STRANGE THINGS YOU USED TO READ

[Alleycat321]

I loved reading the residential telephone directory when I was young, looking up the names and address of people that I knew.

Also, my local residential street directory.

Also, local events’ programmes (summer fares/fetes).

Also, cereal boxes.

What about you?

Wonderful thread! All of these, especially bottles in the bathroom, cereal boxes and Readers Digests. I regularly took a dictionary (English or French) to bed to read. I also loved the hatches-matches-despatches in the local, free paper...in fact I was the only one in the house that read that paper front to back every week. I loved any horoscopes or problem pages I could find, anywhere. I remember spending hours reading random stuff on Ceefax or Teletext. I still read anything and everything and completely agree that this is why I enjoy Mumsnet!

The dictionary
A thesaurus
The phone book
The Avon catalogue (baffling; I was not a 'girly' girl at all and was a latecomer to beauty products and make-up et al).
The Innovations catalogue ('useful' gadgets that, IIRC, were actually anything but!)

@Tiredpigeon Did you read Backchat on teletext (where teenagers could send in "short and snappy" comments)? I remember one from about 1997, which I think sums up the whole of modern social media: "Backchat is brill because of all the stupid things you write in about. Keep up the good work, everybody, it's so funny!"

@MarkWithaC I loved reading dictionaries. I also loved the "first thousand words" books, and was amused that in the original ones (before they were modernised and all the fun bits removed), the people would be in sticky situations, such as children sweeping tins off the supermarket shelves, or somebody dropping eggs, with everybody turning to look at them.

@Chesticov Did your parents blindfold you, or just tell you to close your eyes? And did they reveal what the eye was straight away? There were loads of other "joke" party games that I remember reading about, and I so wanted to take part in! But I didn't dare to stage these for anyone else. Some of them were real meanies:

Submarine. Putting an anorak over a child's head, zipping them inside, and holding the sleeve upwards for them to look through, telling them that it's the submarine periscope. Then saying "we're going under the water now, and lowering the periscope"; and then you empty some water down the sleeve.

Obstacle course, in which you blindfold someone, and tell them they have to find their way through the course. Then you quietly remove the obstacles.

I know someone who did this for an 18th birthday child, with their birthday money. Blindfold someone, tell them they have to find a small object in the room, and they can ask yes/no questions about where it is, and they can move about. When they're not getting anywhere, tell them to ask questions such as "is it behind me?". Eventually they realise that when they ask "is it in front of me?" the answer is always yes, no matter which way they are facing, and the object is hidden inside their blindfold.

I did experience this one: being blindfolded outdoors, and lifted into the air, and being told I'm flying very high indeed, with the tiny scenery below described, when I was actually only a few inches above the ground; and then being told to jump off what I'm standing on, which feels like miles, when it's actually something very low.

What I liked in Reader's Digest was Buy-lines - that section where someone, first Alison Grey, later Madeleine McDonnell, would push products as if they were personal recommendations when they were actually paid advertisements. I remember reading a stack of them in a youth hostel common room on a family holiday when I was 14. Then, one time when I was doing A level French, we were given a French Reader's Digest to read, and there was the same feature, now called Sylvia a noté pour vous.

Yes - I loved Robert Graves's Welsh Incident ('The populations of Pwllheli, Criccieth, Portmadoc (sic), Borth, Tremadoc and Penrhyndeudraeth were all assembled...'), so I got a thrill when I read the dialling code booklet and found there was a code for Penrhyndeudraeth.

Yes, why do these things stick? There was a Cub Scout Annual in our family when I was about 10 which had a poem called Post That Litter and, so help me, I can still do it from memory:

Five excited cub scouts had a picnic with the pack.
William ate an orange, threw the peel behind his back.

Jonathan had some chocolate, gave the other two a bit.
They dropped the silver paper into a sandy pit.

Bellamy had some biscuits and some chocolate wafers which
He shared with John and Gordon, dropped the paper in a ditch.

Then Akela saw the litter, said they'd quite disgraced the pack.
So now they put their litter in a proper rubbish sack.

I thought I was unusual in reading cereal packets and phone books etc and when I was telling my daughter about it, I put it down to it being the 70s and 80s and I just had to read whatever was available!

My grandma’s Readers Digest / Woman’s Realm (which I called in my head Re-alm), Family Circle and Woman magazines.

My dad’s newspaper (The Mirror) or local newspaper. DH is always astounded at my depth of knowledge of news and celebrity events from the 80s, given that I was born in 1974. Also, The Sunday Sun, which I always thought was a Scottish newspaper because it had ‘The Broons’ and ‘Oor Willie’ comics in it, but a quick Google seems to imply it’s a North-east paper. My dad also bought me the annuals of both of those comics.

Loads of books about ponies and horses. Gymkhanas were very far from my world but my cousin loved horses and I inherited all her books. I never found them very interesting but they were better than having nothing to read.

Lace, Flowers in the Attic etc as a young teen. No idea where they even came from. I assume my mother’s bookshelf but she’s not a reader at all. I think she did get books from those monthly book clubs but no idea why?

Radio and TV times, holiday brochures, Argos catalogue and those free magazines that used to come with newspapers, full of ‘handy’ inventions, such as tap grippers to make turning a tap on easier for arthritic sufferers.

Postcards in the newsagent’s window. I always knew who was selling a fridge, lost a cat or looking for cleaning work.

The deaths notice in the local paper. I was 8 and unlikely to know any of the people.