All you need is love
Turns out that food and oxygen are quite important, too
(moon monkey is busy making memories worth repressing, Fri 20 Jan 2012, 16:48, Reply)

Having been quite into Matchbox cars as a kid
I once tried to find out what my grandparents' new car was by crawling underneath it and looking for the make and model description.
(rosyatrandom has no regrets apart from all those regrets, Fri 20 Jan 2012, 16:40, 5 replies)

Simply Red
One of my mate's in school convinced me that the singer from Simply Red had a mild case of Down's Syndrome.

I believed it for about 2 years as well.
(magic the cat will someone please think of the kittens, Fri 20 Jan 2012, 16:25, 5 replies)

When you grow up you'll find a nice girl
get married and have a family.

I carried on believing in this up until my late 20's before reality finally won out.
(ParaSitius is an Optimistic Pessimist, Fri 20 Jan 2012, 16:21, 10 replies)

I used to believe there was a type of tree called 'Ficus carica'
until I realised it was a fig of my imagination.
(apeloverage committed the vile act of onanism on, Fri 20 Jan 2012, 16:18, Reply)

That teachers were moral, upstanding citizens who had nothing but the wellbeing of their pupils in mind.
That was until I met Mrs Airman Gabber who's father was an ex head teacher.

Turns out a good portion of them hate the kids and are only in it for the pension. The rest hate their colleagues.

My father-in-law admitted that, as being responsible for the years timetables, he'd deliberately coordinate lessons to either make a thoroughly miserable day for the kids or to seriously inconvenience the teachers he disliked the most.

I'd suspected that all along.
( Airman Gabber Living life like a 70's BBC presenter, Fri 20 Jan 2012, 15:55, 1 reply)

I'm _fairly_ sure it's not true.
I believed my classmates when they said that the people who ran the swimming pool had added a special chemical that turned bright red when you pee in the pool so everyone can tell it's you and they'll throw you out of the pool.
( sanityclause is waiting until, Fri 20 Jan 2012, 15:51, 20 replies)

I thought that the doors labelled 'Male Staff' and 'Female Staff'
were separate staff rooms in our school.

First week of secondary school, I spent a good ten minutes knocking on the 'Female Staff' door. Lots of kids saw me and laughed, but it didn't click until a baying, hysterical crowd had gathered.

I could barely sleep for a month due to wincing embarrassment.
(leviticus no longer likes the cut of your gib on, Fri 20 Jan 2012, 15:44, 5 replies)

Spots on your tongue...
...are from telling lies, my grandfather always used to say.

I know now this can't possibly be true, but whenever I get the occasional spot on my tongue I still wonder whether I've told a lie recently and, if so, which one gave me the spot.
( sanityclause is waiting until, Fri 20 Jan 2012, 15:37, 1 reply)

Having only ever heard about it, and never having seen it, I still like to think that the Hanger Lane Gyratory System
Is some sort of massively complex alien spacecraft run by a clockwork and steam engine.
( Je suis un vagabond is an unfunny, up your own arse middle class knob, Fri 20 Jan 2012, 15:25, 3 replies)

Up and over
I always thought you went up and over the top of the Runcorn / Widnes bridge as you crossed the Mersey, not across the middle of it. For years, I kept my eyes closed in terror whenever I was driven across it.

I was actually quite dissapointed the first time I kept my eyes open...
(ScousersPet, Fri 20 Jan 2012, 15:16, 2 replies)

In which grandmasterfluffles poos
I was a fairly ordinary little girl in many respects - a bit brainy and geeky and serious, but otherwise fairly normal. I enjoyed running around and jumping and climbing trees, chasing animals, laughing too loud, I was terribly clumsy (still am!) and my hair was always a mess.

Then I started school, and realised that I was nothing like other girls.

All of the other girls at school looked perfect, from the ribbons on their pigtails to their patent leather Clarks slip-ons. They whispered daintily to one another, pointed and giggled at the holes in my red woolly tights, always behaved themselves. Their bedrooms were pink, and they played with Barbie dolls, not lego. They wrote vapid sentences in painfully neat handwriting. They picked at their ham sandwiches on white bread at lunch time. They all wanted to be air hostesses when they grew up. They were perfect, every single one of them, a regular little army of miniature Stepford wives in training. I would have given anything to have been one of them.

I began to realise that I had a filthy secret. I hadn’t realised that I was abnormal until I saw what other girls were like, but there was one major difference between us that bothered me more than anything else: I was quite clearly the only girl who pooed. They didn’t poo. They couldn’t possibly poo. None of these picture perfect little girls could possibly ever have pooed in their lives. I was furious with my mother for concealing the truth from me - she’d always led me to believe that my bodily functions were normal, but it was obvious that they weren’t. All of the other girls were normal, and I was a disgusting freak who pooed.

And so, in addition to begging my mother to buy me pretty clothes and Barbie dolls (unsuccessfully), and trying to adopt a more ladylike demeanour overall (VERY unsuccessfully), I set about quitting my poo habit. It was clearly simply a matter of self-discipline. I must not allow myself to poo.

