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?

No wonder your'e all so nutsy :o

My mother would not allow me to wash my hair when I was having my period.

My dad and I are both terribly competitive. Everything was a race, everything was a game, everything was a joke.

I don't know what my neighbours thought about the two of us, every single morning crashing out through the front door, tearing around to the garage (located quite a long way away) trying to trip each other up, and pull each other back all the way in an effort to get there first.

Supermarket trips were the best. It was like something out of supermarket sweep with us loading the trolly. One occassion I remember was me hurling something into the trolley and a man shouting at me, telling me that was his trolley and to stop mucking around. I went, a little shame-faced, to my dad and told him I had got told off for putting something in that man over thete's trolley, and he went a bit white and said that he had too. I went to rmove the item and the man said 'what else did you put in there' and I replied 'it wasn't me, it was my dad'. Dad, by this point, had hot-footed round the corner. We laughed like drains

Mother driving down the main street in the town shouting "we are a bunch of wallys"

Letting baby bro walk around the supermarket with the net bag off the oranges on his head being Spiderman

Her and my brother breaking the (non-safety) glass on the door playing some daft game

I forgot to wash up the cheese grater one too many times as a teenager, so my Dad used to leave it inside my bedclothes.

Where to start...... one habit was on the first day we went for the family holiday.
We didn't have a car so relied on taxis. But would mum wait inside the house for the taxi? Would she buggery.
We would be hauled out at least 15 minutes before the taxi was due "in case it's early" and made to stand, cases, bags and all, on the pavement to wait. Of course it was never early and we'd stand there in all weathers looking like a bunch of refugees. They still do it now, 30 years later.

Mum was also too tight to hire a van when giving my old bed to great auntie. So off up the main road we went, one at each corner, with a divan bed between us, passing drivers though it was highly funny.

I also remember the blackberrying sessions.....carrying bags and bowls to the local estate footpath, coming back stained purple, scratched and stung by wasps and nettles. And what did the lovely fruit turn into? Pies? Crumbles? NO......

Blackberry vinegar, basically as bad as it sounded.

My brother and I rebelled one year and nicked 10lb of potatoes from the next field

My mum put me off ice skating. When I was 12 I was once going to the rink with another family first and last time and she said be careful you don't fall over or someone may go over your fingers and slice them off

I'm 43 now and yesterday rang her from the clifftop whilst walking pooch. Her voice got all panicky saying 'be careful you don't fall off' I said oooo good job you said there I was so close to the edge

This has just made me realise just how unhappy our childhood was, nothing funny ever happened, nothing at all, dad was always grim and mum was always sad, aunts and uncle all grim, GM pure venom.

But Dh comes from a very happy family, he is really barmy and dcs have inherited his humour

Taffeta no!!!

Reading these, laughing, thinking 'we never had anything like this!' but it's given me a creeping realisation that 'oh, wait, mum was pretty loopy too'

THe Stevie Wonder album Songs in the Key of Life features a version of Isn't She Lovely with a baby crying at the beginning and, later, some splashing about in the bath recording. Mum told my younger sister that it was her (my sister) on the record. We believed it for years.

When said sister and I walked home from school, every now and then mum would open the door and say dramatically 'Oh! Hello MandaHugNKiss! You're home! Who is this friend you've bought with you?' then looking expectantly at my sister. She'd end up in tears insisting 'It's me Mum! It's meeee'.

Oh, I have a deep dimple at the top of my bottom (where they look for a sacreal dimple) and Mum told me that was where I was born with a tail and they took it off in an operation.

And every now and then she'd sing us this creepy ass song at night. I'm sure to purposely scare us - why else? I don't remember all of the words but it went something like this:

A woman in a raveyard sat
Oooooooo. Ahhhhhhhhh
Very small and very fat
Oooooooo. Ahhhhhhhhh
She saw three corpses carried in
Oooooooo. Ahhhhhhhhh
Very tall and very thin
Oooooooo. Ahhhhhhhhh
Woman to the corpses said
Will-I-be-like-you-when-I-am-dead?
Corpses to the woman said
... pause...
BOOO!

Even once I recognised it was 'the' song that was gonna end in the boo scare, she'd always change the time she waited until she exclamed BOO so I always jumped. Evil.

My parents would put an old quilt in the boot of our ford ital and let me and my best friend sleep in there on long journeys ! the dogs would normally be in there behind the dog bars.

We used to go out picking rose hips to help make rose hip wine.

My mum used to get chatted up by my teachers every parent's evening

My mum ran of with another man and joined a touring rock band when i was 11 !

