Here are 20 things you’ll find in every British person’s home.
There are some things that you will find in every single persons house in Britain. These things range from the embarrassing to the absolutely necessary.
There is nothing wrong with these things, just how funny and typically British that they are.
Sports Direct Mug
Now, this is one of those mugs you have in and give to any maintenance person who is over… the builder, the plumber or the electrician. You have no idea how you acquired this mug either but it is a big part of your house now.. alongside the other mismatched mugs you have.
Fridge full of magnets
This is something that every household has. A huge collection of magnets from everywhere. You would buy your magnets from every place that you have visited… like Benidorm and Mallorca. Or you would have the letter ones where you could leave messages for the rest of the household.
Ahhhhhh Bisto.
Have you ever known someone not to have gravy in their house? No, I didn’t think so. Have you ever known a Northerner to not have gravy in their house? DEFINITELY NOT. That would be a serious sin. Bisto is the staple of any British persons roast dinner. You people who cover their roast dinners in Ketchup need a slap across the face.
If you’re a gravy fan (most Brits are) you’ll probably have a box of bovril in your cupboard too! There’s nothing better than a nice warm mug of Bovril and crusty bread on a cold winters day.
Cup a soup.
You should always have these in the cupboard for those ‘ill’ days. When you’re feeling too sorry for yourself to bother making yourself any proper food. Or those days when you’re so hungover, even walking down the stairs to get food seems too much. Cup a Soups are always there for you when you’ve got tonsilitus and can’t eat anything but watered down foods. They’re good for those days when you’re too busy to cook anything or too lazy to make tea.
One of these Tea Towels
These were classic ones that we ALL had. Who remembers the dreaded moment you had to draw a portrait of yourself? You had no time to prepare or practice so every single person’s picture turned out creepy and weird. Instead of just drawing a face with two eyes and a mouth, I tried to draw myself as a stick person with a checkered dress on. It didn’t look the best and mine was the odd one out, since it took up the biggest portion of tea towel.
Fully stocked up ‘tin’ cupboard
This means your mum or dad’s excessive buying of either beans or tinned tuna meant that this cupboard was completely stocked at all times. This was never ever a bad thing because what British person doesn’t love good old beans on toast every now and then. You can never have too many tins of beans in your cupboard and there’s always a tin of sweetcorn in there that rarely gets used.
Biscuit tin
There is ALWAYS a biscuit tin in every house hold filled with the best household British biscuits. Yes, I’m talking of custard creams and hobnobs. This is usually an assorted tin of biscuits, or an old Quality Streets tin… there is usually one the crap ones left that no one really wants.
Every Christmas without fail, we find tins of family circle biscuits lying around the kitchen then about two weeks later, when they’re al empty, they’re full of sewing equipment and other rubbish.
When the biscuit tin is now used for spare buttons
When you spot the biscuit tin, you get extremely excited for the contents of it. But, when said contents are old buttons that have been gathered over years it really, really depresses you. I mean, who actually needs that many buttons? A tin like this can usually be found in your grandmas cupboard along with string and other useless things. We’ve got a box like this under the stairs with all sorts of crap we’ve found around the house.
Every ‘Now That’s What I Call Music’ album
This is something from our childhood. We had to collect every ‘Now’ album that was ever created. Unfortunately, our houses now have these albums and they are all in the wrong cases or scratched!
Non of them are in the right place and for some reason we’ve kept them after all these years. No one really uses CDs nowadays, we have speakers we can connect our phones too and in our cards we have USB cables we can connect our phones to to listen to music. Like videos, no one uses them but we all have that pointless collection of CDs stashed away in our loft.
These glass cups from McDonalds
This was something we were all adamant about collecting when we went to McDonalds when we were younger. These glasses were the best part about buying a meal and they are now proudly placed in our cup cupboard! If like me, you’re addicted to McDonalds, you probably still have about a cupboard full of these taking up space in your mums kitchen.
OR this one inside..
Which is why we have a back-up clothing line that goes inside our house that looks like this…We take up the entire space in our living room, bathroom or kitchen by standing this up and putting all our clothes on it to dry and half the time our clothes end up smelling of food.
Porridge in the cereal cupboard
In the cereal cupboard at home you have really random bits of cereal that you have left for months… things like Fruit N Fibre and Crunchy Nut. But one necessity is Porridge. You seem to have an endless supply of this stuff but there never seems to be anyone that eats it! My mum used to tell me if I ate all my porridge, I’d be rich when I was older, of course, it made me eat all my porridge, but I’m still waiting for those millions to drop into my bank…
The only porridge that tasted amazing was Chocolate Ready Brek, but I don’t think it’s acceptable for an adult to eat kids porridge every morning. Think I’d get some funny looks in work….
