What do you remember from your youth that would never happen today?

mrmonkfinger – Member

Being allowed to climb up a rope attached to the school hall roof, in pe lessons.

Yeah, and playing British Bulldog in PE, that’s now banned apparently.

Pirates – a game played in old fashioned gym. Basically tig with all the kit – ropes, bars, horses, trampolines, wall bars etc. Total madness but brilliant fun. Guaranteed to have some mishaps, so only once a term at Xmas before the end to term party!! Happy days

Me wearing a school uniform, going to school and not getting arrested for it.

playground ice slides — steepness and length graded by primary year, longest one for P7s.

short trousers at primary school

taking dog for a walk (shit) in local park – and that’s it – no cleaning up.. 🙁

easy availability of huge Bowie style knives

making huge bows and arrows (chop wood, garden canes)

as above, total freedom in summer, parents would have no idea where we were, would bike into countryside by Inverness / Elgin, get home for tea, head out til it got dark (so, in summer, c. 10.45pm)

various pupils (secondary!) and teachers getting a rather friendly and no-one really this was particularly bad.

being advised on school ski trip by biology teacher (who was great…) that Coke was rotten to teeth, better off with local wine..

Had to swim naked if you forgot your trunks , but also you could go swimming in the school pool at lunchtimes and there would be teachers swimming naked with 11-16 year old boys in there as well . It was a boys only school .

Murderball on concrete

Parents leaving us young kids in the car alone while they went to partys occasionally brining out coke and crisps

there would be teachers swimming naked with 11-16 year old boys in there as well .

😯

It was a boys only school .

Ah,that’s ok then 🙂

Putting pennies on the railway line and then trying to find the flattened ones

I initially misread that as “Putting penises on the railway line” – made me wince 😯

Yeah, and playing British Bulldog in PE, that’s now banned apparently.

We allow our rugby kids to play it 🙂 Don’t often make them do it in their pants though!

Analogue porn
Violence
Throwing your rubbish on to the street
Guns/Catapults/traps/Flick Knives/Butterfly Knives/Assorted weaponry.
Violence
Smoky rooms
Casual attitude to noncery
Being told to ‘hit him back’

Being battered my psychotic nuns at the age of 5 and being told I would burn in hell for eternity for something as sinful as not having a pencil.

Ritual humiliation by teachers.

Being beaten by teachers.

Setting their desks up so they fell off the dais as soon as they put their books/bags on it.

Drawing pins on chairs.

Board dusters flying around at head height.

As mentioned before…..one bike for everything.

Being out all the time and not wanting to come in…..ever….except to feed.

More sweets than you could eat for 6d

My Great Uncle randomly giving me half a crown or ten bob when my folks weren’t watching.

Catching newts in ponds

Those tacky ‘lucky bags’ where all the sweets tasted of cardboard.

Cranks with cotter pins – hated them!

Bird nesting….usually pigeons

Driving a tractor with a full load of grain down the main road at the age of 14

Trusting coppers

Black widow catapults, air rifles, and knives were just the standard stuff that everyone just had.

Nowadays you’d be on the receiving end of a Met Armed Response Unit

Copying tapes.

Making a mixtape.

Recording from the radio.

oh come on…try harder

Stink bombs in the little glass bottle that stank
itching powder that really itched

PE in pants? Yep
Games outside in all weathers? Yep ( our field was on a hill, we would lie flat on the ground when the teacher went looking
Playing outside all day and night? Yep, the summer of 2003 I think I sept and eat at home, other than that I was out on my bike

I’m only in my twenties 🙂

mrmonkfinger – Member
Being allowed to climb up a rope attached to the school hall roof, in pe lessons.
Yeah, and playing British Bulldog in PE, that’s now banned apparently.

teamhurtmore – Member
Pirates – a game played in old fashioned gym. Basically tig with all the kit – ropes, bars, horses, trampolines, wall bars etc. Total madness but brilliant fun. Guaranteed to have some mishaps, so only once a term at Xmas before the end to term party!! Happy days

BigButSlimmerBloke – Member
playground ice slides — steepness and length graded by primary year, longest one for P7s.

All of the above! Bulldog, Pirates and ice slides. All brilliant!

Black widow catapults, air rifles, and knives were just the standard stuff that everyone just had.

and that was just the teachers…..

Being taught home to make a home made explosives in chemistry and successfully testing them on the school playing fields….

We made a very good rocket launcher that could fire a tennis ball at about 100m/sec. Tennis balls only lasted 2-3 launches before exiting as shrapnel….

TV that stopped transmitting at lunch and midnight

rickets

A rag and bone man coming round the streets in a horse drawn cart. This was mid 1960s.

Guddling trout – ctaching trout by hand in the local river which involved wading through the shallows and feeling under rocks for the fish sheltering underneath. Once you had done it a few times you got to know which rocks were worth trying as the fish tended to use the same ones as only a few had suitable gaps underneath.

