To ask for your weird family behaviours that you didn't realise weren't normal until you were older?

[Coffeebiscuitsrepeat]

1. We called a toe poking through a sock hole a "potato".

1. Whoever made the most mess at the dinner table "won the prize"... And the prize was to clean up the mess!

She made sliced potatoes dipped in batter and fried that we called 'Specials'

Are you in the North West? definitely a Bolton thing when I was a child.

When we were on holiday on the Isle of Wight we went into a bakery to buy picnic stuff and my mother, who worked in a bakery at home, asked for cheese and onion pies. The baker was puzzled, had a long discussion with her about making them and she finished up spending an hour in the bakehouse showing them how to make c and o pies.

I agree that you use ground ginger to sprinkle on the melon. No added salt or sugar.

Cut the honeydew melon longways into four or six, remove the seeds. Following the contour of the skin, slice through so the flesh is separate from the skin. Divide into bite sized chunks across the slice, pushing each alternate piece in the opposite direction. I'm not a fan of the orange slice (sail) I prefer two or three glacé, or better still maraschino cherries, on a cocktail stick to represent the main mast!
Sprinkle with ground ginger to your taste!

The more of these posts I read, the more evidence I recall of my 'deprived' childhood in the 70s.

Our diets were very plain, no takeaways other than the odd bag of chips and, until I was 17, the only eating out was in the Wimpy bar as a birthday treat.
My nana kept a catering sized tin of dried oxtail soup in her pantry and one of dried curry mixture, complete with sultanas and tiny bits of dried apple. A curry was made by making a paste and gradually adding water then cooked chicken leftovers. I'm sure that it was objectively horrible, but we loved it at the time (no properly made curry to compare it to)

There was very little spare money in our household so, apart from school uniforms, my sister and I had new clothes only at Christmas and birthdays.
My nans younger sister (the posh one) visited a couple of times a year and always brought with her a bin bag of cast off clothes and a selection of makeup that she no longer wanted. We loved those visits!

My grandad still does the sugar on strawberries thing, he brought a bowl in for DS when we were visiting him with a great sprinkling on sugar on, I nearly died! DS was overjoyed

Removable secondary glazing that seemed so dangerous when cleaning. ...
Always cold meat and chips on Mondays...
Slicing up a Mars bar and sharing!
'Treacle' sandwiches - buttered white bread with golden syrup...
Yorkshire pudding as a starter. Never on the dinner plate.

My dad used to make me and my younger brother banana milk and sugar for supper on a Saturday night, we adored it. My mum thought it was mental😂

A really big thing of my mum's was diaries: she is still an aspiring Samuel Pepys, and writes every day. Early on, she made us write diaries (she was a teacher). In our early years, she did this herself with us there, writing them from our point of view, in the first person, with lots of pictures, which she got us to help with drawing.

I liked this at first, and the early diaries are treasured possessions. Sadly, I resisted this as I got older, as I just didn't share my mum's pleasure in writing. It became a chore ("you've got to write your diary, you've only written about the first day of the holiday"), and for me, this obligation spoiled the enjoyment of going on holiday, especially as she used to inspect them, like tidy bedrooms. I had a good memory, and still do for my childhood, so I didn't feel the need to write about things I did. I also remember a realisation that school trips were always followed by having to write about them.

Occasionally I wrote a diary as a teenager, full of Adrian Mole-style rantings about the world, but I rarely look back on it.

Ginger and melon deffo a thing in the 70s my mother used to to serve it with honeydew melon cut in segments and the flesh cut off the skin then each segment sliced. ..then the ginger sprinkled on...

My mother was brought up in the war and had a horror of nasty food and a fascination with 'deli items' and anything vaguely 'European'.

So we ate really well esp with my dad having his own food obsession s and coming home from soho with a bag of weird Chinese stuff or whatever.

We certainly never saw any beige food or baked beans on toast. In fact the first time I heard of 'baked beans on toast' when I was about ten and i nearly laughed because I didn't believe that such a thing existed. ..

Dinner had to taken in silence. It was in response to my brother, who would talk and refuse to eat his dinner.

Peeling an apple before you ate it, I never realised until later on in life that you don't have to peel an apple unless it's a cooking apple.

We did the set meals thing too and always at 5.30pm never an alternative time.
Always Fish & Chips from chippy every Friday night.

We never closed the downstairs curtains ever. My mum wouldn't allow it. She had the pleats arranged in a certain way and therefore couldn't be touched. I thought it's strange if I went to a friends and they closed their lounge curtains.

I was never allowed to have a friend over to sleep and neither was my brother.

We only ever had a bath once a week and that was on a Sunday night.

When my dad pulled up on the drive in the car no-one was allowed to speak until we got safely inside the house - something about not letting all the neighbours know we were home.

Highlight of my childhood was left over Yorkshire’s spread with Jam! If anyone asked for extra on their dinner and there was a chance there would be no left overs we would get very twitchy, and that was a childhood in North Notts/S Yorks with a Yorkshire father!

I’m also feeling really nostalgic now for my grandad and dad’s bread and dripping. And I’m a vegetarian now lol!
they would fry their bacon and sausages on a Sunday morning for breakfast, but leave the pan dirty on the stove so the fat solidified as it got cold, then for supper they would spread that fat, with loads of salt and pepper, on thick cut white bread.

