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.

I don't know if this resonates with others who were children in the 80s, teens in the 90s and so on.... but I often feel like my generation was the last one through the door before it shut.

By that I mean, the last generation to grow up without social media and mobile phones and the internet and on demand TV. The last generation for whom buying their own home was a reasonable expectation. The last generation where getting a decent job without a degree was possible etc. Perhaps the last generation to grow up in a world that felt more optimistic about the future (climate, equality, prosperity) than pessimistic.

It's possible every generation feels like that, just about different aspects. I don't know.

I made a fairly long train journey involving a several changes yesterday. I'd used the "split save" thing on the Trainline as it was cheaper so had multiple single tickets with different train companies. When, inevitably, one train was late and it looked like I was going to miss my connection I commented to the young woman that I was sitting next to that it meant that not only would I be very late home but I'd probably have to buy new tickets for my onward journey as company A wouldn't see it as their problem that company B's train was late and I didn't even have a through ticket. I said despite how much we used to moan I think it was better when there was just one train company, you could buy one ticket from anywhere to anywhere, and they did even sometimes hold trains if a connection was late. She looked surprised and asked me what the company was called. She'd never heard of British Rail and was amazed to learn that the railways were once nationalised in this country. I felt very old!* *

On the flipside- some things I’m glad to see the back of:

Being wolf whistled at when passing any building site

Random cars slowing to offer lifts

Fat shaming / body shaming acceptable- ie men or women loudly complaining about fat people

Snobbery over having the ‘right’ manners

Girls being discouraged from maths and science; boys being told they have to be tough and can’t cry

I live in Hampshire. Maybe there are a lot of elderly people who still like their newspapers delivered. My neighbour does.

@DiamondGoldandSilver Sadly fat shaming hasn't yet become obsolete. It's still considered a shameful thing to be fat.

Yes I think you are right. I was at university in the early 90s and still got a grant, had tuition fees paid and only had a very small student loan when I left. Just started using email, the internet was very new when I did my Masters in the mid 90s and although we had computers when I started work, we still were mainly paper-based.

I think the thing that most surprises younger friends and family, including those as old as their mid 30s was the fact that we had to agree a meeting point and place and stick to it because we couldn't text each other to change it.

We have our newspapers delivered at the weekend. They are delivered by a guy in a car. There are no newsagents round here who actually do deliveries any more.

I had penfriends all around the world. I have boxes of letters but they all stopped in the mid 90s when people started using email instead.

Instead of making a phone call, we would just let the phone ring twice-usually to signify we were home safely or similar.
When they started charging for calls to directory enquiries we used to go to the pay phone opposite which still did them for free! Circa 1980s.

Are you sure about the remote on a wire. I hired (yeah hired) a VHS player for a weekend in the early eighties). It had a remote on a wire. Never saw one after that. And DVDs didn't come out in UK until late nineties. Pretty sure remote controls on wire had gone extinct by then.

"Give me three rings when you get home!" was a frequent request whenever you said goodbye to someone.

Don’t know if this has already been said but I grew up with a smoker parent and prior to the inside smoking ban we used to have to sit in the smoking section of whatever restaurant we were in. Seems bonkers now to look back and imagine a world where you’re eating a harvester salad amongst a waft of 15 peoples fag smoke 😂

In 1996 I had a part-time job and my manageress in her 50s was talking about how her daughter was psychic or spiritually gifted and said while watching Ghostwatch a few years earlier, she'd started screaming 'theres a man!, i just saw a scary man!' which no-one else in the room had seen.

I didn't know how to tell her it was part of the programme and i'd seen it too, as had most of the population and it must've been that her and her husband just weren't paying attention.

I was born in 1960, so there was a LOT of stuff that I've tried to explain to my kids and that they roll their eyes at, but a great deal of it was because my family had no money while I and my brother were growing up. So it wasn't so much weird because of the times, as weird because of having to 'make do'

Like not having a pair of wellingtons until I was about eight and having to wear my mum's galoshes (a real thing!) over my shoes to walk to school in the rain. Having recorder lessons at school but having to share a recorder with my brother and hating the smell of his spit on it (so I gave up music for good!). Going to bed clutching a hot water bottle to me to try to keep warm under the nylon sheets and single blanket.

Stuff like that.

Travelling around the world and using Poste Restantes to get actual written letters!
Soooo exciting...

I wonder if our idea of history is changing because eg WW2 was in black and white, but when you eg see bands in the 80s, it's all in colour. Does it seem as far away to today's youngsters as the 1940s did to us in the 1980s?

A lot of schools including mine still have this, parents pay for the milk, it's not free, it's about 29p it's a little carton of milk so it's not that unusual.

I used to buy the candy cigarettes. Didn't even like them just bought them so I could pretend I was smoking.😂😂😂

I loved the chocolate cigarettes, I can still taste them now (with the edible paper around them)!

Where I grew up we had NO TV at all until I was 14!

I am slightly puzzled by the posts about the speaking clock. This is still in use. Does nobody else use this to check the time when setting a clock or a clock on their devices? I use it every March and every October to check I've got the times right when the clocks change?

Don't you have devices that automatically have the correct time to check against?

I heard a radio advert for directory enquiries this week. 78p a call! I wondered why anyone would call but presumably they do.

If you don't have a smart-phone you might but most people do have one so there's no need. It sets the time exactly automatically, including the clock changes in March and October.

Oh clever ! I’m not on SM though but thanks for the heads up, it’s a mine field.

They still do milk in schools or at least did a few years ago. Most of these things aren’t weird, they are/were perfectly normal. Whereas some modern things really are weird - I didn’t think it would be a thing for people to take pictures of their arses and stick them on the Internet for instance. But there we go.

yes, in Liverpool as well