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.

Slippers!

Coal man came and delivered sacks of coal to the coal shed.

Bin man came and collected the bin from your back garden carried it over their shoulder and emptied it into the truck by hand then brought it back.

Thing is none of these were weird at the time. It was perfectly normal because other stuff hadn't been invented.

Weird would have been eating rice pudding after a curry.

Had you never wondered about his name? 😂

I’ve been to lots of Indian restaurants where rice pudding is on the dessert menu - it’s an Indian dish, similar to “standard” rice pudding.

Covering school books in wallpaper and getting a detention if they were not covered by the deadline.

It would make the national news now. There'd be fulsome apologies from the Pope down.

Re doing PE in vest and knickers, I can't get worked up about that. We're not talking about skimpy garments. When I was at primary school in the 1960s/early 1970s we'd have looked like the two on the left in this picture. Not very far removed from sports kit, surely?

The student grant was enough to cover accommodation and living costs. It was quite substantial in the 80s and 90s until it was scrapped in 1997.

It gave my generation much more social mobility than previous generations, by giving us access to higher education.

Putting a tape recorder up against the radio to record that number one at the end of the Top 40 and being cross if the DJ spoke over it.

My children thought this was insane, why didn't I stream it, what's a tape 😁

Can still.get Walkers salt and shake crisps.

In the early 2000s I worked near a psychiatric hospital with a lot of out-patient clinics. At that time if you saw someone walking along the street on their own talking audibly it was a reasonable guess they were on their way into or out of the hospital. That changed quite fast during that decade.

Actually, that's been one huge change in my lifetime. The British used to have a reputation for being very reserved. Now most people will say absolutely anything into a phone even though dozens of complete strangers can hear them.

It used to be the same in Regal tabs but they were Focus Points.. my friend and I were amazed on a trip to Manchester when we saw the actual Focus Points shop with all the stuff in that you could get 😮

My Mum said that in the 60/70s they used to straighten their hair with the iron that was used for ironing clothes. A bit of baking paper to avoid completely frying it.

Straighteners, aren't that new, hair styling tongs go back centuries, and before electricity you heated them on the fire. They just tended to be used more for curling due to fashion.

Modern electric ones were around in the 80s but were a bit rubbish and no one wanted straight hair anyway. In the 80s we got a styling tool with interchangeable plates so you could straighten or crimp your hair. Why we wanted hair like crinkle cut chips I have no idea!

Page 3 girls…but then again at the time I thought it was absolutely mental and my whole childhood and adolescence generally couldn’t understand how on earth it was accepted and just lay around peoples houses or in schools even.

I remember once the Sun had this teenager whose dream was to be a page 3 girl. Leading up to her sixteenth birthday each day they had a photo of her taking another item of clothing off until on her 16th!!! birthday she was topless.

yes but it was means tested...properly means tested. My parents had to fill out a form stating all income, number of children in family, rent or mortgae payment and so on. You were then told what the parental contribution would be and the government paid the rest. My parents contribution was about 3 quid a week and they upped it to a fiver...oh and we had to have uniform which was also covered by the grant. this was early 70's. The school I was at gave me a bursary to cover textbooks (60 quid, a fortune) and I was invited by the school to apply for another bursary from a London charitable trust which gave me another 40 quid.

Open coffins are still absolutely standard in Ireland, nowadays usually in a funeral homes, and hundreds of people go to offer condolences to family, who will all be there, including children. I've only kissed family members, but would regard touching the dead person's hand as very usual - a way of letting yourself really know they aren't here any more.

Janet Evanovich's Stephanie Plum is always taking Grandma Mazur to open coffin funerals in New Jersey, with predictably chaotic results. I admit Stephanie's experiences might not exactly replicate real life, but still.

The college I went to was in the grounds of a private psychiatric hospital. the walk from the coach station in town was up a long straight hill alongside the huge walled grounds of the hospital. Every so often there were gates in the wall that were left open and coming back after dark we would all go into the grounds at the first gate and walk up to the residence inside the grounds because we knew that the local bad lots were afraid to go into the hospital grounds because of the rumours about who was in there and how dangerous it was if any of them escaped. It was all fabrication of course.

and NOT sellotaping the cover to the books.

Bloody hell when was that. The luxury!!!

I think the lack of drinks at school would blow most kids minds.

We didn't get a drink other than a small plastic beaker of milk with lunch (or weak squash for that one kid with an allergy). No drinks at playtime or during lessons unless you went to the cloakroom and used the drinking fountain.

No one died of dehydration and hardly anyone needed to go to the toilet during lessons!!!!

Pocket diaries. Buying a new diary was an important task as the year drew to a close, and for a short time you had to manage two diaries at once.

Back in the 1960s and 70s when I was growing up, regular visits to the house from the Avon Lady, the Prudential Man and the Pools Collector.

There was also some arrangement between a group of neighbours where one (the agent?) got a huge printed catalogue (Littlewood's, I think) and she passed it round the group. Each lady had it for a few days, the whole family pored over it at length, and then she handed it back with an order form for what she wanted. The agent then placed the orders and possibly got a small amount of commission from it. She received the deliveries and passed them all on, I think. If you wanted, you could pay in weekly instalments. I think my Mum preferred to pay upfront, having a horror of debt.

And finally .... luggage. Wheeled suitcases didn't exist until the late 90s, as far as I recall. It might have been a bit earlier, but we didn't have any till the early 2000s when they were really easy to get hold of and cheap. Before that you had to be able to lug your own luggage around, or else get a taxi driver or railway porter to do it for you, this being a large part of the reason why they got a tip. Did airports have porters too? We were not wealthy enough to fly anywhere in the 1970s so I don't know. In the 80s and 90s we were young and strong so able to carry our own luggage without assistance. Wheelies are such a huge improvement.

I remember that too.

You'd have the tape recorder right up next to the radio with your finger hovering over the button ready to record, anxious not to miss a second. And of course you had to make sure that sufficient space was available on the tape, not to mention the dramas when it got caught up in the machine and you'd have to fish out the tape with a pencil, hoping vainly that your precious songs were still audible!