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)

You are me
AICMFP
(Smale is stuffed, Fri 20 Jan 2012, 14:26, closed)

I hereby give myself a fiver.

( shinyshinyscalp less a man, more a way of life, Fri 20 Jan 2012, 17:22, closed)

RE: #4 - You say your cousin was slightly older
How older is slightly? Just seems odd calling him a paedo if you were 8 and he was 9
( Michael Ellis contributes nothing, Fri 20 Jan 2012, 14:27, closed)

My exact thoughts! Hardly a peado cunt if he wasn't sexually mature. Surely just kids messing about and experimenting?!
(boosh, Fri 20 Jan 2012, 15:08, closed)

Hooray!
It's the charge of The Nonce Brigade...
( monster munch person, man, woman... camera... TV?, Fri 20 Jan 2012, 15:17, closed)

probably more like
the charge of the pedant brigade. I mean I played "show me yours and I'll show you mine" when I was six years old, with the girl next door, who was also six.
Extrapolation can be a dangerous thing.
( sanityclause is waiting until, Fri 20 Jan 2012, 15:41, closed)

He was 18 months older.
Which is the difference between being pre-pubescent and adolescent (or it was with us). And he lost interest in me altogether once I hit puberty too, and starting "playing" with one of his neighbours. And he accused me of being gay, once I knew what the word meant in it's more modern sense.

Paedo may be a bit strong, but he was certainly on the nastier side as far as pieces of work go. I can't go fully public (as in naming names or discussing it with family) with it 'cos his mum is still alive and he was an angel as far as she's concerned.

He later got into all sorts of odd stuff e.g. Satanism (quite seriously, as it goes).
( shinyshinyscalp less a man, more a way of life, Fri 20 Jan 2012, 17:22, closed)

I vote that Reginald is indeed made a military rank.

( Je suis un vagabond is an unfunny, up your own arse middle class knob, Fri 20 Jan 2012, 15:03, closed)

I had it in my head that it was a non-com in certain cavalry regiments
In the same way that not all lowest-rung soldiers are "Private", but some are "Trooper", "Bombadier", etc.

Probably the rank in the Quartermaster's office most closely responsible for administering beer rations.
( shinyshinyscalp less a man, more a way of life, Fri 20 Jan 2012, 17:25, closed)