I really don't think that frequency was 'normal' in the UK at all. I'm a similar age and we had a takeaway maybe once a month (usually fish and chips, occasionally a curry or chinese). Meals out were a bit rarer, usually a pub but occasionally McDonalds. For the generation above mine, my grandparents on both side basically never ate takeaways unless it was fish and chips on holiday - culturally it just wasn't a thing. I just asked my wife who was much wealthier growing up than I was and she similarly reckoned she didn't eat out much / have takeaways often.
Thanks for relating your experience. Wow is it hard to get any concrete figures on questions like "how many takeaways did an average household get per week in 2004". Also pretty tricky to chase down the references from the article you linked.
I've no doubt that my own childhood was atypical in many respects. Relatively well off, only two kids, dad was a first generation immigrant so perhaps had fewer financial and cultural constraints. When I was a teenager at home from 2000-2006 the data suggests that spending on takeaways and eating out had been surging up to that point.
Either way I will always fondly remember having a donner kebab on a Wednesday evening, sat in the kitchen watching Star Trek Enterprise on the telly on its spinning turntable.
I agree with you about grandparents though. I think the closest mine would ever have gotten was a microwave meal.
Looking at economic stats, spending on food and drink outside of the home grew enormously between 1992 and 2004 to overtake spending on food within the home: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/j.1467-3010...