Memory Lane

[Chindie]

St Margaret's is a strange one actually. 

Manor house gets turned into a mental hospital, they use it and surrounding buildings for 40 years, abandon it, but keep using some of the buildings for another 30 odd years, and then the land excluding the manor is sold for housing development. And the manor is still sat there rotting.

[Seat68]

8 hours ago, Xela said:

Got some old Big Breakfast clips recommended to me on YouTube. Makes me nostalgic for a time when life was more fun. Is it me, or does everyone take themselves too seriously now?

I know he is a divisive character, but Vaughan was excellent as a host. Cox lovely as well. 

I guess this around 97 or 98? I always used to watch a bit of BB before I went to college / work.

 

I really liked The Big Breakfast, Johnny was an excellent host. One year they ran a competition where you could win The Big Breakfast house, not the actual one, a built one. It’s actually in Telford just off Donnington Wood Way in Muxton . 

[Xela]

1 hour ago, Seat68 said:

I really liked The Big Breakfast, Johnny was an excellent host. One year they ran a competition where you could win The Big Breakfast house, not the actual one, a built one. It’s actually in Telford just off Donnington Wood Way in Muxton . 

The original house was put up for sale not that long ago.Around about £6m I think. 

The only downside is that they built the Olympic stadium pretty much next door, so now you have West Ham fans breathing the same air on game day! 

[bickster]

8 hours ago, Chindie said:

St Margaret's is a strange one actually. 

Manor house gets turned into a mental hospital, they use it and surrounding buildings for 40 years, abandon it, but keep using some of the buildings for another 30 odd years, and then the land excluding the manor is sold for housing development. And the manor is still sat there rotting.

We used to "play" in St Margaret's grounds as teenagers, It was dead easy to get in if you went from the Great Barr Golf Course side

There and the golf course were the absolute best places to pick magic mushrooms

So imagine being in the woods at dusk, around a mental hospital, tripping your tits off.

Fun times  

[sidcow]

6 hours ago, Xela said:

The original house was put up for sale not that long ago.Around about £6m I think. 

The only downside is that they built the Olympic stadium pretty much next door, so now you have West Ham fans breathing the same air on game day! 

 

[Xela]

After being recommended Big Breakfast videos on YouTube, it was inevitable that the algorithm would then pick out TFI Friday. 

What a show. 

 

And Denise  what a woman!

 

[mjmooney]

Old photographs.

Since the rise of the phone camera, cloud storage and screen displays, it looks like photographic prints are all but extinct. The most recent ones we've got are from a holiday on Corfu about fifteen years ago. 

But like most People Over A Certain Age, we have LOADS from earlier years. A lot were in various spiral-bound self-adhesive albums, which were a bad design to start with, and are now in various stages of disintegration. But there were even more in drawers and old shoe boxes - including ones going back to our parents' and grandparents' eras. 

So I've decided to undertake the task of curating the archive, and re-filing the lot (throwing out duplicates and just plain crap ones), chronologically in new albums. It's quite a massive job, but surprisingly enjoyable - and intriguing. Who was she? What the hell was that bloke's name? Where were we when this was taken? Look at the state of that wallpaper! etc. 

This all very much ties in with my family tree research (see appropriate thread). My wife says I'm death cleaning, and perhaps I am. 

I might put a collage up on Rogues' Gallery eventually. 

Edited May 8, 2023 by mjmooney

[sidcow]

As suggested by @mjmooney I'm posting here instead.

2 more football games. 

1) Slams, played against a blank (hopefully) brick wall where you'd take it in turns to boot the ball first touch at the wall trying to build up a high score. 

2) We played death ball at my school which was eventually banned. 

Played in a large rectangle in the playground near a grassy area. 

Basically you booted the ball at each other as hard as you could. Last person it hits before it leaves the rectangle has to run for the grass before everyone else in the game could kick the shit out of them. 

So you would basically have all the younger weedier kids hanging round the edges ready to break for the grass as quickly as possible whilst the bigger / tougher kids would stay right in the middle surrounded on all sides so if they booted it out they'd have to run the gauntlet of nearby bigger kids and surrounding little kids kicking out at them. 

Teachers banned it because so many kids got absolutely battered. 

Selly Oak was a tough school and there were plenty of kids not at all shy about tripping up a runner and everyone laying in. 

I was definitely an edge of the pitch hanger Still managed to get a few kickings though. 

[mjmooney]

Here's a game that as far as I remember didn't have any particular name, but was quite popular. You need as many kids as possible to stand in a line, holding hands. The kid at one end starts to turn around, swinging his partner, who swings his partner, and so on. The ripple down the line quickly starts to get more pronounced due to centrifugal force, eventually resulting in the kids at the far end being whipped around with considerable force - if they let go, they hurtle through the air, risking injury when they hit the ground or any other object. Bad enough on grass, deadly on a hard playground. Choosing to go at the 'fast end' was a badge of courage. If it wasn't called 'whiplash', it should have been. I think it may have been banned at our school eventually. 

