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?

LeQueen I cant stop laughing at the Arctic Roll.

Christ! They were all bloody nuts.

I had the home colours and perms. There was something called Lite N Brite which was basically peroxide which you used to apply with a sponge. One of my first memories was having that dabbed on my hair - must have been 2 or 3? In the very few photos of me as a small child my hair was white and seemed to have the texture of cotton wool. I was like a young Diana Dors. Fuck only knows what my natural colour is under over 30 years of bleach! My gran soon progressed onto SunIn when she discovered it.

She forcibly gave me my first perm when I was 9. I looked like one of the scousers from Harry Enfield, especially when twinned with the oh do fashionable shell suit.

My gran was friends with all sorts of scallies. She used to give them money to steal stuff. One of the blokes thieving specialities was nicking chocolate. He was evidently a junkie and nicked christ knows how much chocolate and posted it through my gran's door, whilst shotuing through the letter box for his money for his bag of smack. I came home from school to find a junkie on the doorstep surrounded by loads of bars of fruint N nut and Twirls, gran was too scared to open the door.

It was like something out of Shameless

Oh, and she sent me to a fancy dress competition at a holiday play-scheme dressed as a chicken. Nice one mum. (I did come 2nd, though) Oh, ad she also sent me somewhere dressed as Pinocchio once...not sure where, but she took a photo of me next to my friends before we left. They were all fairies and princesses, and I had a paper cone held on with elastic over my face.Again, nice one, mum.

My dad was fab. He was an orchestral musician by trade and because he would often walk to work wearing a dickie bow and tail suit he enjoyed telling the neighbours that he was a magician.

Every year he sent an anonymous valentine's day card to the bloke he sat next to in the orchestra and would laugh to himself (and us) about how this bloke truly believed he had a long term admirer. I wonder if this bloke ever figured it out after dad died and the cards (presumably!) stopped arriving

He would hide metro tickets (I grew up in newcastle) in subtle places all over the city just to see how long they would stay there. One lasted over five years tucked behind the pedestrian crossing button box next to the junior school.

I remember him putting glasses of sherry under a metal pyramid and having a test subject glass of sherry not under a pyramid. I suspect that although he was curious as to how the pyramid might change the glass of sherry, it was actually an excuse to have two drinks instead of one.

Ah, yes...the fancy dress parties. Home made costumes when everyone else had shop bought stuff.

Going to a party aged 10 as a a home made 'princess' when everyone else had grown-up costumes, such as punks/Madonna/vampire-whore type things. Mortifying, but actually not really my mum's fault as I hadn't realised that everyone else would be dressed like that.

Your dad sounds lovely golly :)

Your dad sounds lovely golly :)

Think he must have read Supernature, Golly. My Dad read that and started leaving razor blades under a little cardboard pyramid he made.

After the UK Army Corps of Engineers had spent months clearing and grading a space for an airstrip on the island where I live, they were going to start paving the next day. In the middle of the night, my dad 'borrowed' a backhoe, dug a huge hole in the middle of the perfectly smooth runway, and planted a fully grown coconut tree.

My grandfather was a prominent lawyer who used to go naked snorkelling in the sea in front of his house every day. He lived under the approach to the aforementioned airport and the pilots of the tiny planes used to buzz him and point him out to the passengers.

My mother had a live alarm clock - the bloke who read the local radio news would shout to her over the radio every morning at whatever time she asked him and say "Tola's mum - Get out of bed!".

My father once went out on the lash and climbed a massive tall radio tower to tie a bedsheeet to the top like a flag. The radio station owner cursed him for about a month because he had to climb up and get it down.

When I was a baby my parents used to drive around in an ancient Landrover Defender with me swinging wildly lying in a baby hammock that was strung up in the back.

