Things you never see nowadays

.... but you could use your ruler to catapult them to the ceiling, where they left a blue-black smear ......

...that clogged up the nib of your pen....

Trish, and those said inkwells were always stuffed up with soggy bits of blotting paper!

The ink monitor with a tray of filled inkwells, cos we weren't allowed ink unless we were writing....

baNANA & jeni, I hate cookery programmes on tv (apart from Nigel Slater) and the only baking I participate in these days are the Christmas cakes we make every year, but I might yet be driven to try if you are telling the truth about them being easy.

Learning to write my first letters at primary school on a slate, then progressing a year or two later to wooden pens with scratchy nibs and desks with ink wells, and ink!

Frost on the windows inside.
Putting clothes on in bed to stay warm.
Dad lighting the fire before we got up.
Sitting on the kitchen table when our basement flat was flooded every winter and being piggy backed out to go to school.
Cocoa before bed with custard creams.
Collecting horse droppings for nanna's rose garden which was about three feet square on top of the midden.
Standing at the bus stop freezing on winters day after swimming lessons with hands wrapped round hot oxo drink.
Winding up the gramophone at parties.
Being bathed in the tin bath to be clean for Christmas Day.

I remember when underskirts started to go out of fashion and I went to school without mine under my summer uniform dress. It felt like I was wearing my nightie flapping round my legs.

I remember underskirts with bones in - a short crinoline! They took up a drawer each....

trish they are easy to make. I love them.the only trouble is :- calories

trishs - If you watched the latest Great British Bake Off, they made Rum Babas as one of their first tasks.

I've just read through all eight pages and can remember 95% of what's been mentioned so far
My contributions- 'starching' net underskirts with sugar solution in the early 60s
and, whatever became of Rum Babas from the 70s? I live in hope that one day someone will start selling them again.

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

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

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.

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?

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!

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.

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.

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'...)

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.

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!

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.

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|!).

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