Also my mum was tight so wouldn’t let us “eat out” but as a treat if we had a day out at the seaside she would get us a bag of scraps from the chippy (the crumbs of batter they scooped out of the dirty fat), and would give away for free in little paper bags. We thought we were the royal family if it was a bag of scrap day hahaha

My mum used to put raisins and marmalade in curry. I thought I didn't like curry until I had a proper one as an adult.

My mum used to put raisins and marmalade in curry. I thought I didn't like curry until I had a proper one as an adult.

Sorry it's done it again!

4) brown envelopes in the post were known as “no help me someone’s”. I’ve no idea why.
Maybe because it was a bill or a demand from the taxman?

It was probably Oh help me someone, On Her Majesty's Service, communications from the government, often unwelcome.

Everything, apart from the fridge, had to be switched off at night. TV aerial pulled out of the wall as well

My late mother in law liked everything switched off and that included the fridge on Christmas Eve, the children enjoyed chocolate ice-cream for breakfast, iit was only a small fridge luckily with a freezer section inside When she went into town she would turn off the gas and the electricity, she wouldn't have a fridge, hoover washing machine, her sainted mother managed, she could too. When she was about to throw out a lot of family documents we found her mother's wedding certificate, she was horrified that we discovered that her birth occured five months after her sainted mother's wedding! She would have been even more horrified when the 1911 Census went on line but sadly she had died by then!

To be fair, I still shut the curtains as soon as it's dark too. I don't like lights on and curtains open because people CAN see in - I know I always look if it's someone else's house (or at least glance) .

Also in pre-double glazing days, it really did feel significantly colder if the curtains were left open on winter evenings (still does, to my way of thinking, even with double glazing, although I’m aware that might be just conditioning!).

My dad used to carry this to extremes though. He was paranoid about drafts, so doors in the house had to be kept closed, with draft excluders at the bottom. But his particular bugbear was 'heat escaping' up from the radiators (all of which were situated underneath windows for some reason) under the (closed) curtains. So every winter he used to put piles of books all along the windowsills on the base of all the curtains, to close the gaps and hold the curtains down!

I thought it was completely normal to do this until I started having friends over in my teens and one of them asked me, very confused, why we stored our books on the windowsills instead of on the bookcase!

To be fair, I still shut the curtains as soon as it's dark too. I don't like lights on and curtains open because people CAN see in - I know I always look if it's someone else's house (or at least glance) .

Also in pre-double glazing days, it really did feel significantly colder if the curtains were left open on winter evenings (still does, to my way of thinking, even with double glazing, although I’m aware that might be just conditioning!).

My dad used to carry this to extremes though. He was paranoid about drafts, so doors in the house had to be kept closed, with draft excluders at the bottom. But his particular bugbear was 'heat escaping' up from the radiators (all of which were situated underneath windows for some reason) under the (closed) curtains. So every winter he used to put piles of books all along the windowsills on the base of all the curtains, to close the gaps and hold the curtains down!

I thought it was completely normal to do this until I started having friends over in my teens and one of them asked me, very confused, why we stored our books on the windowsills instead of on the bookcase!

Sorry for double post

turquoise50 a lot of heat goes out of even double glazed windows. If it's coming up to dusk and the heating is on, pull those curtains :) When we got thermal linings in the curtains for our double-glazed French windows, we were able to lower the thermostat in the hall by a couple of degrees

Also during thunderstorms all mirrors had to be covered up and cutlery put away. And back and front doors open to allow a strike to go through the house. And at first drop of rain it was our jobs to put all house plants out in the garden for some rainwater.

My mum used to keep the jar of fat from cooking. Not that unusual but as children we were never allowed to touch it.

When she was dying in 2007, should add I left home in 1992 and my brother 2 years before, she calmly told my brother she was leaving the jar to him as he has children and I don't and it was something to hand down to the youngest whenever he gets married (he was almost 18 months at that point). when asked about it she told us that the fat at the bottom of the jar was from the year she got married, first Sunday breakfast after the wedding with my dad in 1962, and it was added to on all special occasions since and it was nearly full, she would add a spoon or 2 each time so it "celebrated" births, deaths and marriages. (Vom)

My brother promptly disposed of it as soon as he got it.

We used to have

Sunday - Roast usually Beef or Pork with only 2 potatoes each and lots veg served at 2pm with sandwiches and seafood served at 7pm. Sunday was also the only day we were allowed desert - either angel delight, vienetta, arctic roll, tinned fruit and carnation milk, vanilla ice cream with ice magic poured over or neopolitan ice cream never had desert on any other day

Monday - Bubble & Squeak cooked from left over roast

Tuesday - Home made minced beef and onion pie or steak and kidney pie with mash and gravy

Wednesday - Toad in the Hole with new potatoes and peas or in the summer Boiled Egg Salad

Thursday - Liver & Bacon with Mash and Carrots

Friday - Fish and Chips from Chippy or sometimes Smoked Haddock with parsley sauce, Mash and Peas

Saturday - Cooked Breakfast for dinner or Sheherds Pie

Answer the phone by saying the number that was normal for the time

I wasn't allowed to read at the table, not sure that was weird though, I think a lot of families were like that.

I didn't have to ask to leave the table though and found it really weird when I went to people's houses and we couldn't just get up once we had finished and go back to play!

At elections her father told her mother who to vote for

Ha ha I remember a teacher asking us how our parents were going to vote in the 1983 election and I said Tory and Labour. How come everyone around me says? Well my dad will vote Tory and my mum will vote Labour! They couldn't fathom that she had a mind of her own! She drove too, and had her own car, we were about the only two car family I knew (and for years as an adult DH and I were about the only one car family I knew!)