Funny stories that show your age.

Our Fischer Price toys have been played with and passed on except for the the schoolhouse which was my younger daughters favourite. She is now 46 and still likes looking at it.

The garage, record player, circus train witn animals and camera were passed on still in tip top condition. Wish I had taken photos of them. Toys were all so well made in the 70s and 80s.not sure where they were made.
I must have a trip to the Museum of Childhood again. I went many years back.

My daughter took her family veto the Museum of childhood in Edinburgh this week. She sent a photograph and said we didn't really need to come here, we should just have come to Grandma and Granddad's house. The display was of many toys, mostly Fisher Price that were hers in the 1980s which have been played with for 40 years & our young grandchildren still play with here at our house 🤣. Toys were certainly built to last then.

In the 1950s we used to eat rabbit a good deal, roast or stewed. At some point we started to have chicken at Xmas and then chicken replaced rabbit - probably because of myx.

Lahlah65

I remember having people over for dinner and doing trout meunière. I left four trout carefully prepared in the kitchen, ready to pop in the oven when our guests arrived. When I went back out there, the cat was busy eating one of them in the middle of the kitchen floor!

Luckily she started at the head end - I picked it up and put it back in the tin and into the oven. When it came to serving them, I was careful to put lots of extra parsley to disguise the half-eaten head and made sure that I got that one!

🤣 Brilliant!

My parents bought a Victorian terraced house in 1952 and were the first in the row of 14 to have electricity put in. They were also the first in the close to have a car, but the last to do away with the outside loo. My siblings and I had long left home before the back bedroom was converted to a bathroom, in the late 1970s, most of the other houses had added the bathroom as an extension beyond the kitchen (or scullery, as we called it).

A romantic home-cooked meal with my boyfriend in the late 60s was a Vesta Curry.

I was invited to my friend's house for tea when I was about 15 in order to meet her older brother who was on leave from the navy. Already really nervous, as I sat down at the table my suspender came undone with a very loud 'ping'. I was so mortified I couldn't actually speak to anyone, let alone the gorgeous older brother.
I remember the first time I went into a pub when I was 19 and had a drink. When I got home Mum could smell alcohol on my breath and she said I looked 'bloated with drink'. But I'd only had half a pint of shandy.

Not rice🙄

I remember my MIL cooking a chicken in its plastic wrapper. She didn’t realise she was meant to remove it.

Aged 17, I stayed with a friend whose mother was a model, the house very trendy and I thought very sophisticated. She asked me if I wanted butter with my jacket potato. I was confused as we only ever had boiled at home. And ordering steak tartare in France was a shock…

maxmeyers I have put sultanas in rice and curries since the 70s!
Blossom I hope you enjoyed your boyfriend’s “bed of chow mien rice”😁

For my 18th birthday many moons ago I went out for my first Chinese with my friend Cynthia Jones. I can’t say that I was that keen on this very strange slimy meal that we had, but he gave me something to remember all these years later. Another memory is off my boyfriend who eventually became my husband Giving me a gourmet treat when I went to visit his bed of a chicken chow mein from the Vesta . I thought it was absolutely amazing, but then I did
only get mince and peas as it was called at home.

Ours was a shilling meter as opposed to the penny ones, some people really couldn’t afford a shilling at a time, oh the indignity when I think of it now.
When the gas meter man came to empty the meter you got a few coins back as a discount depending on how much was in it.
Very hard times indeed.

OMG yes! I well remember the coal man and the milkman, and the electric meters that took 10p, then onto 50p!

And I loved the original bulky 50p coins and the little 1/2p coins too!

I also remember, when I was between 5 and 8, a neighbour and his missus who were regularly in court for fiddling the electric meter by removing the coins!

Some good stories on here. Here is another one from me. When I married in the early sixties we were lucky enough to have saved a deposit to buy our own house. To get the one we wanted we had to take on the maximum mortgage we were allowed so money was very tight more so when our daughter arrived a few weeks after our first anniversary. My husband came home with a message that his Mother and her friend would visit at the weekend arriving early afternoon ,staying for an evening meal and then being driven home in our very elderly battered car. This really messed up our food and fuel budget but here was nothing we could do. I planned themenu, lamb chops, new potatoes and peas followed by apple pie and cream. On the day I made the pie and went to get the rest of the things I needed leaving the chops until last. I had made one mistake in the calculations forgetting that I was buying g double the quantity of chops. When the butcher packed them up a d told me the price I must have .looked a bit surprised but then I started to feel very faint. I vaguely remember someone bringing a chair, when I looked up I saw that the butcher had come from behind the counter and was apologising profusely for the price of his chops! I assured him that I was just a bit under the weather and left with my parcel of chops and just two pennies and a threepenny bit left in my purse. On the way out I realised that the only time this had happened before was was when I was first pregnant with my daughter !