The shame that I went through over the following few weeks was excruciating. Every time I lost control and caved in to my revolting habit, I hated myself a little more. I was a disgusting girl who couldn’t even control the whims of her anal sphincter, I would never have any friends, and the whole world was mocking me, their perfect little non-pooing faces contorted with cruel laughter. WHY COULDN’T I STOP POOING???

I wish I were making this up. It really was very traumatic.
(grandmasterfluffles Come to my Armageddon party on, Fri 20 Jan 2012, 15:14, 5 replies)

Incey wincey little house spiders
could kill me with one bite.

Still don't like the little cunts; they now win a free one-way ticket to the bottom of my shoe when I see one in the house.
( Jeccius Steam Borderlands 2 junkie, Fri 20 Jan 2012, 15:11, 3 replies)

All robbers are black
My oldest boy, when about five years old informed me that:
"All robbers are black, aren't they?"
"Where did you hear that from? I asked, wondering where this racial sterotyping had come from.
"Well, nowhere, they just wear black hats and black tops, don't they?
(BadgerSmaker, Fri 20 Jan 2012, 14:15, Reply)

Bob Marley
My mum convinced me for years that Bob Marley didn't die from cancer.

Oh no, apparently his musical career eventually stopped, and he went to get a job at a bank.

They wouldn't let him keep his dreadlocks, and cutting them off sapped his lifeforce much like with Samson & Delilah, eventually leading to his death from business hair.
(Irregular Joe last touched ham on, Fri 20 Jan 2012, 14:12, 4 replies)

Flash!
For years I believed that the soundtrack for Flash Gordon was written by *the* Queen!
( benjymous help me! I'm turning into a grapefruit!, Fri 20 Jan 2012, 14:02, 5 replies)

Where to begin?
Stuff I thought I knew:

1. Sesame Street was made in Africa because that's where all the black people live
2. Lingerie is pronounced to rhyme with "finger me"
3. "Gay" only ever meant "happy" or "glad"
4. My slightly older cousin's insistence on fiddling with my bits when we camped out in our garden for a week one summer was ok, provided I didn't tell anyone. (The paedo cunt is dead now - a sudden stroke when he was 31. Couldn't have happened to a nicer bloke.)
5. Male to female gender reassignment surgery meant that you could father a child as a man, then have a sex change, get pregnant and give birth to another one. This was a Good Thing.
6. Smooth peanut butter was the food of the gods. Crunchy peanut butter was what they made when the machines broke down and didn't grind the peanuts properly, and was therefore inferior.
7. That if you put your mono radio cassette player on behind you when you watched Top of the Pops on the telly (when they broadcast it simultaneously on Radio 1 in the early 80s), you'd get the full stereo effect. Rather than just two identical monos.
8. Mud (the substance) was a food group and enhanced the look of all clothing and hairstyles.
9. Mud (the band) were the greatest exponents of popular music in the history of the world, and much better than Queen, with that preening poser Freddie Mercury pouting out front. (I was half right; I still can't quite bring myself to like Queen.)
9. Everybody's bedroom windows got iced up on the inside in cold weather.
10. "Reginald" was not a first name but a military rank, like Sergeant or Captain. "Reg" equated to "Sarge" as a diminutive. My dad therefore liked and respected Reg Taylor in the village because he was a superior officer, and not because he actually liked him. Why would he? - he was very fat with creepy wall eyes and never smiled (at me anyway), his house smelled funny, his wife was also fat and odd, his elder son wandered around the woods with a gun wearing "army gear" (well, he was a gamekeeper at the time) and his younger son kept a pet tortoise - and that's just weird

Stuff I had no clue about:

1. That "crap" was an untoward or crude word in any way that meant anything other than "not very good" (gosh, THAT was a fun family meeting, the day that I used it to describe a drawing I'd done when asked by the headmaster of my tiny village primary school about it). At least by the time I learned "fuck", "cunt" etc. I knew they were taboo words to be used sparingly, even if I didn't immediately know what they meant.
2. Why it wasn't ok to follow Phillipa into the girls' toilets when playing kiss chase.
3. Why my eyes watered and I felt very sick a few moments after Phillipa kicked me in the small, apparently unimportant, rounded lumpy bits underneath my willy after I'd followed he into the girls' toilets while playing kiss chase.
4. What the strange references to Chief Brody lying on top of Ellen and "pumping away" meant when I read, and enjoyed reading, Jaws in about 1976/7 aged 8 or 9.
5. Other people could smell it when I didn't shake the drips off or wipe my arse properly.
6. Central heating.
7. That "hydrogen hydroxide", offered to me as a beverage by the current Bishop of St Asaph in the mid 1970s when he was a teen and I was 7 or 8, was perfectly safe to drink and not - as I suspected (as he no doubt intended, having learned it in chemistry the day before) - a dangerous poison
( shinyshinyscalp less a man, more a way of life, Fri 20 Jan 2012, 13:53, 9 replies)

