Stuff that didn’t seem weird at the time but when you tell someone younger they think it’s nuts

[MildGreenDairyLiquid]

Just that really.

The other day I explained to my 11 year old niece that when I was at junior school we used to have a small bottle of milk with a straw every morning, and she looked at me like I’d lost my mind.

There were even 'Aga Sagas' written by people like Joanna Trollope, supposedly about middle class aspirational characters who congregated round their Agas! 🤣

My brother died from school milk, the teacher had placed the crate of bottles next to the radiator in winter, the usual practice, and the heat activated something in the milk that had not been properly treated which made him ill and killed him. I was in the same teacher's class 6 years later, I often wonder how awful that must have been for her. I asked my parents why they had not sued the school and education authority but as my Dad said, they were too distraught and it wasn't the norm then, late 1940s.

I think I've got a genuine nuts one for you.

When I started going to discos back in the mid 1970's us girls used to put our handbags on the floor and dance around them.

If a slow dance started you'd stay on the dance floor, put your right hand on your friends shoulder and step from side to side. Pairs of blokes cruised around and if they wanted to dance with you they'd tap your shoulder.

I look back and think WTF

The nuts part with some of it is the miracle that many of our generation (mostly Gen X I reckon) survived at all given today's standards and pressures. Some change is good obviously, but some of us look back on borderline/benign neglect with a wistfulness it's hard to admit to some younger generations.

Congratulations - you’ve managed to describe the point of the thread, and yet completely miss it, in the same post…

When we told young DC, television was black and white only, when we were children, they asked if the world was black and white?

We told DC, when we went to university, there were no mobile phones and we had to carry maps or A - Zs with us, for when we got lost. No Google maps in those days!
We had to write letters to our parents and friends to keep in touch. Met with blank incomprehension by DC!

Not being in a car behind a vehicle with lumber/poles etc.

That occasionally someone would be late to work on a Monday when the clocks went forward in the summer,( Usually if they had had a quiet Sunday and hadn't twigged about the date of clocks changing that year). They just went through Sunday thinking it was an hour later than it was as their watches and clocks did not automatically change (like phones times and those on laptopts/tablets nowadays)

I worked in a British Rail Travel Centre up to 1989 and we used to get twice-annual deliveries of this MAHOOSIVE folder of all the train timetables in Britain. We would also get a catalogue of errors and updates, and in our breaks we would have to go through each timetable and write in the corrections.

It was quite the skill to get anyone from anywhere to anywhere else in Britain just using the information in these folders, but most of the job involved giving people the same few journeys that you pretty much memorised.

The man who did the European rail travel was regarded as a cross between a wizard and a minor god...

Maybe I have got that wrong. Maybe it is when the clocks go forward. Anyway it was one of them I get so confused!!

We also used to smoke in the canteen, and the men would bring porn mags in for a joke, and would head off to the Railway Inn at lunch and come back rolling...

Work before email. We were using a new internal system recently and were resorting to checking it had been received (teething issues) and joked it was like early days of email when you’d call to say did you receive my email. In legal we used to dictate letters onto little tapes (and dictate the punctuation) and put a pile of files with tape for secretary. If tape broke you had to re do all work. Work would get out of date before it was typed. Now virtually all work is via email. I felt like a relic from Victorian age explaining it to young ones.

They still give milk in dc primary school. In a small plastic bottle, not a glass bottle anymore.

Oh, and we had boredom that it was our own responsibility to deal with. I only made the mistake of complaining about it once to my Mum in my early teens. As a result I spent an afternoon handwashing my smalls, and never complained again.

You can buy a slide scanner quite cheaply and digitise them.

I overheard a conversation at work: “It’s strange that we celebrate Guy Fawkes”. Colleague 2 - “well, in this country we love to support the underdog”. I wonder how many people see Bonfire Night as a celebration of Guy Fawkes?

None of them seem to find names funny at all, which is both lovely and I think at my boys’ school, a symptom of the fact that it’s very multicultural and so they wouldn’t dream of mocking a “foreign” name.

They have friends with the surname Dong, Wang, there’s a girl called Seerat, but they not once have even made a lighthearted comment. Whereas at my school in the 80s ANY tiny thing that made you “different” was relentlessly mocked.

Oh yes. My parents never felt it was their duty to constantly keep us entertained., we had to do it ourselves.

it was, a normal small christmas gift was a chocolate smoking set....foil wrapped chocolate in the shape of a pipe, cigars, a box of matches and an ashtray. It was that terrible cheap chocolate. I may have been odd but i didn't associate it with actual smoking (and my dad smoked) I also had a collection of cap guns and have never shot anyone!.

I was talking to dc who has just gone to uni about lectures and saying was she finding way around ok. She looked at me like I was mad. The timetable is on an app and if you click it takes you to map/directions. No wandering around with a paper map.
I’ve thought a lot about uni. I went and just called my mum once a week from a pay phone. I’d write paper letters to friends, my mum would write to me sometimes with clippings from local newspaper, getting post in your pigeon hole was always nice.

Yes, Dr Whites. Luckily by the time I started my period (1979), they had started putting an adhesive stip.

Thatcher the milk snatcher

There was one phone box in the middle of the village where I grew up. There was a little shop and park near by that we used to play around in (like 9-10 years old). Occasionally the phone box would ring and one of us would go and answer it and you'd get someone for example saying "Can you go and get Mrs Jones at number 13 to come to the phone please" and off we'd pop to get the old lady to come across the road to the phone box!

Sounds like an old Hovis advert set in the 20s when you think about it now - but this was like 1992! 😂

A lot of posters have mentioned physical media, but I think only very young children would have literally never seen a CD or DVD. However, one thing that would definitely seem nuts to youngsters - and I say that because it seems nuts to me now, and I was there at the time - is how much we used to pay for physical media. Moving house a few years ago, I finally chucked out some old VHS tapes and one still had the price tag on. It was £14.99! For three sitcom episodes! It must have been 30 years old, so if you think about inflation, that’s an insane price.

I don’t take full advantage of Netflix and have considered cancelling it recently because I’m “wasting” a tenner a month. Then I look back at how I used to pay more than that for a single piece of content 30 years ago and it suddenly seems good value!

I remember when my dds were at primary school I found it really weird to think that my head teachers at infant and junior school in the 70s used to give kids a hiding. At infant school it was in front of the other kids in hymn practice. It's just unthinkable now.