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I was thinking about how much the world has changed since I was a kid, and it hit me: there are so many skills we learned back then that are absolutely useless today.

For example, I grew up in a small town near Leeds in the ’70s and ’80s, and one of the weird skills I picked up was repairing cassette tapes with Scotch tape. If your favourite mixtape got chewed up by the player (which happened all the time!), you’d have to carefully unwind the tape, cut out the damaged part, and splice it back together with tape. It was like performing surgery on your music collection! These days, with streaming and digital music, I doubt anyone under 30 even knows what a cassette tape is, let alone how to fix one.

What about you? Did you learn something as a kid that’s totally obsolete now? Maybe it’s something like dialling a rotary phone, programming a VCR, or even memorizing phone numbers. Let’s hear your most useless (but oddly nostalgic) skills!