Have you ever had, or used, a walkie-talkie?

As they're currently in the news.

Me and my brother were given walkie-talkies for Christmas one year in the mid to late 80s. They were great and we had lots of fun speaking to each other from one end of the garden or house to the other. They had beeping buttons on them which you could send each other morse code messages - not that I had a clue what that was at the time, but they were fun to beep. I think I still have my handset somewhere in the loft.

Ours weren't exactly like these but they had the morse code dashes and dots printed on them like that and had pull-out aerials.

Oh yes, they used to pick up random voices from other people! I used to think they were like foreign criminals (that's probably what I was told for excitement reasons) but in later years I remember hearing our Northern Irish neighbour from across the road talking so I think it was picking up the signals of neighbouring cordless household phones. Still, quite exciting - if a little worrying.

Yes. Similar circumstances to you. The novelty wore off fast.

I preferred the baby monitor the gossip upstairs had - the older kid was my age and the younger in a cot in the same room. If you switched those around and put the noise generator one in the living room you got all the best and clearest adult chat as they sat around getting pissed and smoking weed drinking tea, while you played*, listened in, and occasionally glanced over to check the sleeping baby was still alive.

It was high quality goss - who’s got AIDS now in the what was a close knit neighbourhood community, who’s in court for slicing a ball off her cheating boyfriend, who was on the fiddle, who had a young student/tourist that week and showed him the hospitable ways of the London woman, etc. My friend and I knew who was splitting up and why before their own kids or spouse knew it was happening. Keeping it back is where I learned to be restrained. Just because you can spill deets doesn’t mean you should and lose access to the goldmine.

*one of our favourite games was sneak out a handbag from one of the guests (not our mothers) and examine or use the contents, while replacing the odd thing we wanted like an item of make up with a joke, like a packet of Mates - easy to get in bulk around 1980’s Soho, then sneak it back in.

I've never had one but, when I was younger, me and one of my sisters, made walkie talkies by tying two paper cups together with a piece of string, and talking into them.

We could hear each other, loud and clear.

Admittedly, we were only five foot apart, because that's how long the string was.