My mum and the frozen portion of pasta from 1983

[bubble99]

Well, not quite that old but you get the general idea. Feeling down at the moment and want to cheer up a bit.
My mum, gawd bless 'er, cannot physically throw leftover food away. She says it's because she was a war baby but it drives me to distraction. Whenever she comes to stay I have to empty any leftovers in to the bin when she's not looking. I'm not a particularly wasteful person but I don't get the logic of clingfilming 2 tablespoons of peas only to find them loitering in the 'fridge a week later. I s'pose if I was Nigella I'd make some kind of super duper leftovery type thing with them but to be honest I can't be arsed

Anyone else or is my mum just particularly odd?

re the microwave - we were renting a house in the UK and the dishwasher died... it turned out to be about 18 yrs old. Was so impressed given that the dishwasher in my house back in Australia had to be replaced after about 4 yrs..... so I do agree with the they don't make them like they used to HOWEVER not an excuse to keep a scary microwave

bubble99 same with my MIL and appliances, although I have to say hats off to her for still running a fridge from 1970, the only reason we got rid of it was because it kept us awake at night with it's thrumming and buzzing.

She had a Sharp microwave from 1981 too and we got ds2 to pick the numbers off it and then we just had to get a new one, lord knows how well they sealed the radiation in those things in 1981 ,we shall probably find out with kidney damage and brain tumours in the near future.

At the moment the peace of my Australian Bank holiday is being broken not only by those pesky kids but the chugging of a d
25 year old whirpool freezer that I am going to replace very very soon.

She also appropriates cultery from all the air trips she has made back and forth between Australia and Malaysia for the past 35 years and she has some groovy metal early Quantas and SA stuff and 50,000 plastic spoons

Bless her

No pack rats in my immediate family but the genes exist in some members. My grandad can't make himself throw out anything. Hence he has a garage that the car has never seen. And a boat house that a boat doesn't use either. He has a Raleigh bicycle from 1960 (an antique now I guess but that is not why he has it.) And about 30 lengths of mahogany timber from the same era - because one day he 'will use it to make something.'

He once woke my aunt up triumphantly at 2 am saying he'd fixed her glasses with a teeny screwdriver that he bought 12 yrs earlier because 'it will be good for something one day'.

Stiff competition for top hoarder in my family between my mother (25 year's worth of 'Dog World' anyone?) and my aunt (who at least still occasionally wore her collection of 1974 kaftans and coats - groovy).

Both had to concede defeat, though, when my aunt went to help her mother in law move house and found, neatly filed away in this very large house, an extensive collection of plastic bags, flattened and carefully folded, about 30 years worth of pickled gooseberries, the world's largest collection of pencil stubs and a small drawer labelled....

'Pieces of string too small to be of any further use'

Family legend, that one.

Damn.

Wrong apostrophe. Try '25 years' worth...'

Sorry Mr Penman (3rd form English teacher)

love it! Gizmo

gizmo, that is fantastic! do you think she laughed to herself as she carefully inscribed the label, or do you think she just thought that technology might catch up with her very small pieces of string and make them useful one day?!!
no, oldiemum - sherborne

30+yrs worth of National Geographic, 10yrs worth of BBC music magazine and 6yrs worth of PC Plus - my dad

LOL...a funny thread, so nice to find!!!

I have been a victim of the parent who just won't throw food away.

One cookery lesson at school, we had to take a cheesecake mix in. Mine just wouldn't work, and smelled funny too. The teacher came to investigate, slyly suggesting that if I am not able to follow packet instructions then there must be something wrong with me , only to look at the pack and see it was more than 6yrs out of date !!!!!

I think she might have been waiting for some spare time on those long winter evenings to splice them back together.

She - as am I - a Yorkshirewoman. Which means I am getting increasingly worried by my tendancy to save old envelopes to write my shopping lists on. It's only a matter of time...

lol lol lol gizmo!!

Have just spent the w/e at my 85 year old grandmother's house....She has recently moved from a 5-bed house to a 2-bed bungalow, somehow my dad and his brother allowed her to bring: HP sauce from 1983, medicines with expiry dates in the early '90s, unopened tights with the 1970s "St Michael" labels( prices in old money),the list is endless.

She also has this weird thing about collecting mini soaps etc. from hotels and aeroplanes. I threw away a binbag chock full of the things. She insisted on keeping some unused tablecloths from the 1950s-apparently she can give them away as presents!

Great thread!! Had me laughing

On a recent visit to my mums cupboard I was surprised to discover not too many things out of date and only by a short while. Maybe she's learning or has just finished off the pre historic out of date packets!!

The other thing she drove me mad with, with food, was eat up, think of all the starving children in the world!! hence now I hate to see food wasted after years of having that drummed into me. I'll never say it to my dd's!!

I've a great image of Gizmo's aunt's MIL sewing together tiny pieces of string!

The other thing she drove me mad with, with food, was eat up, think of all the starving children in the world!!

DH is like that - but then he has good reason to - he grew up in a country were children starve, and now sadly millions of adults are starving too - many of his own family don't really have enough to eat so he hates seeing food go to waste - although he has got a lot more 'tolerant' of it.

I cannot imagine how old some of the food in my parents' fridge is. And I had LEFT HOME when I realised that most people covered things they left in the fridge too

We have to check the sell-by dates on EVERYTHING in my mum's house, which is funny until it comes to medicine. She gave DH some antihistamine to take last year and we couldn't read the sell-by date, but it had a 5 on the end so we assumed 05, then looked closer and it was 95...

And I'm sure they would all collectively shout
"Well it's not done ME any harm"!

MI - LOL about not covering things in the fridge

About 5 years ago my flatmate's mum had a clear out of her kitchen cupboards and brought us a box of tins round. Half of them were something AND A HALF P!!

when i was at college i stayed in the halls. at xmas everyone went away for 2 weeks. in my corridor i was the first person to come home from the holidays, i had bought some food so i went along to the communal kitchen to put it in the fridge. the cleaners had turned off the fridge as they knew no-one was there for 2 wks, but they hadnt emptied the fridge! i opened the fridge and a swarm of bluebottles came flooding out of the fridge, off a plate of uncovered mince, which was still covered in maggots.

i immediately heaved, and havent been able to eat mince since!

i now feel sick again, yuck spew

And I had to convince her that yes, opened jars of mayonnaise did need to be stored in the 'fridge

My gran used to hoard things like you wouldn't believe.When she went into hospital,we found that she had 7 teasets,16 packets of instant mash,stacks & stacks of vests/pyjamas ect still in the cellophane packets,enough towels for a family of 5 & a dozen bottles of disinfectant.

Perhaps she thought that there would be another war & that there would be a vest shortage!

My mum keeps things too.
We always complained and then she had the last laugh once when, AFTER we had polished off a delicious spaghetti bolognese that only my mum can make she told us she had used the mouldy, furry tomatoes that we had been moaning about for the sauce .