Child Of The 1980’s

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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One of the nice things about having an ice lolly made by Walls or Lyons Maid, rather than a Tesco or Bejam (remember when Iceland was called Bejam? Well, it was in my home town anyway…) own brand lolly was that you got a joke on the stick after scoffing down the icy goodness. It almost made the ice cream headache (or brain freeze) you got from eating it too fast worthwhile, just so you could be first to read out the joke to your mates.

Of course, the jokes were generally not usually that funny, but that didn’t matter. In fact the ones that made you groan were often more popular than the ones that were funny, just because they were so bad. Here are some examples of the kind of joke you might get.

Q. What do astronauts have in their sandwiches?
A. Launch meat.

Q. Why did the dog cross the road?
A. Because it was stapled to the chicken.

Q. What is the difference between a duck?
A. One of it’s legs is both the same.

OK, maybe not that last one, but it was in one of the joke books that I had. To this day I still don’t understand that joke, yet still find it very amusing for some reason. But that’s just me…

Do kids ice creams still have jokes on them? I really don’t know! Perhaps I should buy one and find out, purely in the pursuit of research of course, you understand.

The UK decimalised its monetary system on February 15th 1971, and one of the new coins to replace the old system of pounds, shillings and pence was the Half Penny coin. Today it seems hard to believe that there was ever a need for such a small denomination, but these days 1p is such a small amount of money in real terms that it’s almost not worth having a One Pence coin. The only reason it still exists, I am convinced, is for purely psychological reasons. As an example, consider this. Why does £99.99 seem to feel a substantially smaller price than £100.00?

Anyway, back to the topic at hand, the dear old Half Penny. Sized slightly smaller than a One Pence piece, it was a “copper” coin, so called because of its colour rather than its composition, as it was actually made of bronze. One one side was Queen Elizabeth II’s head, and on the other a crown and the words NEW PENNY, and the fractional number 1/2. It kept this design for over ten years, but in 1982 it was finally decided that the decimal coinage wasn’t new any more, so the wording changed to HALF PENNY. This change was a bit of a waste of time however, as inflation finally caught up with the Half Penny in 1984, when it was deemed no longer necessary and removed from the UK coinage system.

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OK, when was the last time you got a soft drink and were given a paper straw to drink it with? Thought so. You can’t remember can you? These days all straws are plastic, but I remember the time that whenever you were given a drink as a child, you also got a paper straw to sup it up with.

The good old paper straw was made from a single strip of waxed paper wound in a spiral, to produce a narrow tube that was perfect for sucking up your Ribena whilst avoiding the dreaded purple smile effect, where the blackcurranty goodness stained the corners of your mouth when drinking straight from a glass. This was important if you didn’t want to incur the wrath of your Mum with her handkerchief with some spit on it…

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