Odd things - do you remember your mum doing these in the 60s?

[Waltons]

Putting a drop of water on a tin can before opening it, because if an air bubble came up through the water, the can might be blown? (I think that was the reason?)

The only bottle of olive oil in the house was absolutely TINY, and labelled "Olive Oil. BP". I think it cost a fortune, and was kept in the first aid cupboard. For earaches, perhaps?

Soda Siphons. Dad used to go down to the off license to swap the empty Schweppes siphon for a full one. They were such exotic things, and we were not allowed to use it,

For fetching blocks of Walls ice cream (also from the off license) we had a polystyrene box that fitted the ice cream perfectly, fitted together in two halves.

The off-licence was known locally as the 'beer off' but we weren't allowed to call it that as that was 'common' for some reason.

Thrumpton
My gran did that with sheets too.
Mr Straw's House, NT property in north Notts still has sheets like this on the beds. I often wonder what children make of it all.

My mum cooked everything from scratch, she loved making pastry and bread but never had the patience and both were as hard as H*ll.
My brother used to beg for 'manufactured' cakes and pies. We loved going to friend who ate cheap, white sliced bread.
At 89 she still makes scones, they are still virtually inedible

Whoever mentioned Lucozade before antenatal blood tests - I had to take my own Lucozade for a glucose tolerance test at the IVF clinic. But the NHS provided a lemon flavoured drink. And that was in 2014/2015.

My grandparents didn't have a phone until the mid 1980s. Family paid for them to have one put in but my granddad just didn't speak on it. Sometimes he would answer the phone and there'd be silence - 'hello, hello, grandad? Is grandma there?' He was a man of few words anyway but on the phone he was a man of no words.

We had a Herman cake in the 1980s. It didn't even taste nice.

Somewhere in the dark recesses of our pantry, there is one of those mincers and the thing for pumping butter and milk into cream.

Upthread someone mentioned Clothkits. They hadn't been invented when I was a child, but my DSs were decked out in them throughout the 70's. If you saw another Clothkitted family on the beach, you knew they were 'nice' and would be suitable friends for your kids.

I really regret not hanging on to those lovingly sewn outfits; they are collectors' items now, as are the catalogues from that era and apparently Clothkits has even been the subject of someone's PhD.

Wow! This has turned into "the book of my childhood"! It only occurred to me to start the thread because I got a tin out of the cupboard that was a bit dusty, so I gave it a rinse under the tap, and the next thing I got out was a litre bottle of olive oil. A whole litre - the tiny wee bottle in the first aid cupboard might have been 50ml, if that.

I laughed at the washing machine with the colour-coded plastic tabs for each programme because we had one of those. I was just going to mention the refillable soda siphons too.

Another mystery item was black treacle. There was always a tin of it in the cupboard, but I don't recall it ever being used for anything.

We used treacle in baking - in Mum's case,mainly making gingerbread ( when gingerbread was the proper stodgy ginger cake stuff,and not those weird anaemic gingery biscuit things it is now!)

My auntie was an 'early adopter' of any thing new and always sent off for all the stuff advertised in the back of the newspaper. She was the first person I knew who had duvets and continued to refer to them by the brand name 'Ducal Down' long after they became common and everyone else called them duvets.
One thing I particularly remember was being served the very exotic dish of spagetti that hadn't come out of a tin. My aunt had discovered that it was usually served with tomato sauce and grated cheese. She dished it out with a dollop of Heinz tomato ketchup and grated some block cheedar over it. It wasn't until I went to university I discovered how delicious pasta could be.

My Dm still opens the curtains before she goes to bed, and so do I (but only when I'm visiting at her house - where I grew up - not at my own).

I also make marmalade and own a pressure-cooker. Some things stay with you

I was born in the 1970s but I remember a lot of these things from my childhood.

My mum swore by her Hostess trolley. The top slid back to reveal glass serving dishes suspended over (I think) hot water, essential for any dinner party.

She also had a white plastic soap saver. When pieces of soap became to small to be useful, they were stored in the soap saver and eventually she would have a new multi-coloured, multi scented bar! She often bought Lux soap.

Paracetamol suspension was made up for each child depending on weight and came in cuboid-shaped white plastic bottles. It tasted like Calpol does now.

We had the wall-mounted tin opener too, used for opening everything including the dog food!

Yes to Ski yogurts in a tub that was wider at the bottom than the top. Pear was my favourite!

Tea at my granny's house always came in a pot, with a tea cosy. She had a top-loading washing machine too.

My neighbours had dried, spiny sea urchins on top of the TV as an ornament. TVs always seemed to have a metal coat hanger stuck in the top to improve reception.

They also had a curtain made of thin strips of coloured plastic hanging by the back door, to keep flies out.

And a beautiful black-haired doll from Spain, wearing a red flamenco dress. I loved it, but I wasn't allowed to because it was an ornament. Ornaments were very popular in those days!

My mum wasn't even alive in the 60's never mind myself, but in the 90's she used to bath me in Dettol every now and again.
I still do it now when I want a nice comforting bath, don't think it actually does anything to be comforting but it must just be how I associate it
Whenever I mention to people about my Dettol baths they always give me very strange looks

This thread has had me in tears.

