Child Of The 1980’s

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…

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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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.

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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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!

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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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.

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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When I was a kid we never really bothered with the Christmas Sales until it was too late and all the bargains had already been snapped up. The main reason for this was that we used to spend most of Christmas week visiting or being visited by various relatives, so we never had the time. When I got a bit older the visiting of relatives begain to stop happening so much, so we might pop down the shops to see if we could get something with any Christmas money we had been given. Normally we came back with the money still in our pocket…

There was one particular shop in the town where I live that did have some good bargains though. This was the local independant department store, a bit like one of the John Lewis stores but on a bit smaller scale. They would always have some great bargains on some of the more expensive items they sold, such as furniture, and because of this people would actually camp out in the shop entrance and along the street on Christmas Day and Boxing Day (in those days Boxing Day was still a non-shopping day, not like it is today) waiting for the shop to open so they could run and claim the bargain they had their eye on. The sale items were usually advertised in the window, so people had a good idea of what they wanted to get. One year the queue was so long it even made it onto the local television news!

The other thing I liked about the Christmas sales were the TV adverts advertising them. Normally these were national department stores and furniture stores. The one that made me laugh the most was the one for Courts, the furniture store that is no longer trading in the UK, although they do still have a presence in other countries. Courts always seemed to have a sale on all year round, so when their advert came on you always thought it was only about a week since the last one. Courts always seemed to have an advert some time in January saying “Sale must end soon” which was even funnier.

I’m sure that the vast majority of you looked forward to the end of school term, for the obvious reason that you were going to get some time off school to do whatever you wanted. That last school day before the holidays always felt special, and it was especially good when your teacher felt that way too and decided we could put normal lessons to one side and enjoy ourselves.

The best chances of the teacher getting into the holiday mood were at the end of a full term when you would be on holiday for two weeks or more, that is the Easter, Summer and Christmas holidays. The half term break was not generally deemed exciting enough for the teacher to give the class some fun time.

Primary school was the best for end of term fun. Our school allowed us to bring in games from home to play with our school mates, and whilst there may have been some work left for us to do, such as cleaning out our tidy trays or helping the teachers remove that terms paintings from the school walls so we could take them home, plenty of time was still available for play.

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Let’s face it, kids are not naturally tidy people. So how do you solve the problem of keeping mess to a minimum when you have 20 or so of them together for long periods of time in a single room? When I was at Primary School this problem was solved by giving each child was issued their own “tidy tray”, as the teachers referred to them.

At my school the tidy tray was a sturdy plastic tray large enough to comfortably hold a couple of magazines placed side by side. It was about 10 centimetres or so deep, so you could put a fair amount of stuff in there, and that’s exactly what you did. The purpose of the tray was to store all your exercise books, pens, pencils and other stationary items, reading books, artwork and basically anything else that you might possibly need during an average day at school. The trays were all stored in a big cabinet with slots, and a sticker was put on the front with your name on it, written in thick black marker pen in that large loopy handwriting that only teachers seem to be able to write in.

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The 1980’s spawned a number of dubious fashions, with the usual suspects of big hair and shoulder pads normally being mentioned first. However, during my teenage years the fashion it was cool to be seen sporting was the simple Terry Towelling sock.

Doesn’t sound all that fashionable, does it?

Looking back, this obviously came out of one of those rebellious teenage moments where kids don’t want to have to conform to rules. In this case, the rule was one of school uniform. In my secondary school, boys were only supposed to wear dark coloured socks with proper shoes. This wasn’t a particularly strict rule. It wasn’t “thou must weareth black socks”, just dark coloured sufficed. Despite this, the teenage rebels fought back by wearing their sports socks and trainers at all times. At this time the sports sock of choice was the short terry towelling kind that came up above your ankle but not quite as high as a normal pair of socks.

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