Utterly insane things your parents did when you were growing up

[GetOrf]

My gran thought that liquid paraffin applied to my skin as achild would stop me from burning (in the tropics). God knows why she thought that. I stank! And was wary of lit cigarettes. Needless to say it didn't work and I fried.

She bought a 6 foot long chest freezer from a shop which was going bust, and put it in the hallway. Our house looked like Iceland (Kerry Katona, not volcano) when you walked in. She bought half a cow from a local farmer to put in the deep freeze. We could have had fillet steak, but no, she kept that for best (?) and we ate the offal. Never did eat that fillet steak, it was probably still in the freezer when she died.

Would refuse to pay the council to remove old ovens or whatever, so would wait until the dead of night, we would dress up like burglars and would fly tip the oven (by hoiking it over a 6 foot wall into allotments, or shioving it down a rough path and pushing it into the sea over the harbour wall). Ilfracombe residents of the 80s - that oven on the beach in August was mine.

Same happened with hanging baskets - she would refuse to buy Busy Lizzies or lobelias or whatever to make her hanging baskets, so we would sneak into municipal parks at dead of night and nick 'em.

What eccentric or frankly insane things did your parents or guardians do?

My Uncle (my Mum's bro) was a cactus freak, had three greenhouses no les full of them, he was a real meanie when they were growing up and was mean to here when me and my bro were little, after one 70's afternoon BBQ my Mum, drunk and revengefull sneaked into two of the greenhouses and poured a tiny bit of bleach into every cactus. They all course all died 3-4 days later, and OMG it was like a national catastrophe, wheeping, inquests, family gatherings, all the kids accused of terrible mischeif. My Mum told me when I was 19 that it was her! Every time I see a cactus now I do laugh.

Also my Grandma, Dad's Mum and over bearing MIL always wanted to come for afternoon tea and be waited on like the Queen, my Mum and Dad then had their own business working 7 days a week and it was the last thing my Mum wanted to do on a Sunday. She once came round on a Sunday despite being told we were out and my Mum grabbed me and my bro and we lay pressed up against the floor of the bay window to hide from her. She was there for ages and I remember my Mum telling us 'not to breathe until she had gone' I was about 7 and my brother was 9. Hilarious.

My Dad used to get home from work before Mum and she hated walking into a messy house so about 15 mins before she came home he would yell "The Witchfinder General will be home soon battle stations" which meant clear up your mess and get sorted. It's from a film apparently, off to Google it now....

I also remember my parents crying and howling with uncontrolled laughter as they had read my Christmas wish list which included a "soft hairy pussy" - I was mad about soft toys and stuffed animals.

We also lived above our kitchen and tile shop for a while on the upper two floors which we kitchen showrooms, me and my brother had a kitchen bedroom each, mine was 70's all the rage orange and my bro's was fake walnut looking, I used to flipdown the oven and use it as a bedside table. So so normal.

Thanks for this, totally shite days, this has made me weep with joy

My mum was great and brought up 5 of us while holding down a fairly high-powered job, but she never really had quite the right things - her catchphrase was always "It'll be fine, no-one's looking at you.."

I was the child with loo roll and a bit of masking tape instead of a plaster (if we hadn't been told to just "wave it about a bit, the fresh air will do it good"), computer printout paper stapled to half a cornflakes packet instead of a clipboard, a 70s sunlounger (that kept folding me up in it) instead of a camp bed at Brownies, a high-vis construction workers jacket instead of an approved school raincoat, jelly 'bonks' (read unmelted squares of fruit jelly) in my lunchbox for pudding....

She was always embarrassingly late to pick you up from things and I was always the kid still waiting with a teacher after an hour when the car with 4 other kids in would screech to a halt in the playground and sweep me up and zoom off again!

How did we get 5 kids in the back of one car - we used to have to sit leaning alternately forwards and back.... all the way from norfolk to newcastle!

I was never allowed to pee in peace.

My dad hasd an annoying habit of needing to tell you things IMMEDIATELY (still does a bit, thinks nothing of calling me repeatedly when he knows I've done a night shift)!