Vesta chicken supreme - this would be one of my all time favourite meals - always left the cardboard cubes of chicken that never really softened though.

Children's tv - always playschool, jackonary then a drama ( the cuckoo child ) then blue peter or crackerjack , think of a number then a 10 minute wombles, magic roundabout, Ludwig the egg.

Bizarre decorating choices - our living room was painted dark brown with a dark brown carpet , hallway was fuscia pink kitchen navy blue.

Friday was spaghetti bolognese day - we had cardboard tubs of buitoni parmasen cheese that smelled of rotting socks - although the children could have grated cheddar.

One day my dad tried to make a lasagne - and had to go to the old lady next door to make a bechemel sauce.

Oh and limeade from the pop man - fluorescent green in colour and the ringtons tea man.

It seems that Hostess trolleys have made a come-back! John Lewis sell them for £££!

My mum did that with the sheets, as well.

She did all her own cooking, but is not a good cook. I think it's more out of a sense that it was the correct way to do it.

A dishwasher was, of course, a very exotic thing in the 70s, and like most people we did not have one. But she wouldn't even use rubber gloves for doing the dishes. Part of doing them was the misery of scalding your hands in the hot water, and then, as you continued to wash, your hands getting all wrinkly. Using rubber gloves was somehow inauthentic to her, I think.

My parents had an amazing pop up toaster, though, and I've never seen another like it. You would put the bread in, and there was a switch which sensed the weight of the toast, and the toast was automatically lowered down, and the heating elements were turned on. Then, once it was done, it clicked, and the toast would slowly rise up. It was shiny chrome, and my little brother once kissed his reflection in it and burnt his lips.

My Nan had a bolster pillow. A double length pillow that sat underneath the two normal single pillows. What was that all about? When my brother and I were V little we shared a double bed at her house and she always put it down the middle.

Grew up in the 1980s but my parents were obviously old fashioned as I remember quite a lot of these!

The blamange or jelly rabbit! I remember the mould was bright orange plastic, wish I had kept it for my kids, would love to see their faces if I served one up

Mum did a rabbit mould then green jelly all mashed up with a fork for the grass.

We also had green jelly with tinned pears in.

We inherited my mum's Hostess Trolley. It lives in the utility room, has two big shelves in the cupboard part and stores the decent china. The top has four glass dishes, but, excitingly and also coutesy of mum, we have four fancy silver plate cradles on legs into which the dishes fit, very useful as they protect the table from the heat. The trolley is handy for big meals as things keep hot and plates are warmed. It's always known as the Ost, thanks to a very northern friend who referred to hers as the 'Ostess Trolley'.

We have a rabbit jelly mould. We also have a pig. One of them was a "free gift" we got with jelly in a Spanish supermarket, and the other one we bought here in the U.K.. We would have acquired them within the last 10 years, I think.

Public information broadcasts at the cinema, before the main feature film. I remember one about the dangers of climbing electricity pylons.

Sparkling' we've got a bolster! It has lovely lace ends which are gathered up by cloth ties, loosened for ironing. It is on a spare room bed with pillows on top and looks very pretty. The DGCs sometimes sleep there but not with it down the middle.

My student housemates and I rented a TV and we graduated in 2000!

I was born in '78 and remember occasional crossed lines until probably the 1990s. Was exciting!

And my mum saved butter wrappers until she died. Must have been a childhood hangover.

We also had the wooden ceiling clothes airer in our London kitchen. Victorian house, high ceilings, aga, made sense.

I was born in the 80s but still remember turning the handle on the mechanical mincer to turn leftover Sunday roast into mince for Shepherd/cottage pie.

Oh those rabbit jelly moulds. You could never get the whole thing out in one piece! I remember my mum stressing about it when getting ready for a birthday party. Generally the head fell off. She used to make pretty good birthday cakes - I had a fairy castle two years in a row.

Just thought of another thing about being left outside shops in a pram. I apparently used to sleep with my eyes half open. Everyone knew each other in our small town, and apparently someone ran in shouting "Mrs Sukey, your baby's dead!!"

Our TV didn't have a remote - it had a kind of draw you pushed put and inside were the four buttons for the channels, and 3 dials for volume, lightness and contrast. You could do weird things to the picture by twizzling them.

Haven't things changed so much in 30/40 years?

We had the tiny bottle of olive oil too. It was kept for earache. We also had camphorated oil in a ribbed bottle which got rubbed on your chest and dabbed onto hankies when you had a cold. Talking of hankies they'd get boiled on top of the stove. Snot soup. Lovely

There was a Green Shield Stamp shop on the high street where you could exchange your full books for gifts and Tesco sold Delamare clothes upstairs from the food department.

Other clothes came from C&A which locally was massive and on two floors.

I had two school shirts in nylon (oh, how I envied those whose parents had run to more expensive but less practical cotton) and I had to whip the one I was wearing off as soon as I got in so it could be rinsed through by hand then drip dried in time for the next wearing. Same with school summer dresses.

I also had nylon pj's which must have been a horrific fire hazard especially given they pretty much sparked of their own accord every time I moved.

The TV picture would shrink to a tiny white dot when you turned it off. Anyone else remember the test card? Dbro and I were quite convinced that girl with the checked dress was moving when we weren't looking