This thread has been so entertaining and has triggered many a memory from my childhood.
Can anyone remember Batchelors Savoury Rice? Part cooked rice that you boiled up for about 15 minutes and came in a range of flavours. Far nicer than the microwave rice that seems to have replaced it.

In the 1940s we were lucky enough to always have a turkey for Christmas dinner. It came to my grandmother’s house in Birmingham from her nephew who was a farmer in Shropshire -by post! This was not uncommon, they were not in boxes but wrapped with the legs showing. Another relative worked in a large post office where turkeys which were undelivered by the afternoon of Christmas Eve were given to staff as they would be inedible when the PO opened after the holiday.

DH still has Vesta Chow Mein (as an occassional treat)

Great thread by the way! Some really funny posts 🙂

When I was about 6 -early 60s- I was playing at a friends house and her mum asked if I wanted beans on toast. I said no thank you as I thought she meant runner beans which were the only beans I had ever had (and didn’t like very much). I couldn’t think why anyone would want them on toast🤣!
I was also very impressed that the toast was made from pre sliced white bread. I had silver shred marmalade on mine - another rare treat!
I still feel bad for my poor mum who tried to feed us with healthy fresh food! I didn’t appreciate it at the time.

When I was a young teacher, we decided to ask the headmaster and his wife for a meal. I can’t remember what I cooked but can remember suddenly realising we only had 3 plates and having to sidle into the lounge and remove the plate under a pot plant!

All this home cooking was something I really missed spending my young life away at school with no domestic science lessons. Also, with my siblings away at school there was not much knowledge of family life. It was so enjoyable when watching the two lads chase each other to get home.
Did anyone else who went away to school feel they too lost a family life when young?

My first attempt at cooking - apart from scones and jacket potatoes at school - was when my parents left me at home while they went on holiday. I was 18 and decided to make a proper meal to welcome them home. I decided on individual steak pies. I had no idea how to make the filling so I emptied tinned, stewed, steak into pie dishes and then made shortcrust pastry to go on the top. They came out quite well and my mother was impressed by my pastry.

When we were first married my husband and I were invited to dinner at a friend's house. She had cooked Chili con Carne, which was quite exotic in those days. Unfortunately she had used far too much chili powder and we ended up pouring it into a sieve and pouring water over it until all the sauce had been washed off.

Mouse

My then boyfriend took me for a meal in a posh restaurant, the meal came with broccoli which neither of us had ever seen before. We were not sure we were supposed to eat it or whether all of it was edible. In the end we at a bit of the stalk, a bit of the flower and left the rest on our plates. I’d have been 17 at the time and he was 20.

I was brought up in the North and as a child we didn't experience much variety in vegetables. My first experience of broccoli was at a hotel in the New Forest one Summer holiday.
Meals were always meat and two veg. I didn't eat rice - other than rice pudding - or pasta until I was a student just outside London in the mid 70.s! The first time I was taken out for a meal in a restaurant my boyfriend took me for a Chinese meal. I didn't know what to order, but having eaten Vesta curry I ordered a curry. I was embarassed to admit I knew nothing of Chinese food!

Moth62

I love bone handled knives for spreading butter etc and have several from my mother and MIL. My granddaughter was setting the table for me yesterday and said, “ Granny, you’ll never believe it, but there was this EXACT knife on a table in the museum last week!” Out of the mouths of babes etc.

I still have my mum's bone handled knives for spreading butter. I wouldn't be without them! I shall await my grandchildren's comments when they are old enough for museums!

I’ve been having a quiet giggle reading through.

Two favourite Vesta meals for us were paella and chow mein. I’d forgotten all about them until reading here. My mum loved them too.

Our Friday night treat for several years was a home made prawn cocktail followed by bought, frozen black forest gateaux accompanied by a glass of Mateus rose. I still enjoy two out of the three. . Good friends could never understand why we didn’t have a steak main course as they did when eating out on Fridays. Simple. Couldn’t afford it with a young baby and one salary. Did we care? Not a bit.

1968, I was 16 and went on one of the new package holidays to Benidorm with Dad and my brother. Having never left the UK or been on a plane we were overawed by the whole thing, but decided to be brave and go to a real Spanish restaurant. Our courage then deserted us and we ordered fish and chips. To my absolute horror real entire fish turned up, neatly curled on the plate complete with tails, fins and with the head propped up so the eyes were looking at you. We had never seen anything like it in our lives. I promptly burst into tears and refused to eat anything.