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.

BEEF TEA
Ingredients. – 1 lb. of lean gravy-beef, 1 quart of water, 1 saltspoonful of salt.
Mode.—Have the meat cut without fat and bone, and choose a nice fleshy piece. Cut it into small pieces about the size of dice, and put it into a clean saucepan. Add the water cold to it; put it on the fire, and bring it to the boiling-point; then skim well. Put in the salt when the water boils, and simmer the beef tea gently from 1/2 to 3/4 hour, removing any more scum should it appear on the surface. Strain the tea through a hair sieve, and set it by in a cool place. When wanted for use, remove every particle of fat from the top; warm up as much as may be required, adding, if necessary, a little more salt. This preparation is simple beef tea, and is to be administered to those invalids to whom flavourings and seasonings are not allowed. When the patient is very low, use double the quantity of meat to the same proportion of water. Should the invalid be able to take the tea prepared in a more palatable manner, it is easy to make it so by following the directions in the next recipe, which is an admirable one for making savoury beef tea. Beef tea is always better when made the day before it is wanted, and then warmed up. It is a good plan to put the tea into a small cup or basin, and to place this basin in a saucepan of boiling water. When the tea is warm, it is ready to serve.
Time.—1/4 to 3/4 hour. Average cost, 6d. per pint.
Sufficient.—Allow 1 lb. of meat for a pint of good beef tea.

Having ' gym knickers' as a PE outfit option in school

Smoking indoors in public places!!

Restaurants, trains, buses, in other non-smoking people's homes 🤯

Buckinghamshire in the late 80s in the Autumn/start of Spring term! Really fond memories of those little hot drinks in the freezing cold playground.
Nobody injured themselves, although I do remember burning my tongue a lot!
But yes I agree on the lack of availability of drinks. I survived mainly on a singular capri sun at lunchtime.
DH has recently started taking a stand about the kids insisting on taking a water bottle everywhere for this very reason!

@dayatatime18

I member as a child being off school with a throat infection.The doctor walked into the house smoking a cigarette

I don't know what is most surprising. The fact that the GP was smoking or that he actually came to the house for a sore throat!

@IsleOfPenguinBollards

We did actually go over the fence one year. Doubt we'd get away with that now.

A university one from the early 80s.
A boyfriend climbing up the outside of the building and his girlfriend opening the fire door to let him in as boys weren't allowed in our rooms

House calls weren't that difficult to get, if the patient was so ill that they were in bed. In the summer of 1993 my husband had really bad tonsillitis and developed chest pain on top. Our GP came to the house and examined him. Saved having to get a taxi and take him to A&E with a toddler in tow, or calling an ambulance, both of which I was considering.

My children's minds were blown by the concept of live tv you couldn't fast forward or rewind.

My mind was blown by my ten year old child asking if I'd 'heard of Kurt Cobain'

I'm also convinced that McDonald's used to have ashtrays fixed to the side of their tables but nobody else seems to remember this.

McDonald's birthday parties being the absolute pinnacle of a social calendar (when really all you did was sit in a certain area and possibly get to make an ice cream?!)

I was at secondary school in the 70s. Hot drinks(from a machine) were a perk of the sixth form only.

OH and being allowed to go to London with my best friend, just the two of us, to shop for the day in Year 7. We'd never done it before, but both sets of parents assumed we were 'sensible enough' and off we went! This was 1997. My son is in year 6 and I wouldn't trust him to get the BUS into town yet! Admittedly he has SEN but I do sort of gasp at how laissez faire our parents were. We were fine and it was good for us but if I tried a similar thing now with either of my kids the judgement would be huge!

I don't know what is most surprising. The fact that the GP was smoking or that he actually came to the house for a sore throat!

We usually got house calls in the 1960s, when I was a child.

It was rare for us to go to the surgery.

I got a Jimmy White pool cue with my Embassy tokens... took it to the pub with me every saturday too, I was well chuffed with it!

Music and Movement in the hall - exactly as the Victoria Wood song says... running about in your pants doing what the lady says, being as small as a mouse or some such bollocks.

It was a radio program teachers would record I think and then we'd get all the bobbly bitty foam mats out, the yellow ones, with orange and green bits chopped up in it looking like bits of carrot and pea in some sick... and anyone who had forgotten their PE stuff just did it in their pants and vest. Brrr.

The wooden 'apparatus' against the side of the school hall, which to my knowledge only came out once in the time I was there, for us to try to climb up a rope which only one boy could do... It never came out again but ANY activity in the hall came with the dire warning that we were...

