Favourite childhood pastime

I loved 'reading. Best of all I loved dressing up and acting out stories with my friends. ..........and paper dolls of course

Out on my bike, as young as six on road!, pretending it was a horse. Used to jump the kerbstones. Also had an imaginary horse that I looked after in garden. Also loved my Tressy doll. Had a button in the back to make her hair grow. I gave her a haircut...distraught that it didn't grow back!

Fag cards!!!!

Swapping "crystals" in the playground. Jacks, ice skating, skipping, bashing other kids up, knock down ginger, making dolls houses from cardboard boxes, cutting pictures out of catalogues, painting, doing dot to dot, making and dressing paper dollies, making dollies from old fashioned pegs sticking hair on them cut from another dolls head, dressing up, dressing up the cat, etc playing 'he' colouring in, exploring thine attic when dad was out, annoying the neighbours, French ending empty corona bottles and getting threepence back on them playing on the beach.

Famous five books, girl comic. No tv in our house but Saturday night theatre dickk Barton. Radio Luxembourg and Elvis Adam faith and cliff pilchard. Those were the days.

wotbashing other kids up Brighton has certainly became more peaceful since you left!

Yes, that did strike a rather discordant note among all the other more innocent pastimes!

Loved hopscotch. We could play in the road for hours as there was very little traffic in our small village.

How did you know I lived in Brighton? It was only kids who had tried to bash us up(excuses)

My friend and I were a year younger than our class mates and very shrimpy and skinny. So it made us feel good to get our own back. My dear brother taught me how to fight. The girls at our school had some terrible fights in the playground! Our headmistress was the most frightening thing ever; perhaps made us more rebellious??

Outdoors:
whip and top (often the top was from a mineral bottle and the whip was a stick and shoelace)
hopscotch
two a ball (played against a wall when I was on my own)
handstands
jacks
skipping
'French skipping' (coloured elastic bands threaded together, then stepped into at ankle or knee height)
picnics (water or pop, jam butties and a bag of cheap (broken) biscuits to share)

Indoors:
reading (I was vicariously raised by Enid Blyton and regard her books as being my primary means of socialisation)
paper dolls

wot we always call him Cliff Pilchard

One potato, two potato, etc
On the mountain lives a lady
Who she is I do not know
Oh, it's all coming back to me!?

Does anyone remember beatniks mods and rockers?? Liven up the Bankholidays and of course the press loved it ( moral panic)

Playing anything outside skipping with a price of rope
Camping using old blanket over wooden clothes horse
Shops with pies made of mud and wrapped in leaves
Picnics with jam sandwiches and liquorice water made with hapenny liquorice
If a lot of us out tig and hide and seek
At school liked Chinese skipping
When on my own liked reading books from library

Making 'perfume' out of rose petals - always ended up smelling awful!

(sorry if someone's already mentioned that)

Catching tiddlers in Ackers Pit. I have an awful feeling we took them home in jam jars and they must surely have perished...

Couldn't agree more! I had a huge box full, and they were my favourite thing. Someone used to give my Gran old copies of Woman & Home, which had Norah and Tilly on the back. These were identical twins, except one was dark haired with brown eyes and wore mostly red and pink, and the other was blonde and blue eyed and wore identical clothes in blue. In our family the phrase "a Norah and Tilly pair" was shorthand for siblings with this sort of different colouring. They were never drawn by the same artist from one month to the next, and the actual size, faces and figures changed regularly.

Birthday parties were always fish paste or egg sandwiches, jelly and Blancmange. Then pass the parcel, blind man's buff and something about postmans knock.

Merry Milkman game that involved buying milk, eggs and dairy products from the 'milk van' and playing with my Sindy dolls. Reading Famous Five, Secret Seven and Mallory Towers. Happy Days!

Forgot- my little red bike- I cycled everywhere.

BTW, about the skiing. I know you think skiing is posh - when I was a kid, it wasn't. Wooden skis with leather bindings, leather lace up boots, knitted thick socks with tweed +4s and a big knitted woolie jumper, and tweed jacket with knitted cuffs, and knitted mitts and hat. We 'ski walked' to the top (herringbone style)- and then hared down, often landing in the stream at the bottom- when you were soaked, you were soaked- but somehow kept warm with all the walking up hill...

And the toboganning, on the road, often in a chain (lying on front and hooking feet to the sledge behind) and crashing into the wall on the bend near the bottom. Can't remember anyone ever get hurt- somehow- miracle?

I loved snobs, jacks, elastic, swapping beads and playing donkey with a ball against a wall.

My friend and I played with our Sindy (me) doll and Barbie (her) dolls for hours sewing little outfits for them out of scraps of material.

I loved roller skating up and down the road (we lived in a cul-de-sac), playing on my scooter and riding my bike. I was also quite good on a pogo stick!

We used to disappear off for hours playing in nearby streams and fields making dens and mud pies.

Such lovely memories

I've loved reading all these responses; paper dolls and reading for me, too. Sounds like we could start a paper doll club......

Pogo stick and roller skating up and down the street.

Another fun thing was potato heads. Not like today where you use a plastic potato but a real one and could make some funny faces! Also, painting hard boiled eggs at Easter. Making things with shell's. Making a miniature garden with a piece of mirror for a pond. Sewing clothes for a teenage doll (preBarbie/sindy). How boring being an adult is!

Does anyone remember those tricycles with a boot on the back and a handle for the mother to hold?(no, I'm not dreaming!)