He was lovely wobblyweeble I miss him a lot, he's been gone over 14 years! (that makes me feel sad, and old )

Oh yes fancy dress - I dressed up as a punk one year for the carnival, my uncle died my hair with cochineal. Because of the years of peroxide the die didn't really wash out, I had pale pink hair for months and was the envy of all my friends.

Oh yes, I remember razor blades figuring in the whole pyramid debacle of 1976 (or thereabouts)

When Tomorrow's World said 'next week, we will be looking at 3D, so get yourself a bit of green plastic and a bit of red plastic' Dad thought he could do better, and so the next week saw him holding up a wine bottle to one eye and a red vase to the other.

I don't remember if he ever saw in 3D because we were laughing too hard to know

You all had mad childhoods, I wonder what our kids will remember when they're grown-ups?!
My dad has always been a carpet fitter, so us kids would always sit on the rolls of carpet and underlay in the back of his van when going anywhere, we loved it and the danger of the gripper rods potentially gouging our flesh made it even more exciting!

My mother was a big believer in things like homeopathy and other alternative medicines.She believed in the curing power of sea air so if I had been ill for any length of time (usually with chest infection or virus as I often was) we would go to the seaside for the day and I would have to walk up and down the sea front inhaling for a large portion of the day.

She did/does have a thing about clean air - on the less crazy side she opens all the windows in her house for several hours each day no matter the weather (in a snowstorm she would have the windows open). This is partly why their house is so painfully cold. Their house was also full of things like ionisers and dehumidifers and other stuff to 'clean the air'.

She moved house from London in the search for cleaner air (for my health) except we moved to another big city, though apparently the air was cleaner here in her opinion.

oooh LynetteScavo that's Tramps' Picnic that is!
Blast from the past!

My parents made all sorts of home made wines and booze (we had to leave Alberta because my dad was about to be arrested for bootlegging....again) and us kids were allowed to have some, if we "did a days work". Other kids got allowance

I got sent home from school in grade 6 (one of the years that my parents didn't homeschool me) for having 'near beer' (2%) in my lunch

In the days before microwaves , waitrose party food etc my parents used to have a big bash for the neighbours on Christmas Eve. Mum used to cook all the food - Dad in charge of drink - party 7's and babycham and home brew . They used to have a raving do then Mum used to get up and cook Xmas dinner the next day.

Seems utterly insane to me !

Dad used to drive me and my brother to our Nanny's house for the day whilst he and mum were at work. He had a battered old van with ropes attached for us to hang on to in the back.

There was no heater, so in the winter he wedged a calor gas heater in the back to keep us all toasty like

I love this thread

Before I was born my parents had a motorbike and sidecar. Mum back of bike , my three siblings stuffed in sidecar.

Must have been great fun !

I posted earlier and then weirdly had the most bizarre argument with my dh over his mistake collecting a Thai takeaway when he paid for someone else's food too. In 30 years time, my eldest daughter will post about how her mummy threw egg fried rice at her daddy, and it all fell on the floor.

My curfew was the street light.
My parents called my name not my phone.
I played outside with friends not online.
If i didnt eat what was cooked for dinner, then i didnt eat.
Sanitizer didnt exist, but you COULD get your mouth washed out with soap. I rode a bike without a helmet, getting dirty was ok, and most of the neighbours LOVED YOU as much as your parents did.

There's too much really, my mum and auntie are both completely insane... They have a tipi/wigwam and we used to stay in it every weekend in the middle of a field shared with cows.
Before my auntie learnt to drive we used to get the bus there and back (a farm just outside the city we live in) and we would have to walk back from the bus station through our neighbourhood on a Sunday evening absolutely disgustingly dirty and stinking of woodsmoke wearing horrible wellies and awfully stinky wax macs looking like little wood children and would be laughed at in school on a Monday morning.

Of course once my auntie learnt to drive she bought a van.... Not just any van... No, an old dry cleaning van with absolutely no back seats so us and our cousins used to fight over who got to sit on the wheel arches

There's more but I've blocked it out