A completely random draw that you stuff every useless thing in
This is the drawer where you put all the food menus in, all your old mobile phones and of course the used batteries you never get rid of. Oh, and there’s always tubs of pills that went off in 2006. To actually shut the cupboard door you have to completely jam in all the stuff and force it shut. It’s always full of absolute crap, but once in a while something in there will come in handy.
The communal shoe spot
This is a spot in every person’s home. The place near the door where you kick off your shoes. Then there is a huge pile-up of shoes because you simply have nowhere else to put them, there’s shoes on there that people haven’t worn in years and theres always a pair of shoes that you whack on to take the bins out. I don’t think there’s enough room in my house to accommodate for the amount of shoes we all have.
A plastic bag full of plastic bags.
As if there wasn’t enough crap in your kitchen taking up space. I mean, what do we really need so many plastic bags for? There’s only so many things we can use plastic bags for but we always seem to have a plastic bag full of plastic bags stuffed in a drawer or cupboard somewhere don’t we!
Loads of takeaway containers piled up.
Most of them don’t even have matching lids and then when there are lids, we don’t have the matching container. Every time we get a takeaway in my house, my mum ALWAYS keeps the containers, as if they’re running out and we won’t ever be able to get our hands on a plastic container ever again. It’s not like we don’t have 1000 tupperware containers in our cupboards either.
About 20 instruction manuals.
There’s usually a bunch of instruction manuals wrapped up around an elastic band in that cupboard that’s full of crap in the kitchen. The instruction manuals are usually for appliances that you haven’t owned for about 5 years either but your mum always insists on keeping them in case we need them again one day. There’s always an instruction manual for something you don’t own anymore, but when you actually need a manual for the washing machine you’ve got, you can never find it.
A box full of batteries.
Who’s got a box, usually an old Quality Street tub, full of random crap. There’s always old batteries (half the time they don’t even work), a hammer, screw drivers and all sorts of useless sh*t that you know full well, no one in your house would even know how to use it. There’s always a time when your mum or dad decide to try out some DIY in the house and that box comes in handy. Probably once in the whole 20 odd years you’ve lived in your house.
A biscuit tin full of sewing equipment.
The amount of times I’ve found a biscuit tin lying around and thought it was full of biscuits….the funny thing is, I don’t actually think my mum can even sew and if she can I’ve not seen her sew ever in my entire life. I think it’s just a written rule that all British mums have to have a sewing kit in a biscuit tin.
A drawer full of old mobiles and random chargers.
When I say old mobile phones, I mean old. From the stone ages old. We have a drawer with a Nokia 3310, some sort of tiny silver flip phone that I don’t even think comes from this planet and an old house phone. The chargers in there, non of which match the phones may I add, all have broken wires and look like they’ve been chewed by our dog.
We live in a world where if we broke our phone, we’d probably be able to claim it on our insurance that day and have a brand new one within the week. Why do we insist on keeping our old phones?!
A bunch of coins.
So, since the Euro came in all those years ago, my parents haven’t managed to collect as many coins from different countries because most of the time, they holiday in Europe. But we have this pot that’s full of so many different coins from so many different countries. Big, small, gold, silver, Franc, Yen….you name it, you’d probably find it in our coin pot that’s just sat on our kitchen window sill for some reason.
An old Christmas tree and Christmas tree stand.
Why do we find it so hard to throw things away? We do in my house anyway. We’ve had an old Christmas tree stuck in our loft for the past couple of years that we’ve been meaning to throw away but every year when we go up there for our new one, we seem to forget to bring the old one down and throw it away….
A set of bath bombs.
Or bath salts or something that’s been shoved to the back of your wardrobe since 2010. You always end up getting a least one bath bomb set every Christmas. We’ve got about 3 in our bathroom and we don’t even have a bath so what else can we do with them other than shove them to the back of the cupboard and hope they just disappear magically.
An Argos catalogue.
Or a Yellow Pages from 2001. There’s usually a load of pages folded down or ripped out in the catalogues and they’re usually stuffed in a cupboard in your living room next to the biscuit tin full of sewing equipment and your mums photo albums from her childhood. Remember when it was the run up to Christmas when you were younger and you’d fold down the pages in the Argos catalogue so your mum would know what you wanted.
Roughly 2,000 takeaway menus.
None of which you use because you go to the same place every time and order the same thing. In fact, the woman in my local Chinese knows my name and order because I go in so much, but for some reason, there’s always a pile of takeaway menus in the kitchen draw that continue to grow and grow.
