Smoking indoors, never getting your five-a-day and other terrible health risks you took in the 90s

IF you lived through the 90s you risked your life on a daily basis without even realising it. Here’s what you miraculously survived:

Smoking indoors

Giving drunk people lighters and allowing them to hold tubes of smouldering paper seems insane, yet that’s what having a fag in a pub was like. And we all lived to tell the tale, apart from a few hundred thousand who died from smoking-related illnesses.

Not having a bottle of water with you constantly

People used to go the entire day without drinking any water at all. The only reason you’d even think about taking a bottle of water out with you was if the car radiator needed topping up.

Drinking dirt-cheap, sugary alcopops

Before everyone’s body was a temple, we used to neck gallons of cheap, sugary piss like Reef, Hooch and MD2020 without giving a passing thought to what it was doing to our insides.

Taking shitloads of Pro Plus

You popped Pro Plus like they were vitamins, never got any sleep and were so knackered that the only solution was to take even more Pro Plus.

Going out all weekend without a mobile phone

You’d go out on a Friday and return in time for tea on Sunday night, and your parents didn’t have a clue where you were or have any way to contact you. Young people today will never know such joy.

Driving without a SatNav

You’d give your friend a map they couldn’t read and arrive at every destination two hours late, having had a massive argument on the way.

Not knowing your step count

You had no idea how many steps you were taking on a daily basis. How did people cope without constantly worrying that spending all day sitting down was shaving years off their lives?

Buying something without reading a review

You’d go into a shop and buy an item without reading 700 reviews first. If it was shit, you took it back to the shop, which is actually a lot more convenient than trying to post something back to Amazon.

Enjoying cheap white bread

You could enjoy the pleasure of eating bread made from gluten and plastic without chastising yourself for not spending a fiver on a loaf of ancient grains sourdough made by your local artisanal baker.

Being blissfully unaware of your fruit and veg intake

You’d eat an apple when your mum told you to and some carrots and peas at Sunday dinner. Aside from that the only other vegetables you ate were potatoes, and you didn’t even know that they didn’t count.

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Never break a mirror, and four other bullshit superstitions you believe

DESPITE considering yourself a rational, intelligent person, you cling to utterly stupid superstitions like these:

Don’t walk under a ladder

People warn you not to walk under a ladder because it might bring bad luck. However, luck is the least of your worries when there’s a risk of hungover builder dropping a hammer on you. This isn’t so much a superstition as solid health and safety advice.

Never break a mirror

If you a break a mirror you get seven years bad luck. But what about people who work in tips or glass recycling centres who spend every day throwing mirrors about and smashing the shit out of them? They aren’t living continually cursed lives, unless you count only being able to get a job at the tip or a glass recycling centre.

Knocking on wood

Apparently, if you tap against a piece of dead tree, you protect yourself from bad luck. Why? The answer is lost in the mists of time. And the vast majority of furniture that people tap on now is MDF-plastic composite, not even really wood. Which hasn’t led to any appreciable decrease in people’s luck making this superstition bollocks.

Lucky underwear

Some people believe a pair of lucky underwear can help them get laid. In reality they’re not charmed, they’re just a slightly cleaner pair with the elastic still intact. If you’re relying on a pair of pants to help you persuade someone into bed, you need to do some serious work on your personality.

‘Break a leg’

Actors have all sorts of superstitions and rituals around their jobs because they’re wankers. One of them is never saying ‘good luck’ to someone about to go on stage. Unfortunately their melodramatic bullshit has crossed over into normal life and people stick to it rigidly, because heaven forbid something should go wrong and undermine the theatrical merit of your child’s Year 6 production of Jack and the Beanstalk.

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