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' mmmm scollops, you can get a bag of them for 50p from the chippy by me

Oh and when I was young no-ones mums ever drove only the dads and some of my friends never had a family car and would have to borrow the grandparents car if they wanted a day out.
My family didn't own a camera and if we went out to the zoo etc we would ask my dads aunts to borrow their camera for the day.
We had a house telephone and I remember having to ask people if they "were on the phone"

-Shared a bed with my sister until we left home. My two brothers did the same.

• Always having extended family and family friends to stay. There was often someone sleeping on the sofa or the landing.
• Same meals on set days of the week. As soon as you were old enough, you would be helping make them.
• Were drilled on current affairs. Wouldn't hurt young people today to be subject to something similar.
• Taught an unusual amount of wilderness survival skills for inner city children.
• Compulsory diary keeping, much like PP.
• Army style punishment. Wasn't smacked as far as I remember (possibly when I was very young) but we used to have to do press ups and run laps around the block. Pointless cleaning/DIY tasks as well. I remember having to paint the back wall outside as a punishment for something and my brother stripping the paint a few days later as a punishment for something else! Luckily, paint was expensive and that only happened once.

I had a very enjoyable childhood, really. My siblings and I were a lot happier than most teenagers I see today.

@mrwalkensir

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

I shut the curtains for the same reason, it adds a layer of insulation. Plus, I don't like people seeing in if the lights are on. Especially one neighbour in particular, who happens to be a bully from my year at school. Might be 40+ years now, but I know she hasn't really changed, so I'm wary.

turqoise50
I really thought we were the only family that did the books weighing down the curtains thing!

MrsBtheparker
Northerner yes but other side of the Pennines!
Sleepingstandingup
I’d forgotten about chip shop scallops and now I want ALL the scallops!

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

It was drummed in to us when we lived in Army quarters that we should never sit in a lighted room after dark as a security measure, it was back in the days of IRA attacks.

@Butteredtoast55

OMG me too! I thought it was just one of my dad's very idiosyncratic little 'bodges'.

Do you mind if I ask, what was your parents' background? Really curious to know where this idea originated! My dad was born in the 1920s and probably didn't encounter central heating until he was in his thirties, at the earliest, so it's not something he picked up in his own family.

My parents were resolutely working class, Turquoise, but they scraped together and bought the house my Dad grew up in. They moved there in the early 60s. It was an old Victorian house on a hillside...the wind whistled through it! There was no central heating but a coal fire in the living room. We had a lodger to help make ends meet and my brother and I shared a room. We can remember scraping the ice off the inside of the windows in winter!
I sold the house last year after my Mum died and it broke my heart to leave all the memories behind.

Reading through these makes me very nostalgic, I am reminded of a comedian who said You could tell they were posh, they had fruit in the house when nobody was ill.

I remember when my parents got their first colour television. I think it would have been in about 1972.

When we went away on holiday that year they were paranoid about leaving it in the living room so it had to be carted through the house (our house was a bungalow, fortunately) and stored in the bathroom. In those days TVs were usually very bulky things and it took up the entire space in there.

On the day we got back a week or so later after a long journey there would be a mad scramble to get the TV out of the bathroom because we all needed to use the toilet, of which there was only one in the house and it was completely blocking access.

Being only about 6 or so at the time I actually thought that everyone always put their TVs in their bathrooms when they went away.

I’m sure there were other things, but for now that is the one that stands out.

Throughout my entire childhood and teenage years we never ate outside or had a barbecue. Even if it was 25 degrees outside, we still had our dinner indoors. In hindsight I do find that odd as we love eating outside whenever the weather permits!

Following the sugar on fruit theme, we never ate an orange.
Mum would cut a square hole in the skin with a sharp knife and push a sugar cube into the orange. We sucked all the juice out through the cube.

Saying the phone number, family name and who's speaking please was not normal in the mid to late 90s.
They obviously had their reasons for it and i loved that family but that was not normal to me.
We all had mobiles 5 years later.
I do still remember my nana and grandads house phone number.
I suppose whats normal just seems normal, so long as it's not too out there.
We had no heating until 2001.
I had a mostly happy childhood, home was quite choatic but that was normal to me..
Wonder what my son will say about my wierd quirks when he grows up.

