The 'are you officially old?' quiz

"When I was a lad..."

Are you really old, or still quite young?
Find out with this week's quiz.

At the place where I work, we rarely get a chance to chat because we're always so busy all the time doing our work. However, during one of the rare occasions when we took a brief moment to chat, the conversation got onto the subject of things from the past.

The whole conversation made me feel quite old, so I decided to use the conversation as the theme for this week's blog post, which features a 'true or false' quiz on things from the past which may or may not have existed. If you're old like me, then you'll know which of the following are true and which are made up, but if you're young then you'll just have to guess.

Anyway, Charles Fudgemufin proudly presents a special quiz called...

The 'are you officially old?' quiz

Have a read of the following recollections from the olden days and see if you can guess if they are real examples of days gone by, or is it just something I've made up? If you know the answers, then you're officially old. If you don't know the answers and you have to guess ... congratulations, you're officially still young!

1) Half pence coins

Half pence coins.
Were they once real? Or have I just made them up?

Nowadays the smallest UK coin you can get is a one pence coin, but in the olden days there was an even smaller coin ... the half pence coin! As the name suggests, this coin was worth half as much as a penny, or if you had two of them then together they were worth one pence.

Admittedly, there wasn't much you could buy with a half pence coin, and the only thing I can remember buying for half a pence was a half pence chew, which were approximately half the size of penny chews.

Real or made-up?

2) Removable ring pulls

Nowadays when you open a can of pop, you pull back the ring pull, then lower it back down again, and the ring pull remains safely attached to the can. However, in the olden days you would pull back the ring pull and the whole thing would come away from the can, leaving you holding a small slice of sharp metal in your fingers.

Looking back it all seems ... not exactly dangerous, but perhaps a little bit needlessly reckless. The modern version of the ring pull is far safer, so a big high five to whoever invented the current ring pull design found on modern day cans.

Real or made-up?

Twenty pound notes are definitely real, but did
one pound notes exist in the olden days?

3) One pound notes

Another unit of currency which older readers will remember is the one pound note. I can remember they were green, and when I was really young, a one pound note seemed like a massive amount of money.

I once found a one pound note and I felt like I'd won the lottery. I remember thinking, "Wow! I'm rich! This is loads of money!"

Real or made-up?

4) Stabby tin openers

I don't know the official term, but stabby tin openers were basically a sharp pointy blade on the end of a metal handle which you had to stab into the top of a can. Once you had formed a hole, you then had to wiggle the 'stabby tin opener' in a circle around the top of the can until you had cut through the top. You were then left with a lethal circle of sharp serrated metal, and if the old fashioned ring pulls were a little bit dangerous, then these were another level again and went well and truly against the health and safety obsession of modern society.

Real or made-up?

5) Only three TV channels!

In the olden days, if TV remote controls had
have existed, they would have been a lot simpler
than this one, as we only had three channels.

Nowadays the introduction of satellite and cable TV means that we have hundreds of TV channels to choose from, but in the olden days when I was at school we only had three channels to choose from! On the day when Channel Four was launched, it was a massive big deal that we would now have four channels to watch! Wow! So much choice!

As it turned out, I can remember watching Channel Four on the day it launched and thinking, 'This is a bit rubbish,' and all the first programmes seemed quite boring. I watched them anyway though, just on principle. Thankfully, things quickly improved and over the years Channel 4 has shown a lot of my favourite shows such as The Inbetweeners and Friends.*

* Although I have to admit that I've seen Friends so many times by now that I've gone off it nowadays.

Anyway, if you're slightly old like me then you'll remember the days when we only had three channels, and if you're really old, then you might even perhaps remember the days when there were only two channels, although I hasten to add that was well before my time. That must have been the extremely olden days, rather than just the quite olden days.

Real or made-up?

That's the end of the quiz. If you can remember all these recollections from the past then you're officially quite old! And if all these stories sound like made-up nonsense, then congratulations ... you're officially still young!

For the benefit of any young people who want to discover which of the above examples were real things from the olden days, and which were just made up, scroll down the page for the answers...













In actual fact, all of the above examples were real things from the olden days and they all used to actually exist. If you're an old person who can remember other things from the olden days which young people won't remember, then feel free to leave a comment with your recollections of things from the olden days.

Or just to show that I'm not being ageist, if you're a young person who can remember way back when we had to make do with old fashioned technology like Playstation 3s, iPhone 5s, and TVs which were a mere 32 inches, then please also feel free to leave a comment.

If you enjoyed this trip down memory lane*, then you can check out my follow up post below:
The 'are you officially old?' quiz (part 2)

* Clarification : Even if you didn't enjoy it, you can still check out the above link. Charles Fudgemuffin doesn't discriminate against grumpy miserable readers who don't enjoy nostalgia.

Disclaimer: I have to come clean and admit that in reality, of course I'm actually still really young, so as some readers have probably no doubt already guessed, I had to get a guest writer to write this week's blog post. I asked someone who was really old to describe the examples above, because obviously someone like my young self would never be able to remember all those things from the olden days. ** shifty eyes **