - currently I call my son on his Alexa because he's 2 floors up from where I usually am, but it's not ideal. Plus, an intercom would be SO COOL.

I feel the same!
It makes you realise just how much has changed in a few decades 🥲

Yes, it's really handy - vital, actually, to us now. Like I said, we bought a 4 handset with base station cordless phone set, which came with the intercom function as standard. Just name the handsets to denote which room they're kept in, then it's press the intercom symbol 🛜 button, select a room from the list (in our case FT B'ROOM means front bedroom where my DH works upstairs) then select "OK" and it rings in that room. Very simple, very efficient.

Haha 😂
I just sang along with you 🙊

We don't have a landline! We only ever got telemarketers anyway... Sigh. My kid will never have the rite of passage of answering the phone for the first time not knowing who it might be. I had an uncle who would call and pretend to be different people all the time. And everyone used to tell me I sounded just like my lovely auntie.

i'm sure i remember a time when white toilet roll was the worst because they used bleach in it and coloured loo roll was much better!

I think it was in the early days of the environment being a thing, maybe late 80's/early 90's, around the time of the ozone layer and acid rain.

Ah, I see. We were considering ditching our landline, but after my accident we decided to keep it alongside our mobile phones and communication via tablets and laptops etc. Belt and braces. Plus we've noticed that we hardly ever get cold calls these days, which we're very happy about, obviously!

Shops that had awnings that the shopkeeper would pull down to stop the sun shining through the front window and the yellow see through blind supposed to stop sunlight bleaching the goods in the window.
Wednesday was indeed half day closing and there’s a butchers near me that still does this.
Buying a pound of spuds and the green grocer tipping them straight into the shopping bag from the scales, maybe chucking in a cabbage or cauliflower on top! My Granny had a special oilskin bag just for this!

My MIL has that Tina picture up still. I think it's also in Del's flat in Only Fools and Horses.

Does anyone remember the Avon perfume bottles that were in the shape of different Victorian lady styles. Her top half was the lid of the bottle and the bottom half was her skirt.

Not that old, but cases for mobile phones. I mean the soft, cloth pouches you put your phone in, not the hard case you clip to the phone.

Returning pop bottles for a refund.
We were probably the last generation who did that.

Yep, down to the corner shop ( on my own, aged no older than eight, cause it was the 70s), with a bag of empty Alpine bottles to exchange for comic/crisps/ sweetie money! 😁

"Return this bottle for 2p or 5p" it said on the cap, I think. Or something like that.

We could buy a lot of pick n mix sweets for 10p back then!

10p could buy me a comic, a bag of crisps and a bar of chocolate, plus maybe a small carton of squash back then. God, do I feel ancient now! 👵😅

Twinkle annuals.

Comics of all sorts - all printed on that thin cheap paper, cost about 8 or 9 pence each. Bunty, Tammy, Misty, Dandy, Whizzer and Chips, Buster...they all had their own 'day' of issue and newsagents just seemed such colourful exciting places, and all had that lovely fresh inky smell in the air.