These recollections are interesting because they sit somewhere between social history and everyday memory.
They are not necessarily dramatic events. Indeed, that is rather the point.
A girl worried about being late for school. A couple joked in a supermarket. Office workers exchanged banter. Friends celebrated a birthday. Former pupils compared school experiences over a drink.
Yet running through these stories is a reminder of how attitudes towards physical discipline, personal boundaries and acceptable behaviour have changed.
School corporal punishment that was once treated as routine would now be unacceptable in British state schools. Workplace behaviour that colleagues once ignored may today result in a complaint — and rightly so where physical contact is unwanted.
At the same time, consensual joking between adults remains a matter of personal boundaries and mutual understanding.
Perhaps that is what makes these memories worth recording.
They show us not simply what happened, but how differently people understood what was happening at the time.
And sometimes the most revealing pieces of social history are not found in official records at all.
They are found in supermarkets, offices, pubs, school corridors — and in the memories of the people who happened to be there.