I'd be sitting on the loo, he open the door a crack and ask me a question. Whenever I protested that I was trying to use the toilet he'd say 'I'm not coming in, I'm just asking you something quickly.'

Drove me mad and I left home at seventeen. Even now I get funny if I'm disturbed while I'm on the toilet.

I'll never know why he couldn't just wait two minutes.

Love this thread.
My mum was never one to do things just to fit in and be part of the crowd or let us do the same for a quiet life.
I went to an all girls school for a couple of years from aged 6 and was a bit shy and book-ish with short hair after a chewing gum accident and generally felt a bit of an outsider for a while as I was new and not very girly.

Because I had my paige boy haircut and we had a pair of dark green velvet pedal pushers kicking about, my mother thought it would be a good idea send me to some schoolmate's 'lords and ladies' birthday party dressed as a lord despite my desperate pleas to be allowed to wear something pink, knowing all the other girls were going as ladies.
On arrival, everyone else were indeed dressed as ladies in fancy little girl ball dresses with bows and sparkles and I had to spend the entire afternoon trying to explain to everyone, including the birthday girl's parents, why I had come as a boy with a ruffle shirt and a tin foil sword.
At photo time, I had to stand patiently as 25 other girls had their photos taken with me as I was made to brandish my sword.
Bless her - we didn't have much money and she had a job so didn't have much time to make outfits so she did well to get me dressed up but what was she thinking?! I was mortified at the time although the sword came in quite handy from what I remember as I was able to prong and queue up marshmallows to take away and eat in the car on the way home.

Hahah at the caravan painting, lord dressing and kitchen showroom as a bathroom.

I have laughed myself silly over all of these.
Fantastic.

My Dad once pretended to get his head stuck in between the cushions of the sofa. Me and my brother were hysterical and really scared, thinking he was genuinely stuck. Then he pulled his head out and said, "now if anything like that ever really happens, you should call 999..."

My mum painted our kitchenwalls with huge yellow gloss daisies. You could see the pencil marks under the paint where she had drawn them.

Then she moved onto her stencil phase... stenciled leaves and wisteria up the stairs... then 'paint your cupboards to look like real wood' with weird paint kit. Paint enormous Mr Men on your walls. Fuck it, paint everything!

Fuck it, paint everything!

God and I feel guilty that dd's cheeks are a little pink after I forgot to take a sunhat out with me today!

We had a 'mini-van' and I used to travel in the back with only cushions for company. Near my house was a hump in the road which my parents used to drive really fast over because I liked the simulation of a low gravity environment in the back of the van. Think Stephan Hawkings on his space flight - that was me as a kid.

And from 1974 until about 1988 I was covered in vicks and dosed up on actifed ALL THE TIME. No wonder I never got up to the hi-jinks my kids do - I was stoned.

Also, every family wedding, funeral, party was livened up my by one of my great aunts and my grandfather having a row over an event that happened n about 1944 but was never forgotten.

My grandfather used to take me and my cousins on adventures involving ancient car wrecks, dangerous rope swings and teetering around reservoirs.

Man, I loved it all!!!

I hope my kids have a few crazy memories when they are older!!

Mine had a big thing about not wasting food that'd gone off ... so 'scraping the mould' was a big feature of lunchtimes (lunch always meant bread and cheese). They'd scrape mould of any dairy product from cream to cheese and try to eat it, and almost invariably my dad would pronounce it 'just slightly tart but fine'.

Mum also hated to throw away food we weren't going to eat, and she'd stash it i the fridge instead. So the fridge would have bowls of putrefying meat in it (and I mean putrefying - some of this stuff was there months), and I'd rebel by cleaning the fridge and chucking it all.

Dad isn't a cook at all, and I remember a couple of memorable occasions when he fell foul of mum's 'system' for decorously not disposing of 'off' dairy until such time as it was well beyond saving ... I will never forget the utterly foul, grainy, lumpy taste of thoroughly off milk dad had taken from the wrong carton and given us for breakfast.

