‘What’s a weirdly anachronistic thing you can’t believe happened within your lifetime?’ – 22 areas where we’ve thankfully come a very long way

An anachronism is defined as an error in chronology, something that is placed within the wrong time, and the older we get, the more we view things that happened in the past as feeling a bit odd or unlikely.

AskUK subreddit user holytriplem has been pondering this and posted their thoughts…

What’s a weirdly amachronistic thing that you can’t believe was still a thing within your lifetime?

I was born in the early 90s. Until recently I assumed that smoking on planes would have stopped being a thing in the 70s or 80s but no, apparently it was only banned in the mid-90s.

How the fuck did it take until the mid-90s for people to decide that allowing people to light things on fire in a confined space in mid-air with filtered oxygen would be a really, really bad idea?!

It’s a very good question. And lots of other people jumped in with their thoughts on things that seem utterly strange, or downright awful, in retrospect, like these…

1.

‘When I was a small child I could legally ride in a car boot.’
–UnusualActive3912

2.

‘It always amazes me that my dad (who is 98, but still very much alive) is deaf because antibiotics weren’t around when he was a child.’
–Identifiable2023

3.

‘My nan lost a leg in the mid-00s because of polio which she had in the 1940s. Anyone who refuses vaccines needs to give their head a wobble.’
–blozzerg

4.

‘Homosexuality being illegal (it was only legalised in 1967). I used to volunteer in a museum and when I told our youngster, Holly (who was 19) about this she literally couldn’t get her head round it. She asked me “Why would they do that?”, and I didn’t have an answer.’
–Single-Position-4194

5.

‘Homosexuality was still illegal in Scotland until 1980!’
–FuckCallCentres

6.

‘In Ireland, it was still illegal until the early 90s, as was divorce.’
–holytriplem

7.

‘Smoking at work. I used to smoke, so did one other lad, and then there was one who had to share an office with us and suck up our second hand smoke all day.

Also work related – going to the pub at lunch and no-one bothered you came back half cut and did fuck all the rest of the day.

And finally work related, no-one was bothered if you ordered a stripper into the office for someone’s birthday.’
–intothedepthsofhell

8.

‘Paying for ringtones for your phone, Netflix via the post, realising that the smoking in nightclubs covered up the smell of vomit and farts that was all that was left after the ban…’
–Icy_Wafer588

9.

‘I think it’s hard to comprehend how common place smoking was pre 90s. I remember teachers smoking on the playground and in the staff room. People smoking in the cinema. If you asked for a non smoking table in a restaurant you would get something with nothing separating you from the smokers.

I worked in a jewellery shop and we had ashtrays on the counters for the customers. If someone came to your house is was considered rude to ask them to go outside to smoke.’
–PipBin

10.

‘People I work with remember when they got landline phones installed and how before then they would have gone down the street to a neighbour or a phone box to make a call. That was in the early 1970s.’
–spynie55

11.

‘The Spice Girls launching Channel 5 felt to me like a moment as big as the Berlin Wall coming down.’
–Able_Resident_1291

12.

‘I remember my sister and I getting our first duvets in the mid 80s. They were called ‘continental quilts’. Until then, or shortly before, most people had blankets and sheets on their bed. No duvet.’
–xxx654