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Archive for the ‘Memories’ Category

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Car Seatbelts - Clunk Click Every Trip

Posted by Big Boo on June 3rd, 2008

Clunk Click Every TripCars have always had seatbelts as far as I am concerned, at least in the front of the car anyway. In Europe it became compulsory for all new cars to be fitted with front seatbelts in 1965, but it wasn’t until 1986 in the UK that rear seatbelts also became compulsory in all new cars sold.

However, just because it became compulsory to have seatbelts in cars, it didn’t become law to wear a front seatbelt until 1983! Up until then most people probably still didn’t wear their belt, but when the fines started to come into action most people started to belt up, as it were. In 1989 it became law that all children travelling in the back of a car must wear a seatbelt (if fitted) and in 1991 this also applied to adults. These days it is considered normal to wear your seatbelt, and as the dramatic footage of crash test dummies flying through car windscreens shows, this is probably a very good thing!

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Marble Solitaire

Posted by Big Boo on May 20th, 2008

Marble SolitaireMy uncle had one of these when I was a child and I remember that I used to always love playing with it whenever we went to visit. As the name of the game suggests it is a single player game, and is one that is incredibly simple to learn but incredibly hard to complete. You start with a cross shaped arrangement of marbles, with the middle marble missing. You can then remove marbles from the board by jumping other marbles over them horizontally or vertically. To complete the game you should end up with a single marble left on the board, occupying the central space.

I must have played this game hundreds of times, and I don’t think I ever completed it perfectly once. I certainly got down to having two or three marbles left on the board several times, and maybe even a single marble in the wrong position once or twice. This didn’t matter though because the game took such a short amount of time to play that you could always have another go really quickly.

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Black Plimsolls

Posted by Big Boo on April 28th, 2008

Black Canvas PlimsollsThe world is a strange place, and there’s no accounting for taste, but I do find it somewhat bizarre that the humble Plimsoll shoe is currently considered an item of fashion, in the UK at least. Apparently David Beckham himself is a big fan of them! Not bad for a shoe normally worn by primary school children that was originally designed as an item of footwear for wearing on the beach - one step up from a flip flop, another item of footwear which also seems to enjoy a strange popularity.

The humble Plimsoll, or Pump as it was sometimes called, is a shoe usually made out of black or white coloured canvas, but normally black. Normally they have no laces but instead have a piece of thick elastic that goes over the top of the foot to keep it on securely. This is why they were usually part of the school uniform for primary school, as they were easy to take on and off, useful for children who haven’t quite mastered the art of tying their own shoelaces yet.

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Lucozade - Replaces Lost Energy

Posted by Big Boo on April 17th, 2008

LucozadeThe image shown here looks as though it probably predates the 1980’s by at least two decades, but it does indicate the thing I most remember about Lucozade from when I was a kid. Nowadays bottled soft drinks most always come in plastic bottles, but back in the 1980’s we still used glass bottles. Lucozade was always special though, in that it looked like it was made from orange glass by virtue of the orange cellophane in which the bottle was wrapped. It was always disappointing to find that the bottle was actually completely clear once the cellophane had been removed.

Back in the 1980’s Lucozade was looked on as a “special” drink, and certainly not something that you would drink on a day to day basis. Today of course the idea of the energy drink is rife, and Lucozade finds itself fitting in with this niche in the world of fizzy pop, but back then you would only drink Lucozade after a bout of illness. Nobody in their right mind could ever say they enjoy vomiting, but being ill was looked forward to in a peculiar way when you were a child if it meant you were allowed to drink a bottle of Lucozade as a result.

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Easter Eggs

Posted by Big Boo on March 24th, 2008

Easter EggsFirst off I hope you all had a nice relaxing Easter weekend, and aren’t feeling too sick now from scoffing too many chocolate Easter Eggs. Today I thought I’d reminisce a little about Easter Eggs past (and present) that have stuck in my mind for one reason or another. So without further ado, let’s get the egg rolling…

Yorkie Egg - I used to love Yorkie chocolate as a child due to it’s seemingly massive chunk size. The current advertising campaign for Yorkie is “Not for Girls”, but the bar as always been advertised in a similar manner. I remember the old TV adverts featuring an array of burly 18 Wheeler Truck drivers, who needed a big bar to keep them satisfied whilst driving their lorry across country.