Edited May 15, 2023 by mjmooney

[Seat68]

Anyone ever play stretch? In the days where you might own a penknife and it wasn’t to harm anyone. You would play opposite a friend and you would throw the knife in the ground and they would stretch a foot to it. You could either release yourself by throwing the knife in the ground in front of you or make your opponent stretch. 

[sidcow]

What was the game, a variation of tig, where if you got tigged you had to stand with arms out wide whilst the 'on' person went to find a new victim.

In the meantime anyone not yet tigged can run under your arm and release you. 

Normally ruined by someone who had been tigged suddenly deciding they weren't after all and deciding to run around releasing people. 

Was it called statues? 

[mjmooney]

43 minutes ago, Seat68 said:

Anyone ever play stretch? In the days where you might own a penknife and it wasn’t to harm anyone. You would play opposite a friend and you would throw the knife in the ground and they would stretch a foot to it. You could either release yourself by throwing the knife in the ground in front of you or make your opponent stretch. 

We called that 'split the kipper'. 

[chrisp65]

Y’all had shit games.

We had two main games. Game 1. You all have two pebbles and stand back to back to back in a circle. You throw one pebble straight up. Then you just stand there, anybody breaking ranks, well that’s what the second pebble was for, stoning the quitters.

Game 2, get a decent fire going and lob in an aerosol can, and then stand around the fire and wait. Eventually there is a huge bang and the fire is usually blown out and as your eyes adjust to the darkness (oh yeah its played at night), as your eyes adjust you look to see if there is a man down, hit by the aerosol.

Never did me any harm.

[sidcow]

Everyone humming the Laurel and Hardy theme when The Old Bill moved to lineup in front of the stands before the end of the game

Edited May 15, 2023 by sidcow

[Xela]

Got serious nostalgia about visiting some of the places I used to go as a kid on holiday - mainly Shanklin, and Bewdley. 

Might have a few days in Bewdley next month - I can still remember all the pubs we used to go to for our lunches / evening meals. Would be good to see them again. 

[Follyfoot]

On 29/04/2023 at 11:06, Xela said:

After being recommended Big Breakfast videos on YouTube, it was inevitable that the algorithm would then pick out TFI Friday. 

What a show. 

 

And Denise  what a woman!

 

Coming up next Dale Winton, Sting and Morrissey

[HKP90]

On 15/05/2023 at 20:24, mjmooney said:

Here's a game that as far as I remember didn't have any particular name, but was quite popular. You need as many kids as possible to stand in a line, holding hands. The kid at one end starts to turn around, swinging his partner, who swings his partner, and so on. The ripple down the line quickly starts to get more pronounced due to centrifugal force, eventually resulting in the kids at the far end being whipped around with considerable force - if they let go, they hurtle through the air, risking injury when they hit the ground or any other object. Bad enough on grass, deadly on a hard playground. Choosing to go at the 'fast end' was a badge of courage. If it wasn't called 'whiplash', it should have been. I think it may have been banned at our school eventually. 

Yeah, they banned that at ours. The outer folks would approach Mach 2 and be flung off onto the main road next to the school.

[Xela]

7 hours ago, HKP90 said:

Yeah, they banned that at ours. The outer folks would approach Mach 2 and be flung off onto the main road next to the school.

Yeah.

I was up before the Headmaster for starting one of these. The poor lad on the end let go and was slung across the tarmac playground, only using his face as a brake. I still remember his Mother's screams when she saw his face when she came to pick him up to take him home. It looked a lot worse than it was, and it healed quickly leaving no permanent marks, luckily. 

[mjmooney]

Ah, so that game was fairly universal then. I was starting to wonder if I was imagining/exaggerating the dramatic results for the kids at the 'fast end'. 

[bickster]

On 08/05/2023 at 17:20, mjmooney said:

Old photographs.

Since the rise of the phone camera, cloud storage and screen displays, it looks like photographic prints are all but extinct. The most recent ones we've got are from a holiday on Corfu about fifteen years ago. 

But like most People Over A Certain Age, we have LOADS from earlier years. A lot were in various spiral-bound self-adhesive albums, which were a bad design to start with, and are now in various stages of disintegration. But there were even more in drawers and old shoe boxes - including ones going back to our parents' and grandparents' eras. 

So I've decided to undertake the task of curating the archive, and re-filing the lot (throwing out duplicates and just plain crap ones), chronologically in new albums. It's quite a massive job, but surprisingly enjoyable - and intriguing. Who was she? What the hell was that bloke's name? Where were we when this was taken? Look at the state of that wallpaper! etc. 

This all very much ties in with my family tree research (see appropriate thread). My wife says I'm death cleaning, and perhaps I am. 

I might put a collage up on Rogues' Gallery eventually. 

I've got a similar job on, except with my Dads photographic slides. I can't go on lugging them around with me if I move, So I've got to reduced the amount I have. Even on a first glace there are slides from an International Eisteddfod in LLangollen which must be from the 50s, so I'm thinking of asking them if they want those for an archive they may have (no idea if they do), some are just awful photographs, they'll be getting binned, some are of family members I was never involved with but have heard of, I'm certainly not in touch with any of those. There will definitely be some of various schools my mother taught in and housing developments in Brum / West Brom etc more stuff possibly for museums....

Huge job