I used to love my annual trip to Earls Court for The Ideal Home Show, A few times I went with a friend, but actually preferred to go by myself, so I could go exactly where I wanted as I wanted.
Most year I would come home ith a 'gadget', often they proved reasonably useful for a short time. The worst one was a sausage maker. My youngest son never let me live that one down!!!
The Kenwood mixer was one of my ambitions as soon as I married in 1964. I think I finally got one in 1969. (It is still working with one of my daughters (with .a replacement bowl).
My parents passed on to us one of those twin washing tubs when first married. Tried it twice, gave up and used launderette from them onwards. Continued with this even after birth of first baby (his things hand washed each day), when second child arrived eleven months later we purchased a washing machine. This had to live in our bathroom so that for use, we would put the inward hose onto the taps and draper the exit hose over the bath. All too often as the water exited machine would go for walkies, pulling that exit hose off the bath and flooding the bathroom.
One of the best IHE I attended had a wonderful rain forest feature built there, which we could wander around and take shelter as it rained, each time.
Only once bothered to do the large queues for the houses, but spent one wonderful time at an exhibition there of caravans.
When I retired from work I used some of my retirement money to treat myself to a Vitamix. Used it for a few years before passing it on to one of my daughter who also got a good few years use out of.
At another one I was introduced to 'washing sheets' at one of the market place stalls. I was attending with a friend and they had a special offer of several packages of these for tenner, so we did that between us. Many years back, never used anything other than these sort of sheets since.
Always took a packed lunch with me, found the food sold there very expensive.
In the last few years I went there was always offers of free entry tickets.