‘What’s a silly UK thing you believed when you were a kid?’ – 21 peculiarly British childhood thoughts

Children are naturally highly credulous and believe all sorts of nonsense, a lot of which is fed to them by their parents for a laugh. They’ve been chatting about this on the AskUK subreddit, after user Basis_Safe asked the following:

‘What’s a silly UK thing you believed when you were a kid? When I was a kid watching Balamory and Mrs Hoolie would talk about the weather at the beginning of each episode I thought not only was it live, but also local to me. So when she said ‘Today is sunny’ I always thought she was a big liar when it was clearly raining.’

To be fair, it doesn’t seem unreasonable to believe that Balamory was a real place. And this post prompted plenty of replies from people who had also held strange notions about reality when they were little, like these…

1.

‘When I was about four, I came downstairs, to see my dad nailing shut the old cat flap in our back door. I asked him why he was doing that. He told me it was to keep the draughts out.

‘But I didn’t know that word yet, so I spent a while believing that there were groups of giraffes, just wandering around Britain, randomly sticking their heads into peoples cat flaps.’
–turingthecat

2.

‘When I was about 5 or so my parents bought a draught excluder, I misread the label as ‘daughter excluder’ and I started crying because I thought they wanted to get rid of me!’
–hank_marvin_in_drag

3.

‘My dad convinced me he was psychic by predicting storylines in the evening Home & Away because he had watched the same episode at lunchtime.’
–Guilty_Dream8050

4.

‘I used to think the BBC newsreaders could see me through the TV, so I’d sit extra proper when they were on.’
–Drowsypetals

5.

‘That a caretaker manager in football (a temporary manager) was like a manager but also the stadium’s caretaker, like my school caretaker. A player-manager was a player who was also the manager, so why not?’
–PabloMarmite

6.

‘When hearing on the news after a crime that ‘a man is helping the police with their enquiries’ thinking that it meant that a man with some free time had offered to give the police a hand.’
–OldEquation

7.

‘Once as a kid I was watching Noel’s House Party and I asked my dad who Noel Edmonds was and he said ‘That’s Mr Blobby’s dad’. So I grew up thinking it was canon that Noel was Mr Blobby’s father.’
–Old-Awareness4657

8.

‘That the chutes you see hanging off scaffolding were for the builders to slide down once they’d finished for the day (fireman’s pole type vibe).’
–That-Pension-6457

9.

‘My dad told me llamas were native to Wales, with the double L, and should be pronounced as such with the throaty ‘chhhhl’. Was in my 20’s before I realised he was winding me up!’
–clydebuilt

10.

‘My brother told me that Cher was part cyborg because of her vocals on Believe, and I believed this until I was at least 17.’
–RaspberryJammm

11.

‘We were doing a nativity play and they described Joseph as a carpenter. I, being 5-years-old and not yet knowing what carpentry was, found myself confused at the notion that he painted cars for a living, given that the Bible was meant to take place 2,000 years ago and I don’t think cars were invented then.’
–MysteryNews4

12.

‘I used to be scared of The Watford Gap. For some reason, child me imagined it as some sort of terrifying Mad Max-style desolated wasteland. My siblings would wind me up on road trips saying we were about to enter it and I should hold on tight.

‘I’m mostly over it now. Watford still gives me the creeps, but that’s pretty reasonable, imo.’
–Atomlad360