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.

Same here! My kids find it really weird. It's even worse because I had to share one with my brother so only got to open a door every other day! And he always worked it so that he opened the double door with the picture of Santa on Christmas Eve. 🤣

I had a friend that worked at BB during uni and she had to check the video and note down the names of any offenders and then talk to them next time they came in. She never did and I don't think anyone else in the store ever did.

Or.... ring the dedicated help line lol...done that a few times in my day

I was explaining guy fawkes to Americans and they looked at me that way too - it is a funny thing to do...

Before photocopy machines, Roneo machines. They had them at my school. Talk about messy, there was purple ink everywhere!

I moved out of home at age. 18. My rent was only £12 a week!

Being able to smoke in hospitals.

I went to see Culture Club in 1983 and the tickets were only £1.75

• Not having a computer and handwriting essays and coursework for school.
• Having to head to the university computer room to word process an essay and then print it and hand it in.
• Having to make plans with friends in advance and agree to meet in X place at Y time.
• Owning a book with national rail times.
• Owning multiple paper leaflets containing bus timetables
• Getting the local paper for different things on different days (the property section was one day, jobs another) and relying on it for small ads and cinema times.
• Having to do most banking in person and your own bank branch. Which meant that if you moved house to another area you had to transfer your bank account to another branch.
• Having to get all the money you needed for the weekend by noon on a Saturday as cash machines were few and far between and lots of places didn't take card or cheque.
• Paying by card and the cashier bringing out the giant guillotine-looking-thing to take an impression of your card.
• Relying on cheque payment at the end of the month because they'd not clear until after pay day.
• Smoking everywhere: staff rooms (including at schools), top deck of the bus, cinema, restaurants, planes, hairdressers
• Renting the TV from Rumbelows.
• Standing outside a TV shop to find out what was going on in the world (e.g. football results, news events).
• No rolling news. So very occasionally, if something major happened, the normal TV shows would be interrupted for a news bulletin.
• Leaving cash in an envelope on the doorstep for the milkman
• Most chickens were sold with the giblets in a wee bag inside it - and they made great stock.
• Almost nothing being open on a Sunday.
• Having very few photos from school/university because you needed a separate film camera and buying film and developing it were expensive.
• Owning an address book and a paper diary, and being completely reliant on both.
• Schools having just one or two computers for a few hundred kids. And they were the BBC computers.
• Having to go into a physical travel agent shop to book a holiday or flight
• Flying being really rare, almost luxurious.
• No Channel Tunnel - instead one had to take a flight or board a ferry to get to France.
• There being a HUGE gap between films and TV shows being released in the US and then being released in the UK. For films, six months or more was common. For TV shows it was years.
• Being left alone as a kid a lot of the time - in the car while my mum went to the supermarket; in the house while my parents went out; letting myself into an empty house after school from the age of 9; being sent to the shops alone from the age of about six.
• Sitting outside the pub with a fizzy drink and a bag of crisps to share with your siblings while your parents drank inside.
• Four TV channels.
• The Radio Times Christmas edition being invaluable - and everyone went through it to circle what they wanted to watch. God forbid there was a clash!

I'm only in my early 40s!

We used to regularly go to Butlins in the 1970s. A great selling point in the day is that in the evening you could leave your kids in the chalet and go out for the night. Every half hour or so a staff member would come and shine a torch in the window to check the kids were still alive. That was childcare in the 1970s.

In the school "computer club" in the 1970s. We just learned some coding. The school didn't have a computer but we had a trip one time to the university to see "the computer ". It took up a large room, made a noise, and had a "hopper" onto which you loaded a stack of punched cards, which was how you asked it to do anything. We got it to work out the value of pi to 100 decimal places, which took a few minutes.

We had a family newsagents business back in the 70s during the power cuts. We'd have loads of candles all over the shop to provide lighting. Didn't give a second thought to having lighted candles close to flammable newspapers and magazines! We'd have a table of lit candles, stuck to upturned jam jar lids by the door for customers to pick up when they came in so they could use them to see to buy stuff off the shelves!

Looking back, what was even more crazy was selling loose fireworks by candle light - what could possibly go wrong?? It was in the day that you'd have stacks of loose fireworks in small boxes on shelves, a bit like buying pick n mix sweets!

Never even crossed our minds back in those days that naked flames close to fireworks wasn't a particularly good idea. But, guess what, we survived. No fires! Nowadays, you'd be insane to do anything so stupid, but back then, there wasn't the same awareness of such dangers, and most people were accustomed to naked flames, candles, open fires, etc., so were probably more careful themselves.