Wasn't the saying the number thing originally due to crossed or shared lines? A habit that stuck with people for a good while

@MulticolourMophead

He also mentioned eating rich fruit cakes with a slice of Stilton cheese. Apparently also a thing in our area, at least for older folk.
I did this last Christmas with a slice of Christmas cake and not Stilton but Wensleydale cheese (the one with cranberries) and it was lovely. Mind you Wensleydale with oatcakes and/or a Braeburn or similar apple is delicious.

[quote Happynow001]@MulticolourMophead

He also mentioned eating rich fruit cakes with a slice of Stilton cheese. Apparently also a thing in our area, at least for older folk.
I did this last Christmas with a slice of Christmas cake and not Stilton but Wensleydale cheese (the one with cranberries) and it was lovely. Mind you Wensleydale with oatcakes and/or a Braeburn or similar apple is delicious. [/quote]
When I met my DH he mentioned needing cheese to go with the Christmas cake, which baffled me.

Cue delight from my Nana who had grown up with that tradition from her English mother, but had lost the habit after donkeys years with my English Grandad and his Irish parents. She was very shy and got teased a bit about her “funny ways” in other things so she’d never mentioned it.

My Great-Granny was from Yorkshire and I’ve never known if it’s an English thing or a Yorkshire thing

Happynow001 I've never actually tried Wensleydale.

lyralalala I don't know where the cheese thing originates, we're Leicestershire. Its definitely something from the older generation, I don't know anyone younger than me who eats it this way.

@lyralalala

Cheese on cake is a Yorkshire thing (and possibly Lancashire too but not sure).

I’d never heard of it until I met someone from Hull when I was at uni (I’m from down south) and thought it was the weirdest thing I'd ever heard. But my ExH is a Yorkshireman and assured me it's pretty standard.

I eventually tried it and was pleasantly surprised. I don't particularly like fruit cake and tbh cheese improves it for me! I now eat cheese (just mild cheddar) on malt loaf, which I can 10/10 recommend!

Thank you!

My post makes no sense as my Grandad was Scottish, hence Nana never mentioning the cake and cheese thing to him. Late night posting does lead to random mistakes!!

I love cheese with fruit cake and buns and lots of butter on the cake which I realise is unhealthy overkill - but it's only occasionally.

Has anyone mentioned standard Sunday tea? Lettuce, sliced cucumber, sliced tomato, maybe beetroot in vinegar, salad cream and bread and butter. One tin of salmon between four followed by tinned peaches with carnation milk. Years of this.

Because we loved the programme The Crystal Maze, it gave my parents an idea for the ultimate (light-hearted) threat: being locked in. I was jokingly threatened with being locked in my bedroom if it wasn't tidy by 6 o' clock, or that certain forbidden words would mean an automatic lock-in. (There weren't any lockable rooms in our house.)

There was only one time this became a reality: in a holiday cottage, I was thrilled to discover an empty cupboard under the stairs, with a bolt on the door. One rainy day when we played Monopoly, I was the first to be bankrupted (I was aged ten at the time). So, grinning from ear to ear, I sat in the cupboard. My parents told me I had two minutes to get out, and of course I stayed where I was. And, instructed by my parents, my brother strode over, and locked me in!

But, as they knew I would be, I was thrilled. They asked every few minutes if I wanted to be bought out, but I said no every time. The players who went out next were offered the chance to be locked up, but none of them took it, so I remained safely locked in my little prison until the game was over. On subsequent games of Monopoly, anyone who was "sent to jail" was locked in.

Westmoreland pepper cake and cheese! It's a not very sweet fruitcake made with pepper and served with local cheese.

Not Christmas cake, but I'm from Lincs and we have strong cheese with Lincolnshire plum bread - I'm not sure if that's what our family does or whether it's what others do too?

No I really want some plum bread.