Whatever Happened To.....? 14

They may still be out there, but you don’t hear so much about them any more. 

Acker Bilk
Bob a Job week – back after a 20-year gap
brooches made of grouse feet (eew!)
buying a man’s sweatshirt and cutting off the welts (80s)

cakes on paper or plastic doilies (did anyone ever put cakes on linen doilies?)
Cancelling third world debt – it caught on.
Captain Marvel (revived, went again, forgotten)
CD Roms – they became apps.
chambray and challis – 80s denim-coloured light fabric
Charity telethons
Co-operative Stores (it’s all at the Co-op now!)
cocktails with a glace cherry on a cocktail stick
Complan, Bengers Food, Virol, Radio Malt
corded silk
cork tiles (you could never get them quite clean)
cress (in sandwiches)
Demerara sugar
dressing gowns (we have en suite bathrooms instead)

electricity showrooms
Empire Day celebrations
experimental theatre

experimental relationships (only a tiny number of people experimented, and the experiments failed. Very few people now live in groups in communes where you sleep with a different person every night and share child care. The children are now having therapy.)

filthy London buildings
finding it odd to see a man tapping a keyboard (early 80s)
flower arrangements stuck into Oasis or screwed up chicken wire
getting terribly, terribly upset about men growing their hair long
glacé cherries (especially in fruit salad)
government crèches (promised in the 70s)
grapefruit knives (flexible, with one serrated edge)
handheld device for shredding cabbage (to make into coleslaw) 

harebells
Instant Whip
large framed sepia photographs (80s)
Lemon Puffs
lolly stick jokes (back after 25 years)
Lyall Watson (Supernature)
Meccano
Middle class people owning country cottages where they spend every weekend.
Milo (available in South America) Also Kolynos toothpaste.
mohair (60s, 80s)
mosaic tiles
music hall (it became Britain’s Got Talent)
Nestle and Lindt chocolate (they’ve diversified)
notelets
overspill

panicking that in the future workers would have to “multitask”
parchment craft
pay phone cards
picnicking in a layby sitting on collapsible chairs with a collapsible table

salmon pink
saving sixpences in dimple Haig whisky bottles
scat singing
secretarial bureaus
shag pile carpets
silver balls and hundreds and thousands
single sex schools (getting harder and harder to find 2012 – hurrah!)
sitting by the telephone
surrendered wives

taping songs from the radio
the Eugenics Society (changed its name to the Galton Institute in 1989)
the new celibacy
the pineapple/grapefruit diet
The Song of Hiawatha, The Immortal Hour 
the word “interface”
tile-topped tables (70s)
touchtyping and shorthand
traycloths (and meals on trays)
UFOs
vibraphones (playing Moon River)

waist height dado rails (80s)
wall pockets
willingly paying £15 for a CD
woollen jerseys

More here, and links to the rest.