NOT TO TOUCH THE APPARATUS!...

Our school playing field (also the local cricket club field, the pitch being roped off) also came with dire warnings both about going on the actual pitch itself and also about touching the huge iron grass rollers.

No one was to touch, sit on, climb on, or go near the rollers as once in the mists of time a small boy had been rolled over and flattened by them! I suspect now this may have been a lie...

I had this exact conversation this week (I also live abroad). They think it's nuts!

My mother's friend used Kensitas coupons to get her baby's cot.

When was this? I got £1 an hour early 80s.

Ours was shared with the house opposite. I think party lines were a result of it taking time to convert all lines from operator dialling to STD, which they were still doing in the early 70s. My dad tells the story of, when I was born very late at night, getting through to a very sleepy operator in the small village where my grandparents live, to be connected and give them the news. Party lines were slightly cheaper than your own line.

Just seen that this post has made it to an Aga FB page. They are all very precious about their beloved Agas and being merciless about this typo. In a supposedly friendly group.

I was at secondary school in the 80s, and anyone was allowed to use the Klix vending machine - 7p for a cup of fairly revolting tea or coffee, or vegetable soup, or powdery cold orange drink - I don't remember ever queuing for it! You could get a wide range of canned fizzy drinks with lunch, including shandy!

@notmoredirtywashing I can absolutely promise you that this happened. Just had a look at my old records, I started in 1987 (so 14 and a sniff) and finished after GCSEs in the summer of1989.

There was a qualified dental nurse present (except on emergency Sundays & any after school cover on those rare occasions). Usually, it was the lead partner’s wife on extraction Saturdays.

Her dentist DH was a pervert; more than once he’d slide passed whilst I was prepping (in the back lab); it was no surprise when I received a call whilst I was at Uni from a qualified dental nurse friend that he’d been suspended for being inappropriate with the staff. His Mrs was well aware of his proclivities; whilst training we’d be given the ‘don’t go into the developing room with him’ speech. By the time I’d come back from Uni, he’d sold the practice & ‘retired’. Or rather, hastily skedadddled.

I wasn’t the only under 16 year old either; there was another who started a couple of weeks before I left who was 15; in fact, all of the nurses employed on Saturdays had started just as I had from 14; some then went & trained formally, working full time after school.

Just because this didn’t happen in your surgery, doesn’t mean it didn’t happen at other surgeries. And as someone who has been r*ped & sexually assaulted as both a child & adult, it is absolutely not something (straddling unconscious guys with erections as a 14 year old) that I’d chose to joke about for the sake of a good, ripping yarn for entertainment.

Composites, amalgam, X-ray developing, even writing prescription's on yellow pads for amoxicillin, handing out blue Valiums in tiny envelopes (and being given them by the same dentist as a kid, utterly unfathomable now), and that particular smell that comes with drilling into exposed jawbone, all Saturday things.Extraction weeks were the easy days!

You stripped down to your vest and knickers in PE in primary school (mine did this, anyway) it's insane to think this happened, but it did.

Walking half a mile home on our own from infant school, starting about six.

Phoning Granddad in the village he lived in, in the Lakes, you had to go through the operator and ask to be put through to 'village name 123'.

My dad was a GP and did home visits for a long time. When I was small and it was the holidays he'd sometimes take me with him and there'd be old ladies in houses that smelled of boiling bones. Sometimes one would give me a shiny penny and some stale biscuits. He did night visits once a week and when he came to wake us up in the morning he often had his day trousers on over his pyjama bottoms. He then went to work as usual during the day.

When the National Anthem played before the tv programmes ended at night, there were still older people who stand up and salute the tv while it played.

And being able to comfortably drive into London without it taking ages and costing the earth. For a couple of years, when my dad had to temporarily move for work, we lived near Reading. On a Sunday every few months my parents would drive into places like St John's Wood or Kensington so we could do things like have a picnic in Regents Park, hop on a sightseeing bus, visit London Zoo, or head to the museums (Natural History Museum etc). You'd never dream of driving to do that now - it'd be insanely stressful, there'd be nowhere to park, and the Ulez would cost £500 (slight hyperbole but you get the gist). Oh, and we had no seatbelts in the back of the car. And obviously no Sat Nav. I passed my driving test a quarter of a century ago and all of that seems absolutely alien to me 🤣

same as my school. late 60's