Things you never see nowadays

Bread dipped into the meat juices from the Sunday joint.

Oh yes!
Stop it. You're making me hungry. I'll watch that California girls utube again to bolster my willpower!

Yes I am off to watch it too mmm it did taste good though didnt it!

Bread and dripping used to be a great treat in our house. If I was really lucky we sometimes had golden syrup sandwiches The thing I miss is the horses. Ever4yone seemed to have a horse and cart - the milkman, the baker, the coalman, the greengrocer and the rag and bone man. Now and again we would see barge horses being walked down to the canal and I remember once seeing a long line of real Romany caravans - all horse drawn of course.

Oh yes! I remember it too! (Cue Hermione and Maurice in Gigi!)

Coin in the slot TV sets ( a form of hire purchase).

All the lights and everything going off suddenly because the 'shilling' had gone. Followed by a frantic scramble in the dark to find a shilling and feed the meter.

Our first TV after we got married was a coin in the slot. At the end of the month they`d empty it, take out the rental fee, and we got the rest back. Ours took 2 shilling pieces, not one shilling.
Going back to the liquorice, at Christmas we used to get liquorice selection boxes, not chocolate, must have kept us regular!

Thin white bread, margarine and sugar sandwiches when I got home home school. Cheap, cheerful and of no nutritional value whatsoever.

Gaberdine school coats with, if my memory serves me correctly, detachable hoods and linings. Mine was navy, wouldn't mind a long version now - sans hood!

Deedaa We don't have delivery horses any more but we do have the occasional pony and trap trotting smartly through the town where I live.

Three dairies delivered in our avenue... two with horse-drawn floats, and the Co-op had a battery-driven box on wheels, with the milkman where the horse should have been, on foot... We were United Dairies, and the horse was called Rosie...

There was a knife-grinder who came round (I wish there still was) on a pedal tricycle arrangement - the same pedals drove his grindstone - an amazing Heath Robinson contraption!

The coalman delivered coal and coke into our back-garden sheds, humping the sacks up the sideway - my job as a child was to count the sacks as they arrived.

Mention of the steam-roller here; what elegant machines they were! I liked the way the boiler made a noise like my mother's Sunday joint in the oven when it would spit fat...

baubles my mother bought me a gaberdine school coat when I started at the grammar schoo. It was very expensive and came down to my ankles but I wore it till I was 16 (I think I may have moved on to a duffle coat in the 6th form where the rules were slightly relaxed). The detachable lining was great and I wore it under all sorts of coats long after I left school. Have to agree about the hood!l

Glassortwo -Re antimacassars; now that the young'uns all plaster their hair with gel and wax, perhaps they are due for a comeback.

I had a school gabardine coat, too. We were allowed to wear duffel coats later, but only if they had black or navy toggles! My Dad painted mine black (took them off first, of course|!).

Feetlebaum, re the coal deliveries, my step-father worked as a miner, so we got cheap coal, when we needed some we posted a card through the delivery man`s door, and the coal lorry dropped the coal off at our front gate, cue all the family out with buckets and shovels to get it round the back into the coal place, after removing all the bits of shale which went under the hedge to be used as chalk for hopscotch.

Does anyone remember going to the Greengrocers for "two pennorth of "potherbs"?

A carrot a parsnip, an onion, I think that was all. Mum would put them into a saucepan with the remains of the week end leg of lamb and bone.

Yes , lamb was cheap enough to buy a leg in those days. we were a family of five - not unusual then!

I remember riding on trolley buses and tram cars in South London in the 50's. My brother and I taking the weekly wash to the launderette. To go to the Wimpey Bar was a treat.

The old gag was buying a sheep's head 'and leave the legs on, please'

In Cornwall in the sixties, many people where I lived didn't have proper ovens, so would have their joints cooked for them, either at the bakery or at a café, where 'Uncle Perce' would supply a roasted pig's head... sounds gruesome, but tasted gorgeous! (Where do you think brawn comes from? Another name for it is 'headcheese'...)

My mother used to make clippy mats in the evenings from cut up old clothes. That was after he darning was completed. I remember her being delighted when something called Indestructable Socks came in. But they weren't. My father used to Walpamure the walls every so often too. Not very efficiently.

And when I went with my mother for church cleaning once a month, I used to collect all the candle drips and bring them home to melt down and make candles for Christmas.

Oh, and rabbits were so cheap, we used to cook them for the cat. Then there was myxomatosis and the poor old thing had to have Kit e Kat.

I remember so well the funerals here, when I was a kid. A bit like the traditional East End funerals- horses, black wooden herse, with the old farmer, Monsieur Berthoud, leading, with his distinctive limp - family walking right behind, and other mourners behind them- with the drummer beating the funeral march. We were taught to stand by the side of the road when they came past, and bow our head in respect until they'd gone past, on the way to the cemetary.

Employment bureaus such as Alfred Marks, Reed Employment, Brook Street Bureau. When I worked up in London to utter the awful expression one of my sons keeps using "back in the day" they were everywhere, you could walk out of one job on Friday and be fixed up with a new one by the following Monday, full employment, those were the days!

Where on earth do you live banana ? s=Since those days they have almost completely succeeded in inserting themselves between employers and applicants. Huge number of them and companies like Reed even advertise on TV. Many large firms outsource to them, so that e.g. Reed employs half their clerical staff. My SIL works for one of them and they directly employ half the workforce in a highly successful car plant.
Maybe they are less likely to have a shopfront on the highstreet - they will be in office accommodation nearby perhaps?

I had a gabardine for school. Grey. As was the pinafore dress the lisle stockings the blazer and even the knickers! The school was the friary, built on the site of a Franciscan friary. I also had to have agrey overcoat for Sundays . Oh! And 2 hats. One for every day and another for Sundays (grey) also a pair of 'best' shoes for Sundays!(black) oh and grey gloves.
I didn't wear grey again until recently and then only rarely.

absentgrana yes, I remember my auntie darning her nylons, over a 'mushroom' which I still have in my workbox.

JessM, I'm probably thinking of the secretarial ones on the high street.