Galvinised steel dustbins and dustmen who actually walked up the path to the back of the house and carried the bin to the truck on their shoulder.

A coal bunker.

My dad was talking about his childhood in the 30s the other night. He reckons it wasn’t much different from the Victorian age. A toilet on the common staircase shared with two other houses. No plastics so anything you bought like sugar came in a paper poke. Larger goods were in hessian sacks. At the start of the 30s nobody in the street had a radio. Nobody in the street owned a car. The nearby canal had horse drawn barges.

Pirates – a game played in old fashioned gym. Basically tig with all the kit – ropes, bars, horses, trampolines, wall bars etc. Total madness but brilliant fun. Guaranteed to have some mishaps, so only once a term at Xmas before the end to term party!! Happy days

Oh MAN that brings back some memories! Our junior school was brand new in the mid-70s and had all sorts of posh gym equipment that folded out from the walls in the hall, I remember playing that!

Being told to ‘hit him back’

Yep. I was told that too. I always have been very placid and once went two weeks trying to avoid a fight, but he ‘got’ me as we lined up to go into class. By the time the teachers arrived I had my thumbs in his eyes and I was knocking tiles off the tiled outside wall with his head….. Nobody ever touched me after that.

Fillings with no anaesthetic at all!!

school sports – sack race in proper sacks..

do kids still get to take their toys in to play with on the last day of term?

When I was 11 me and my best mate cycled from Abercarn to Usk to stay with his gran. Took us all day and I crashed twice 😆 unbelievable to think that parents would agree to that now.

brakes – Member

do kids still get to take their toys in to play with on the last day of term?

Would be a strange day with so many X-Boxes

sex

hover boards from Back to the Future. They should – quite literally – be happening today, but someone forgot to invent them

Not sure of the name of the game but basically the scout leader (my dad, as it happens) had a length of thick rope, with a huge (heavy) knot at one end. We’d all stand in a circle around him and he would swing it round, the idea being that we jumped over it, while it would get higher and higher, Total Wipout style. But on a wooden floor.

Great fun but thinking back, how ankles/knees/faces didnt get broken, I will never know!

They should – quite literally – be happening today in October next year, so there is still time.

ftfy

Brings back memories.

Leeds United won the FA Cup once when I was a kid. never happened again since, and highly unlikely to happen again under current circumstances. Certainly not this year, not after limply giving in to the mighty Rochdale

AnalogueHedge porn

I used to do a 20 miles round trip (from Sutton in Ashfield to Hucknall) to race my RC car on Sundays throughout the winter. On a Grifter XL, with dynamo lights (The ones with the dynamo against the tyre) I had no spares for the bike, not even a pump. I used to pump the tyres up to 60+ psi as I worked out it was faster. I did it in rain, snow, the lot. One section was dual carriageway that split in two (Between Kirkby and Hucknall if anyone knows it) and one time in the snow I decided it was too risky on my side of the road, which was twisty, so I pushed up the ‘wrong’ side of the dual carriageway, as it was too slippy to ride.
These days I’d have been arrested for that, and my parents would have been put on some sort of register for child abuse!
Once I got a lift from a mate’s dad and we did 125mph 4-up in his V8 Rover SD1 down that dual carriageway.
I bet there’s a speed camera on it now.. ?

Kids sitting round the touchline in first division games. I can remember doing this at Portman Road and rolling the ball to George Best when he wanted to take a quick throw in.

Man U got beaten 4-1. 🙂

Hitching lifts. Used to do that all the time, all over the country and Europe.

AnalogueHedge porn

and these

and Dundee to the Glen Doll Youth Hostel on a “borrowed” Raleigh Chopper, and a few times on my own <ahem> “racer” with 3 speed sturmey archer hub gears that I’m still convinced didn’t actually do anything

Stink bombs in the little glass bottle that stank

ah yes I remember buying packets of those from the joke shop in town. We’d then go and stand next to the brass band whilst they’re playing christmas carols and let about three or four off at once, cross the street and stand there pissing ourselves laughing as they start coughing and have stop in the middle of a tune!

Slow worms.

tomhoward – Member
Not sure of the name of the game but basically the scout leader (my dad, as it happens) had a length of thick rope, with a huge (heavy) knot at one end. We’d all stand in a circle around him and he would swing it round, the idea being that we jumped over it, while it would get higher and higher, Total Wipout style. But on a wooden floor.

Great fun but thinking back, how ankles/knees/faces didnt get broken, I will never know!

We used to play that game at scouts – there’d be certain people the scout leader would want out, so the knot would occasionally take a sudden 6″ jump in height. The ‘knot’ was about the size of a small football.

The challenge on scout camps seemed to be who could make the biggest fire (that we then had to run through! We toned it down a bit after melting a ghetto blaster that was left about 15 ft from the fire…..

I wonder if boys still look at the underwear section of their mum’s/sister’s Kays/Gratton catalogue??