There are still cinemas in the UK that do this. Marple cinema has always done it and iirc, the cinema in Windermere. I'm sure they aren't alone in this.

Marple cinema also sold wine gums and fruit pastels in boxes. 😃

Back at school in the 70s, I was one of a small team who did the stage sound and lighting in the school hall for plays, presentations, assemblies, etc. We'd climb the ladders without safety harnesses, and the ladders weren't safety ladders, no outriggers etc., just normal aluminium extension ladders. It was a high school hall, at least three floors high, and an even higher space above the stage for scenery drops (flies). We never worked with supervision, just a group of us 14/15 year olds working it out for ourselves. Same with the electrics and wiring, we just taught ourselves on the job, i.e. wiring plugs, wiring the control boards, changing light bulbs. No one checked anything. The drama teacher who was "responsible" just told us what was needed, i.e. what lights and where, and we just did it. Amazing given all the H&S requirements today especially regarding working at height and working with electrics, but us 14/15 year olds just got on with it!

Re the test card on TV, the girl in the picture was left-handed, so the picture was reversed, so she would be holding the chalk in her right hand.

A punishment for naughty children (not in my time) was being locked in their bedrooms, or "nurseries". It's often seen in books such as the Famous Five, or being sent to bed without supper.

Indeed, houses where all the internal doors had locks with keys seems weird now.

Wine gums in boxes tasted infinitely better than wine gums in tubes. I can remember sending some to my cousins after they moved to Australia and it was the main thing they asked for.

That was another thing. When relatives moved to far away places such as Australia/New Zealand/Canada (and lots of my family did because the economy in Scotland and the North of England was so woeful in the 80s) you just sucked up the fact you'd either never see them again or see them about once every 10 years because air travel was so expensive and Skype didn't exist. Even phone calls were extortionate. So you wrote. My grandmother kept every postcard and letter from my Aussie cousins and my auntie - we found them all when she died and there were boxes full.

Pretty much the same today, then, in some places, due to tracking apps that seldom work because the transponder on the bus hasn't been activated or because their system is down.

No shopping on Sundays, except for garden centres.
People going to different shops for vegetables, meat, tinned goods.
Only four television channels.
Different ITV regions having different programmes, not just their own news bulletin.
Not having seatbelts in the back seats of cars.
Ceefax/Teletext.
Not having mobile phones.
Having mobile phones, but ones that couldn't do text messages.
The public being able to walk along Downing Street whenever they liked - that was "only" 1989.
No M25 and it being feasible to drive through London rather than skirt round the edges.

@taxguru I did stage lighting at school in the late 90s, I too was up on high ladders, and in school out of hours, although we were supervised. One lad swore very loudly when the headmaster was passing with an important guest. He grovelled in a way that Boris Johnson would be proud of: "I'm very, very sorry".

As for train timetables, I'm fond of this line in one of the Famous Five books, which would baffle modern kids: "They hunted for the timetable, found the right page, and underlined the train they hoped the Sticks would think they were catching." Nowadays, you'd live a printout from the website lying around.

Not forgetting to rewind the video back to the start before taking it back.

Eating dinner as a child even if it was something I didn't particularly like, because, well, that was the dinner that day, and if we were hungry between meals there were apples or oranges, and THAT WAS ALL. Teen DD said she'd have killed herself 🙄

Re the Radio Times Christmas edition, I remember when itdidn’t have the ITV listings so you had to get the TV Times Christmas one too. And if you weren’t sharp about it they’d sell out.

After a death it was common to have an open coffin in the deceased's house to allow all and sundry to come and pay their respects. My mother saw a few of these as a girl involuntarily as everyone was pressing her to "go say goodby to ...".

Might still happen today, back then it was common... either way it's unnecessary.

Not having seatbelts in the back seats of cars

Not having seatbelts in the front seats, either.

When they first came out, they were optional, and you had to pay to get them installed.

Son was getting frustrated at computer the other day, was telling him how we had to load a game onto our very high tech BBC home computer with a cassette tape which screeched whilst loading this was everytime we wanted to play- it wouldnt save on there( we covered it with pillows to dull the screech!) Half an hour later it would fail to load and would have to start all over.

Blockbusters - not only did we have to hire the video tape we didn't have a video player so would have to hire that to.

Schools - PE knickers, vests. Blue/ pink custard - was it custard?

First, second and third class carriages on trains.