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.

Doctors coming out to do house calls, they came out for anything years ago, also not having to making an appointment, you just turned up at the surgery. In the early 70s not seeing your GP until you'd missed 3 periods to see if you were pregnant, no scans at all so not knowing the sex of your baby. Not knowing if there was anything wrong with it either until it was born, we just hoped it was.

Mine couldn't fathom the idea of a phone book.
"Is it a phone with a book?"
"Is it a book with a phone?"
"How can you read it or answer the phone?"

i was a stroppy teen in the 70s/80s with an equally stroppy and peri-menopausal mum. I used my Saturday job money to use the slipper baths every week and the same time I'd leave my washing for a service wash at the launderette at the end of our road.

I happily remember the luxury of those hot, deep baths. I also remember my (not very nice) mums frustration as she began to realise that once I had my own money she could no longer control me.

Having to dial up to get on the Internet, and that horrible screeching sound it made! And if someone was on the Internet no one could use the phone.

The idea of cassette tapes and videos is very confusing to my DS!

it was simple.

DH and I moved into our first rental flat during the transition from coal gas to natural gas. they did blocks of area at a time and if the residence was empty, as in between renters or for any reason, they capped the gas and moved on. Once the area was done, they would go back and convert the missed ones, The upshot was that we moved into a flat in a converted victorian house in Bristol with zero cooking, heating or hot water facilities IN WINTER. We used to go up to the public baths in Jacobs Wells Road twice a week to bath and boiled kettles on a camping stove for everything else. We had no bathroom in the house where I lived for the first 12 years of my life, we had a galvanised steel bath. On fridays, my mother boiled buckets of water on the gas stove and bathed in front of the kitchen fire, then my sibs took it in turn to bath as we arrived home from school and my Dad had the last turn when he got in from work. The bath was then baled out and carried back outside to be stored in the shed.

@TheShellBeach

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

This seems like a real luxury - some people are lucky to get an appointment the same week nowadays! My in laws still call GP for a home visit. I don't think they realise things have changed now. It's sad that the days of GP home visits are over.

Smoking on planes

What a great thread! Sorry, if someone has already said this but the fact teachers could hit you! My form teacher at primary school had a cane on a stand on his desk! That man loved his cane and loved hitting kids with it. Completely unbelievable now.
And flying long haul in early 90s and people were smoking. They were in the so-called smoking area at the back but, guess what, smoke travels...

Oops! Sorry, missed your comment.

Similar to this....I used to live in Lewes and tried explaining their bonfire celebrations to my Irish and Italian catholic families.....awkward 🤣

England: Nobody was ever hit in schools I was at (mostly in the 60s) or taught in, but I do remember at my first school in the mid-70s a (very petite) colleague came from Scotland and said they used a tawse in the school she’d come from. I think it was only for boys. I am not sure if she herself had used it.

Slam-door trains, where to open the door from inside, you had to reach through the window and use the outside handle. These trains were still in use near Southampton in 2001.

I didn't have a computer or access to one until my final year! Had to hand write essays after finding papers on a primitive cd rom of medline and then having to search for the current bound set of volumes of the journals on the library shelves.....then either spending hours reading the paper in the bound volume or photocopying for an entire afternoon.....

Oh and no reference Management software.....

We worked hard for our degrees!

@converseandjeans

My in laws still call GP for a home visit. I don't think they realise things have changed now. It's sad that the days of GP home visits are over.

Do they no longer do them for the elderly? My parents GP would pay home visits to my parents as recently as 2019 but I know things have changed with Covid.

I did an OU degree in the 1980s. One course included something which had to be done on a computer, and as nobody had those at home the OU must have agreed with various educational institutions that we could use theirs.

The one in my town was at the local tech and had to be booked well in advance. I could only use it in the evening: it was on the edge of the site in a little hut with a graveyard over the wall and with very poor lighting between it and the entrance gate. I remember this particularly because, having made complicated babysitting arrangements to be there, I arrived in the deep dark to find the hut was locked with no way of finding out how to get it unlocked.

It was considered polite to wait til the end of a meal before starting to smoke…

In the Officers' Mess smoking was allowed towards the end of the dinner, once the Queen's health had been toasted. Allegedly Princess Margaret insisted on the Loyal Toast being drunk at the start of the meal so she could smoke throughout the meal!

No evening parties at weddings, and instead after the reception you saw bride and groom off on their honeymoon. Bride changed into a special Going Away Outfit.

Wedding ceremonies only in churches or register offices, no hotels or stately homes. Parents of bride hosted and paid for the reception, sent out all the invitations, and invited all their own friends.

We were in Germany when we first saw the Advent Calendars with chocolates in and we used to send them to family in the UK, that would be about 1982.

My bad a worked for Motorola back in the late 90s he said he went to a meeting one day and they showed them the prototype for a new flip mobile phone. They said they expected within 10 years 1 in 3 people would have a mobile phone. I remember my parents talking about it and saying no way would that many people have a mobile phone and that it was a ridiculous prediction!

When I first started teaching in 1970 one of the staff went into the city to buy tickets to see an act at the University, 25p equivalent, we all covered for him so the senior staff didn't notice his absence, a huge school 1600 pupils. The act was someone called Elton John, I didn't go as I'd never heard of him.

No evening parties at weddings, and instead after the reception you saw bride and groom off on their honeymoon. Bride changed into a special Going Away Outfit.

Yep, that was my wedding, too. 1970s .

I started boarding school in 1986, when corporal punishment was illegal in state schools but still legal in private schools.

It didn't affect my life one iota - no one was belting public school girls in the 80s, and my whole life was run by a set of rules that didn't apply to most kids anyway. But it's bizarre that it was ever legal for unrelated adults to hit some kids but not others, based purely on where their parents chose to send them to school.

That you could smoke on a plane.

1996 for me