He also washes his hair in washing-up liquid to this day, because 'it's healthier'. There is no justice in the world: he's 60 and has a full head of hair (still cut in authentic 70s style).

Debs, I too did the gear changing on car journeys, from the age of about 7, even on major roads. And drove the car around our driveway at the same age! That brought back good memories for me :-)

As did carocaro's story about hiding from her Grandma. My mother would encourage the same for Jehovah's Witnesses and busybodies from down the road :-)

My father would allow one or two of us children to hide in the boot of the car as we drove though places where you had to pay to gain entry, such as National Trust properties. We found it hilarious and begged to be the one chosen.

He would also play a game on the motorway that consisted of, when someone would overtake us, overtaking them and allowing us children in the back to make rude gestures at them to get them back for overtaking! He had to make a rule that this was not allowed on more residential roads where there was a potential for the offended party to pull over and thump him one!

Both my parents would tell me: don't tell anybody about this 'game' we play. Cue much confusion on my part when we did 'Stranger Danger' etc at school.

i havent got anything to tell really!

but....hopefully my kids will remember the day that we all went to the local resevoir with my sister and my parents. i had just bought a new sun shelter and it was a day similar to the ones we have had recently where it goes from brilliant hot sunshine to chucking it down in a nano second. So, I decided to put up the sun shelter as apractice as we were going on holiday the following week. And it started pissing it down. I mean real monsoon type rain. Me sis and mum managed to finish getting it up and while dad ex DH and the kids all had the sense to get in the car, we decided to sit in the sun shelter to get out of the rain. Except the rain got worse, so we tried to get out and realised that pitching it on an incline meant that we couldnt get up. We all got the giggles being stuck in the shelter, pissing ourselves laughing and getting wetter and wetter as the rain into the shelter as we had pitched it facing up the slope!

Also, thanks to a seriously crappy 6th birthday present that DD got, I have invented the "pants on your head" rule. If you ever receive pants as a present, you have to wear them on your head! My 9 year old thinks that this is a good luck thing and my 5 and 6 year olds genuinely believe that this is law and if you dont then the "Pants Police" will come and arrest you. The upshot of that is that the kids now insist on buying each other and DH and I the ugliest pants they can find for birthday presents. It has become a bit of an ongoing competition :o

V. entertaining thread makes me think of Horrible histories where you also LOL at the sometimes horrible things they used to do and think 'I cannot believe they used to do that!!!@:o

My dad was great! [hgrin] He used to take all of the children from the neighbourhood out on day trips, swimming, ice skating, theme parks you name it. The only problem was there was never enough room for all of the children in his little car, even when we were piled three deep sitting on laps, There were always two or three of us packed into the boot! The funny thing was we would always fight over who got the privallage of travelling in the cramped, darkness of the boot.
The best thing is, now that he is an old man he still has random people comming up to him in the street telling him how much they loved him when they were kids. How times have changed eh?

My auntie used to perm my poker straight hair when I was in my late teens.

She'd be there puffing away on the fags and swigging gin, the curlers going in ever more unevenly.

Then the perming lotion sloshed on, more fags, more gin. Don't know how I didn't combust. Happy days.

My dad used to put potassium permanganate in the bath to make the water go purple. Just for fun. And he'd go to the butcher for cows eyes and leave them in the fridge. I have to point out that he was a science teacher, not into eating cows eyes!

He also used to make elderflower champagne. One year there was some kind of super reaction and it exploded all over our tiny back yard. One bottle set all the others off and it was actually fountaining so hard we couldn't go in the yard till it stopped. Very exciting for us kids.

He read "the dice man" (horrible book) and decided to go on holiday decided entirely by dice - ie get off the ferry and let the dice decide if you go left or right, roll again to decide which hotel, that sort of thing. He actually took a set of dungeons and dragons dice in case there were decisions with 4 outcomes or twelve outcomes!

Oh and me and my mum once found a load of students picking magic mushrooms in a field. We picked a load too and then handed them to the students who were very embarassed at being given magic mushrooms by someone's mum.