My mum borrowed money from my cousin and flew to holland to see a film that wasn't out here yet. Afterwards she got a ferry back to a completely different place and rang my dad asking to be picked up.

That's about the most lighthearted one I can think of.

OOh I remembere that song. That's the 'Worms crawled out and the worms crawled in' song

I jumped too. Except my Dad says 'Whaaaaaargh' instead of 'Boo'.

Arriving on the wrong days for ferrys - more than once.

Driving 7 miles with a flat tyre

Driving 23 miles with the handbrake on

My grandfather:
Showed the tv licence investigator last years licence and told him "it's a bloody repeat"
His small garden was filled with little wooden homemade windmills ( more than say, the Netherlands) and in each window of the windmills we tiny plastic Smurfs he had nailed inside (free with petrol from the garage). He also had the Smurfs nailed to all his window ledges.
He had a budgie he would regularly vacuum up when he was hoovering the budgie mess in the cage. When one died he would replace with the same type and give it the same name. When he went on holiday he would put the entire weeks/fortnights budgie food in the cage.
When you rang the doorbell he would run and skid the 20 feet down the hall in his socks (at 80 years old) on the lino.
He voted for the Welsh Nationalist Party at every election, even though he was a cockney.
He would put his Christmas decorations up in October, and they were so big and old and droopy you had to stoop under them. He would put his Christmas tree back in the cupboard with all the baubles on and just get it out again for October.
Letting us saw all of the legs off the dining room chairs, and the window sills during the summer holidays.

I can't even start on my nana...the image of her, at 85, hanging off a tire and swinging at full speed down a zipline in her skirt and tights, and then bouncing off into the air when she forgot to let go and showing everyone in the park her knickers...it just sort of blocks the other crazy stuff...

My dad signed our neighbours up to a dating agency and then had his secretary telephone asking for the dh to arrange a rendezvous .The dw was insanely jealous and smashed his car windows and bonnet with a hammer.

He "let slip" that he worked for MI5 and had been sent to our sleepy village as there was a mafia cell operating in the local area and asked that he was told of any suspicious behaviour.

My father applied for a job and stated that he could speak Afrikaans (he couldn't). The whole interview was in Afrikaans and he always maintained he did quite well.
He left Oxford in 1959 with an overdraft of £1000. Bear in mind my ex-inlaws bought a quite large 3 bed semi for £2000 in 1962.

And when our allegedly male hamster had babies, my mother was so furious she somehow made the pet shop guy buy the babies from her. When I once criticised the standard of her dish-washing (a mashed-potato flecks issue) she refused to cook or wash anything for 2 weeks (DB and I were 14 and 12).

My mum had games we played in the car:

GAME 1 - Hoot and Wave
choose a random pedestrian, hoot at them, all wave and see if they wave back. Most people did before realising that they had no idea who we were...

GAME 2 - Hoot and Point
Choose another poor random pedestrian, hoot and all point wildly at their feet or something, then drive on and watch them in the rear view mirror, checking their shoes, or circling round trying to see what was wrong with them.

It was hilarious- but sorry if any if you were victims of this in the early '90s... :)

My dear Muvver used to;
give me washing up liquid to wash my hair "Your hair likes washing up liquid" because she saw on some TV programme it was the same as shampoo.
No its for cleaning dirty dishes, not 10 yo hair.

She used to make my clothes. Trousers were a crimpelene -yes crimpelene_ tube cut up the middle and sewn, with a hem at the top and a drawstring.
She took a blouson jacket apart as a pattern for a new coat. I saw neither again.
When she cooked mince it was thrown in the pressure cooker with water, Oxo and a whole onion, not browned, to stew.( I think I became vegetarian in self defence)

She used to wait til Saturday morning to vacuum the front room when we were watching Saturday Swapshop.She was in all day.She could have done it any other day!It was like she didn't want us to enjoy our Saturday telly.If we tried to look round her,turned the sound up or complained the TV went off and we were sent out.

.....and we used to move house quite a lot. My Dad CBA to intro himself and his family to the neighbours in the last house, so he painted TaffDad, TaffMum, TaffSis and Taff live here in white paint in massive writing on the garage door.

I was in my mid teens. Oh the shame.

My dad regularly used to (and still does actually) dance and sing in public - especially when walking me and my sister to school (think Wizard of Oz heel kicks!).

My mum used to wear knickers on her head when she was feeling in a silly mood.

They both have so many silly in-jokes and funny sayings, that me and my sister grew up thinking that it was normal. Cue us looking daft in school when using words that we thought actually existed but were just made-up babblings!

All very funny until age 7 or 8, and then just mortifyingly embarrassing. Although I have come full circle now and am amused all over again!