RSS
Cars 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!
My 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.
The 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 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.
First 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…
The 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.
Pictured 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!
Here’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.