Things you never see nowadays

Gum boils treated with borax and honey
The smell of methylated spirits..to light the primus stove on picnics...to light the hurricane lamp in the outside lav after lagging the pipes with strips of old army blanket enhanced with the smell of damp izal toilet roll...condensation dripping on your head throughout any procedure in the outside loo...

Old people with rickets!
I looked for a picture on line, to show my daughter, and all I found was children from poor countries - no old people with bent legs, but I remember seeing them, and my dad explained.

The little boy I played with next door got polio in 1847 and ended up with a leg iron.

Good grief Alie you're wearing well!

Thanks...I think! 1940 vintage.

Forgot to say Whoops!

Isthis, you actually LIKED Virol? It was VILE!!

Eugh! I hated Virol. The other stuff that made me gag was Smith's Cremola. It was like cold semolina and I think was supposed to boost our calcium levels but I couldn't swallow it.

Virol- yeuk, just the word makes me want to puke.I had tried to erase that memory

I loved Virol! I noticed you can still get something like it at the chemist's - but I don't I need it any more, as I'm really quite 'robust'!

There are some strange people in this world!

Mustard poultices.

School milk in those bottles. A third of a pint each. In winter they froze and the tops were pushed off due to expansion. But the milk wasn't wasted as we thawed them on the radiator.
I had some kind of pink powder, strawberry flavoured and I used to put it in the milk for a milkshake. Probably just coloured sugar.
Were you a milk monitor? What were your duties?

Going to LOOK at M1 (not the M1!!). Being taken by a really sophisticated boyfriend, in his XJ6 for a meal in the upmarket restaurant overlooking the runway at East Midland Airport.

And the sour smell of the school milk crates {yuk emoticon]
I used to get given extra milk that was left over by Miss Williams. because I have pale skin - no pink cheeks.
Taking a walk along an empty, new motorway, just before it opened (but it was 4 yrs ago in Ireland - and the motorway is still nearly empty!)
I don't remember seeing rickety old people, but there is a gransnet member who remembers having patients in the midlands when she was a young gp.
But I lived by the seaside in wales - if I had gone up the valley it may have been different. My MIL grew up in the war in the midlands and says nobody used to go out and sit in the sun.

What was the name of that pink powder mrsmopp?? I can taste it now. No trace of fruit, entirely chemical!

I don't want to hijack this very enjoyable thread (ominous words) but I have been wondering what our grand-children would include on a list if they were have a similar thread many years in the future.

What would they miss?

ipads - they were so big and clunky weren't they? And slow!
The NHS - can you believe my grandma and grandad used to go to hospital to get things fixed and there was no charge "at the point of delivery". And they had their own GP down the road! Does anyone remember GPs?
They had shops too. Not just out of town megamarkets and internet deliveries like now. So impersonal when you think about it. Shops disappeared in the 2020s didn't they? Or probably earlier, I don't remember.
The Royal Family - before they were finished off by the Great Scandals of 2018. But I understand they're quite happy on Mauritius, not that we hear much about them.
Ash trees - I've got an old photo of one somewhere.
etc

trishs Some time ago on a similar nostalgia thread I mentioned that "Uncle Mac" was a paedophile. The women of my family were talking about it in hushed voices on some occasion and I didn't take a lot of notice but grasped the essentials of what they were talking about. It upset some Gransnetters when I posted this piece of information as he was such a figure in our generation's childhood. Shades of Jimmy Savile.

He has been mentioned in the press by a BBC presenter (John Humphreys? maybe, can't remember.) using a pseudonym,Uncle Dick!

Ella46 John Simpson, I think.

trishs have only just got around to reading that article you kindly posted about historical child abuse in the BBC. Bit of a long rambling article but horrifying reading all the same.

I never much cared for Uncle Mac as a youngster. The voice on the radio I greatly loved was David Davis:

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/obituary-david-davis-1345488.html

btw a famous story that I was told years ago about "Uncle Mac" is that, after the end of one broadcast, he gasped "Thank God the little b*ggers have gone!" Unfortunately the microphone was still live and his remark was broadcast.

But a paper from Monash University attributes a near identical story to George Saunders, "Uncle George" an Australian children's host, adding "there are numerous variations of the story (American as well as Australian) and it may well be apocryphal."

I guess not the George Sanders who starred in All About Eve.

Was it Nesquick that you were thinking of isthere?

Hmmm possibly.

Do Mums still give their children a "cats lick" when in a hurry to go somewhere?

Can't remember what it was called but it looked like pink sugar, some kind of sherbet I would think. To encourage kids who didn't like milk to drink it. It was a shocking pink colour. Don't think Nesquick had been invented.
Never did me any harm...lol...

Oh yes a cat lick!
Mum would wet a hanky with her tongue and wipe it all over my face! I'd be squirming, saying, "gerroff" and mum would be saying "shurrup!"