Randomly odd things you believed as a child and possibly beyond...

[Elmo230885]

I live this type of thread...

(I'm not talking about believing in Santa or the tooth fairy)

I'll start. I had a cousin named Stephen and he had the middle name Dean. For some reason he used to switch and go by either name. So as a child I believed that Dean was short for Stephen in the same way Bill is used for William.

One arm forever

@sashh I'll have to have a look at that, maybe use them to scare my DC!

@HUCKMUCK bones don't always hurt when you break them. I snapped both of mine in my arm and didn't feel a thing. Could've been shock tbf but my scraped knee hurt more

My husband has just reminded me of a conversation that we had not so long ago.
I only recently realised what to "TP" a house is. I always thought it was to "teepee" a house- I thought it was called that because the shape of the toilet roll was like a teepee.
In my defence TP=toilet paper is very American and I've only ever heard it on TV.

I struggled to make sense of Christianity as a small child.

I had a children’s book of Bible stories, with several pictures on the cover. One was a large picture of a young child, wearing a white tunic. Because the child appeared far bigger than the people in the other pictures, I thought the child was God. I pictured God as a giant child for many years.

I thought that Jesus was a giant man in the sky, hiding in a big grey cloud (well, where else could he have been?) I decided that when it rained, Jesus would come down. I unwittingly whipped up hysteria in the infant school playground, by running around in the drizzle shouting, “Jesus is coming down!”

Oh, and I thought that Heaven was a department store with whitewashed windows. I’m guessing that the nearest word I could picture was Debenhams. We weren’t allowed in Heaven and we couldn’t see inside, but at least we knew where it was. I was so disappointed when I realised that Heaven wasn’t a tangible place on Earth. Even though I wouldn’t choose to spend eternity in Debenhams.

@Cavagirl
have you read Never Let me Go ?

No. Is it about sex with vertical rigid penises?

My brother thought that the reason women wore bras was to keep their breasts from falling off. Until he was 12.

no, about organ 'donation'

@Cattenberg You'd have loved something I saw in a primary school early this year. When the vicar visited to discuss the story of the ten lepers, he first showed the class an animated video of the story, where the people said in squeaky voices "Jesus is coming! Jesus is coming!" I expect it might have been parroted in the playground that day.

@StillWeRise oooh sounds creepy! Thanks I'll take a look!

I thought everyone had a big vault in their bank where there bankers put your money until you wanted it. DS recently reminded me of this by thinking the same thing.

I thought Jesus was born at Christmas, grew really fast and died 3 months later at Easter.

DS thought that people used the sewer network as a fast way to travel around ‘the city’ (we don’t live in a city) ninja turtle style. One day he scoffed that he didn’t know why they’d bothered putting all the manholes in as he’d never seen anyone use them 😂.

@LadyCatStark Perhaps the Harry Potter books have caused lots of children to think this about bank vaults, with roller coasters to get to them.

I thought there was an animal called a "Mo" and that's where Mohair came from.

I was also convinced that if you ever did anything the teeniest bit bad, God would physically punish you in horrible ways. My best friend used a swear word at school when we were 7 and I told her that he would come down and set her house on fire. We were both terrified for weeks waiting for it to happen.

What did you picture when you were thinking of a Mo @mudskippa ?
I'm picturing a large cow like creature with long stubble! You'd have to shave the Mo and weave the stubble in a silky wool.

@Elmo230885 I had in my head something like a mini llama. I have no idea why.

Aww cute

I thought the London underground would be soil tunnels. I expected there not to be any lights, that we'd need to take torches, and that there would be worms and moles kind of burrowing through as we waited for the tube. Very disappointed to find lighting, escalators, billboards and reinforced tunnels.

I also thought my dad was Jimmy Somerville. He had a bald head, like my dad, and we had a tape of his hits in the car. I assumed it was my dad when he was a bit younger. (They actually looked nothing alike...)

I also had a great fear of quicksand and human combustion. Was also told by my oldest brother that if I kept burping and belching, I'd have to have my legs amputated. That horrified me.

Eating crusts makes your hair go curly.
I still leave the crusty corners to this day which my DH finds hilarious!

That heaven was under a plum tree. (Guess where we buried our pets)!

That the moon was self illuminating, it's something I never questioned until a few years ago when It crept up in a conversation with DP..... he won't let me live it down.

thought the London underground would be soil tunnels.
DS used to love maps as a toddler, and thought the underground rails would be the same colour as their lines on the map. He was disappointed the first time we went on the Tube. Bethnal Green I think it was - he thought the rails would be red.

I was convinced that periods were something only American girls had. I was a very enthusiastic reader and I read Judy Blume books quite early. I figured someone would have told me if this was likely to happen to me...

@TinyMetalBirds Was he also disappointed to learn that the railway lines are not the straight lines they appear on the map? I discovered that shocking truth at Stockwell, where the two lines are certainly not at right angles to each other, like they appear on the map!

I remember vividly gathering around the tree at the far end of the school field in year 4 or so because my friend had learned a rude word and wished to impart it to us. The word was 'pervert'. She told us very seriously that it was a man who lies down on his back on the pavement to look up skirts. I suppose it wasn't a million miles off but I remember wondering why, if a man was lying on his back on the pavement ahead of you, you wouldn't circumnavigate him. I believed that for years.

The second is more my mother's belief that she passed on to me. She insisted it was terribly irresponsible to own small dogs due to the risk of them being carried away by a bird of prey. I remember looking at people walking little dogs when I was about 8 and thinking how sad, don't they care that their dog could be snapped up at any moment? My sister and I raised it with her recently and she insists she said no such thing 🤣

Walking through a local graveyard with my dad and commented on how many people had the same surname. I was looking at the backs of the gravestones at the stonemasons name