Funny things you clearly remember..

[Theseus]

I can remember going on a picnic and having the playing disturbed because we had to go and watch a lady going past in a horse drawn carriage. Apparently she was going to watch a football match and her team won.

 

[gbb]

Another one for me...setting up a rig in the garden to run model nitro aero engines on..they were'nt nitro, but..cant remember the name, worked on compression.
The smell of the fuel (ether seems to ring a bell), the noise from the engine, getting your hands smacked by the propeller, stripping the engines...all fantastic stuff.
Looking (drooling) in the model shops at your next engine you could afford.

Then the dissapointment of mounting an engine too small for the aircraft....

 

[Globalti]

from when you were a child...
It would be in the late 1960s, i'd have been about 10 or so.

I can remember clear as day, sitting at the side of the road. The road had those purple'ish coloured crystally chippings on, freshly laid. Bum on the kerb, feet on the road, sifting through the chippings, they looked like jewels, all spangly.

Its not the thought that made it important...its just that vision has always stayed with me, clear as day, 40 years later.

Any others ?

Yes, I also remember squatting at the side of our road, I must have been about 3 so that's 50 years, collecting a pile of sand and watching little red spider mites running around on it. It's my earliest memory.

From a picture I saw more recently of the house, there was only one car in the street and that was my Dad's Morris Traveller.

 

[beanzontoast]

I recall clearly one Saturday going shopping with my Dad when I was about four. We'd just come out of Woolies in Burton on Trent when my dad suddenly realised he hadn't got his wallet any longer. He dashed back into the store with me in hand and the next thing I know we're in a windowless room with three people, two big men in suits and a lady, and they're asking me questions. I thought they were policemen and I was going to jail so I burst into tears! (They were in fact store management / office staff trying to work out where we'd been in the store so they could send out feelers to look for the wallet).

Ten minutes later, a girl appears with dad's wallet. They'd found it on the toy counter buried under a pile of aeroplanes (he'd bought me one - must have put his wallet down, and then it got knocked off).

For weeks after, every time I played with that plane at home, I got a funny feeling in my tummy. Eventually I lost it in a huge rainwater barrel when it made a crash landing and sank. I tried fishing it out with a stick to no avail. We moved house a few years later and for all I know it could still be there!

 

[Globalti]

When I was about five or six I was taken to a big department store in London to meet Father Christmas. I had just lost the clockwork key to my Hornby railway train so when Santa asked me what I would like, I replied "A key!"

I remember a bit of consternation and a female elf being sent off to find a key then coming back triumphantly holding a yellow plastic Yale key as found on baby's rattles. I remember sitting on Santa's lap and muttering "No.... not that kind of key..." and the frustration of not being able to explain what I wanted, as well as disappointment that Santa couldn't understand. Santa got all huffy and my interview was terminated, I can't remember what I was given instead.

 

[beanzontoast]

When I was also about three I was taken to a big department store in London to meet Father Christmas. I had just lost the clockwork key to my Hornby railway train so when Santa asked me what I would like, I replied "A key!"

I remember a bit of consternation and a female elf being sent off to find a key then coming back triumphantly holding a yellow plastic Yale key as found on baby's rattles. I remember sitting on Santa's lap and muttering "No.... not that kind of key..." and the frustration of not being able to explain what I wanted, as well as disappointment that Santa couldn't understand. Santa got all huffy and my interview was terminated, I can't remember what I was given instead.

When even Santa gets huffy, you know you're in trouble...

 

[beanzontoast]

I also remember when I was about 2 or 3 being in the kitchen one morning with my mum. She had a larger saucepan of cold water on the work surface into which she was putting potatoes as she peeled them. I, much smaller than the work surface, reached up (health and safety alert!) and grabbed the handle of the saucepan, tipping the whole thing over me. I can still remember the ice coldness of the water as it soaked me from head to foot!

 

[Globalti]

Bloody lucky it wasn't boiling!

 

[beanzontoast]

Bloody lucky it wasn't boiling!

In defense of mum, she was always careful to turn handles in when pans were or had been on the cooker. I didn't do it again...