I thought it was 'aural' sex.
My Mrs was furious. I had to go out to the petrol station at 11.30 at night, to get cotton buds.
(username failed moderation, Fri 20 Jan 2012, 13:50, 6 replies)

I used to think the world was flat, really threw my hat into the crowd. Thought I had used up my quota of yearning
Then I discover I had extra yearning available because of overtime I had worked the previous week. Once i was a young man, I thought all I had to do was smile. But as I had a job as a Greeter for Outback Steakhouse, the smiling came in quite handy as it turned out.
( cumquat may will not be commenting further on the allegations, Fri 20 Jan 2012, 13:46, 1 reply)

Oral
I used to think that oral sex meant just talking about it.

Ironically, now that I've been married for several years, the closest I get to oral sex IS just talking about it. *sigh*
(Cheeselog is mostly water, Fri 20 Jan 2012, 13:37, 1 reply)

One day our TV broke down
While we were waiting for the rental company (D.E.R. if you are interested) to come I innocently asked if I could watch Blue Peter (or somesuch) on next door's TV.
They were an elderly couple and I was told that they had a different sort of TV that didn't have children's programmes on it.

I believed that for years.
(Spill, Fri 20 Jan 2012, 13:28, 2 replies)

When I was little,
I thought 'Norris' was a popular first name for dwarves, hence the classic party game of Chuck Norris.
( .Yeti. El amor en los tiempos del cólera, Fri 20 Jan 2012, 13:23, Reply)

When I was young, it seemed that life was so wonderful
A miracle, oh it was beautiful; magical.
And all the birds in the trees, they'd be singing so happily,
Oh - joyfully, playfully watching me.
But then they sent me away to teach me how to be sensible,
Logical, responsible, practical.
And they showed me a world where I could be so dependable,
Clinical, intellectual, cynical.

There are times when all the world's asleep; the questions run too deep for such a simple man.
Won't you please, please tell me what I've learned?
I know it sounds absurd, but please tell me who I am.

Now watch what you say or they'll be calling you a radical,
Liberal, fanatical, criminal.
Won't you sign up your name, we'd like to feel you're acceptable, Respectable, presentable, a vegtable!

At night, when all the world's asleep,
the questions run so deep for such a simple man.
Won't you please, please tell me what we've learned?
I know it sounds absurd, but please tell me who I am.
( Je suis un vagabond is an unfunny, up your own arse middle class knob, Fri 20 Jan 2012, 12:54, 5 replies)

While not quite 'Things I believed as a child'...
...I do still find I have a child like innocence (or stupidity, as the less generous may call it) for believing foolish things.

My face is still red as I type from the gales of laughter from my colleagues that have just died down after I was told by the guy that just came out of his exit interview that one of the questions was 'Which of your colleagues do you like least and which do you like most?'. He was met with silence at the obvious lie by everyone except me who said 'Are they even allowed to ask that? I wouldn't know what to say'. After he stopped laughing, he did at least just say 'you know, just for that, I'd say I liked you the most'.



(sorry, I've kind of shoehorned in an answer to last week's question, haven't I?)
( scarpe We Stole Bikes, Fri 20 Jan 2012, 12:45, 6 replies)

Daughter made an oopsie
I'm eating spaghetti bolognese and Nell (only 3 at the time) asks "What's that smell daddy?"
"That's the garlic" answers I.
"Doctor Who fights them!!!!" she shouts excitedly.

So every time Rose "War Horse" Tyler and the Doc encountered a bin with a hosepipe stuck on it, it was actually full of spag-bol and not an alien blob thing.
( Jeccius Steam Borderlands 2 junkie, Fri 20 Jan 2012, 12:13, 3 replies)

Polo Mints made you sterile.
I still won't eat the fuckers to this day.
(Bear Pookie The Frankly Challenged. Halloween is coming to town., Fri 20 Jan 2012, 12:10, 4 replies)

That my parents loved me.
This illusion was sadly shattered the moment I didn't get what I want, when I wanted it, all the time.
( Je suis un vagabond is an unfunny, up your own arse middle class knob, Fri 20 Jan 2012, 12:03, 4 replies)

fly on the, tube
I didn't consider the idea of pre-dug tunnels. I used to think the trains on the Underground dug out their path as they went. I asked my father where all the earth went and he was too dumbstruck to come up with a witty response.
(mmm savoury snacks, Fri 20 Jan 2012, 11:43, 4 replies)

Animals
I was a confused child. I am trying to recall some of my innocent misgivings.

I always thought that dogs were male and cats were female. At the onset of puberty one of my more advanced friends tried to convince us that spunk was indeed red, I hope he was just lying rather than having some god awful disease.

There are plenty of others.
(feedingtimeatthezoo day 1 of his bikini diet started, Fri 20 Jan 2012, 11:40, Reply)