Stemming from the TV adverts came the idea of packaging the Yorkie Easter Egg as a big truck. The cardboard box was made in the shape of a truck, with the egg being hauled along on the back. Another year they took this a step further and made the cardboard box into a cement mixing lorry, with the egg being the big rotatey mixing chamber on the back.

Cadbury’s Creme Eggs - These were originally launched in 1971, and are still a firm favourite today. To be honest I’m surprised they’ve been around for so long, as I wasn’t around in 1971 yet I seem to remember them being launched when I was little. Obviously not, this fact came from Cadbury’s own website so it must be true.

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Mail Order Catalogues

Posted by Big Boo on March 17th, 2008

1980’s Littlewoods CatalogueThe 1980’s was a very popular decade for the mail order catalogue, and whilst many of these old catalogues still exist today they are not what they used to be in terms of size and range of goods. This can probably be attributed to two main causes - one being the Internet (and indeed most of these catalogues have an Internet presence too) the other being the fact that people are now much more able to get to the shops, now that we have Sunday shopping and more people have access to cars and other forms of transport than ever before.

Some of the best known catalogues available were Littlewoods (presumably the same Littlewoods as the high street shop and the football pools), Kays, Empire Stores and Marshall Ward. The interesting thing about the way the catalogues worked was that they were normally commission based. Once you signed up for a particular catalogue you became an “agent” for that catalogue, and would receive a percentage back on all the things that were bought by you. To make the most of this it was therefore important that you persuaded as many friends and relations as possible to flick through the book and order something.

Most of these mail order catalogues allowed you to buy just about anything you could think of, from electronics to toys to garden furniture to clothes. In fact, clothes was where the catalogues were predominantly focused, with probably most of the book devoted to womens, mens and childrens outfits. One area where they excelled over shops was with the range available for a particular item of clothing. Quite often the catalogues carried clothes in the harder to buy sizes, and each item would normally be available in a number of different colours. Presumably in an attempt to appear more up-market, the colours were never black, white, grey, green and beige but black, white, charcoal, olive and stone.

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Nitty Nora The Bug Explorer

Posted by Big Boo on February 13th, 2008

Head LicePictured here is a human head louse. Ugly little bugger ain’t he. But how did we combat such an ugly foe? This is a job for Nitty Nora - The Bug Explorer!

I am of course referring to the lady in the white lab coat who came every so often to your school to check the hair of every kid looking for head lice, or nits as they are more popularly known. Her name probably wasn’t Nora, but her appearance struck dread into every kids heart. Every school class took it in turns to line up before Nora, who would then examine your hair by pulling it about checking for both nits and, more importantly, their eggs. This wasn’t usually too bad for boys, but for girls with long hair it was much more of a chore, as they normally had to have any plaits etc. taken out first, which meant that the younger girls were then wandering about for the rest of the day with a tangled mess of hair.

The worst thing was she wouldn’t tell you that you had nits (if indeed you had). No, that was revealed at the end of the day when an envelope was given to each child with nits to take home to their Mum. This was probably more embarassing since every kid in the class saw you collect your envelope. It didn’t matter how much you protested that nits only lived in people with clean hair (I’ve never worked out if that’s true), you were then called a fleabag for the next week or so, and no other kids wanted to play with you because their parents had told them to keep their distance, just in case.

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Chinny Reckon

Posted by Big Boo on January 18th, 2008

Chinny Reckon - It’s Jimmy HillHere’s a puzzle for you. Just how do school playground catchphrases spread so quickly, and who invents them in the first place. Looking back it seems strange how suddenly everyone at your school would suddenly latch on to the latest fun thing to say. I’m not talking about catchphrases from TV shows either. No, I’m talking about those weird little sayings that pop up seemingly from nowhere, and for me a great example is the “Chinny Reckon” insult.

What a great insult “Chinny Reckon” was. It’s main use was to let somebody know that you frankly didn’t believe whatever it was they had just said. For example:-

Kid 1: My Dad’s just got a new Ferrari.
Kid 2: Chinny Reckon.

It was most important to get the correct pronunciation, as you had to make it sound as sarcastic as possible, and the best way to do this was to split the word “reckon” into it’s two syllables and say them with as much disdain as you could muster.

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