What do you remember from your childhood?

No matter what people forget, the one thing they always remember is their childhood and what it was like, what they did, where they went and with whom. In fact, the older you get, you begin to remember even the minutest detail about your childhood even though now you might not remember what you had for breakfast that morning.

In a recent study, researchers found that most people still remember their childhood home landline numbers. And it’s true because I can still remember ours. But home landline numbers are not the only thing people recall from their childhood.

They remember what route they took to get to school. They remember what school lunch was on every Friday (it was fish and chips and Spotted Dick for pudding). They remember the name of their form tutor in their first year of primary school (mine was Miss Jones who then left to move to France and was replaced by Miss Savage). Both were lovely teachers. They remember the playground games they used to play, the school tuck shop where they bought snacks at playtime and the snacks they bought on the way home after school.

The older you get the more you reminisce but not just about your schooldays. You remember adverts, fragrances, soaps and your much loved appliances.

Growing up in England in the 70s was a different time. We tried to make soft drinks at home using the Soda Stream and then we stopped until we literally ran out of gas and the flavouring. We tried to use a calculator for the first time. What an interesting piece of new technology that was when my dad brought one home for the first time. We were fascinated by it, adding and subtracting all evening. It was so much fun.

I remember that back in the day we only had one television in the house and it had two dials that you had to manually turn to switch channels. There was no such thing as a remote control and, thankfully, we only had three channels, BBC1, BBC2 and ITV, otherwise we’d be standing up and sitting down all evening. But later on we did get Ch4.

We also didn’t have cable back then but every household did have an antenna installed on top of its roof to catch the channels.

Often we’d also buy an extra antenna that sat right on top of the TV like a rabbit’s ears. It wasn’t very good so we often have to perch it in the most precarious of places, such as the top of a doorframe, just when the picture cleared, or the person holding it would have to stand frozen in case the picture disappeared again. We also remember that the television transmission stopped around 11pm, presumably signalling everyone to go to bed?

Speaking of which, as kids we’d sit on the stairs when we should have been in bed, just to catch a moment of a comedy mum and dad might have been watching. We’d catch the TV screen through the bannister railings, that is until we got caught by mum and dad. I remember one time I sneaked down the stairs and passed a note to mum saying, ‘Please can I have a biscuit?” I got some and then went back to bed. Strangely enough, I am not a fan of biscuits now.

I do have a phobia of needles. I hate any type of injections and I am quite terrified of having blood tests because of the needle. I remember one time mum took us to our local GP in London to get our shots. He’d be following me around with a needle and I would be running around his surgery trying to get away from him!

I also remember our morning alarm going off. There was one area in which we lived where I hated the school we went to. I dreaded the alarm going off in the mornings and when it did go off I’d foolishly pull the bed covers over my head thinking that, by doing so, mum and dad wouldn’t be able to hear it. How silly was that kid’s brain?