Child Of The 1980's

Do you remember how as a kid there were some sweets and snacks that your parents would buy you normally, but others were considered a treat? Notice how quite often it also coincided that whenever you were allowed to have one of those “treat” items, you’re parents were likely to have one as well?

A good example of this in our family was the Cornetto ice cream. Back in the Eighties the Cornetto was a new idea still, and as such was often twice the price of other ice creams. If my parents weren’t having an ice cream then I would probably be allowed a Lemonade Sparkle or if I was lucky a Walls Feast (yummy), but Cornettos were generally off limits unless they were having one too.

I certainly used to enjoy having a Cornetto when allowed though, and at the time I much preferred them to the standard Mr. Whippy style ice cream, or indeed the scoop of Soft Scoop Vanilla on a cone. I liked the way the ice cream went right to the bottom, so you didn’t have to worry about pushing the ice cream down the cone with your tongue to prevent having to eat half a dry cone on its own.

I recall there being four flavours originally, which in order of my own personal preference were Mint Choc Chip, Strawberry, Chocolate and Hazelnut and Rum ‘n’ Raisin.

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I’ve never been good at blowing bubbles with bubble gum. It’s just something I can’t seem to do, no matter how hard I try. My only explanation for this is that I’m one of those people who can’t curl their tongue up at the sides, which I seem to recall was used as an example of genetics when I did Biology at school.

However, bubble blower or not, I still enjoyed the odd piece of bubble gum to chew on now and again, and Hubba Bubba was most definitely one of the nicer varieties available. A lot of bubble gum either tasted bad or was very hard to get chewing (or both), a good example of this being Bazooka.

Hubba Bubba was different, in that it was fairly soft from the very first chew, and all the different varieties of it had a pleasant and long lasting taste. Each packet contained five pieces, which were of a fairly decent chunky size. It was also supposed to be really good for blowing bubbles (not that I can vouch for that) since it’s slogan was “Big bubbles, no troubles“.

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Over the last couple of years the controversial Sex Pistol John Lydon (aka Johnny Rotten) has been advertising Country Life butter and has helped put the brand back on people’s shopping lists, but back in the Eighties this particular brand was being advertising by four men made from the stuff.

There were four Country Life Butter Men, though there were no real distinguishing features between them and they looked pretty much identical. They were presumably made from butter since they were seen to live within a packet of the dairy product in question.

The adverts featured the four Butter Mens singing a song in West Country accents, which always made them sound like they were being forced by The Wurzels (though whether that is the case or not I really don’t know). The lyrics to this song will forever be etched into my subconscious, and they went like this…

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OK, this isn’t one that would have been aimed at a Child of the 1980’s, more an Adult of the 1980’s, but it certainly has a bit of an Eighties vibe about it.

The Eighties was a decade that saw some people striving to try and make themselves look more “middle class”, for want of a better way of putting it. People started to live the Yuppie (Young Upward Mobile) lifestyle, and as well as carrying around a Filofax they liked to host dinner parties for their friends, and Baileys Irish Cream soon became an instant part of the make up of such an evening, along with Ferrero Rocher or After Eight mints.

Baileys first came onto the market in 1974, and though the bottle may say it was created by a certain Andrew Bailey of the R.A. Bailey Company, this is nothing but a big marketing lie. Baileys was however the first of the Irish Cream liqueurs, a mix of alcohol and cream along with some other flavoursome ingredients including chocolate and vanilla.

Cleverly the cream doesn’t go bad thanks to the alcohol acting as a preservative, although the shelf life of a bottle is officially listed as 30 months. Not that that will probably be of too much concern to most people as Baileys is one of those alcoholic drinks that is very easy to drink!

Baileys has since been imitated by a number of alcoholic beverage makers, but it is still undoubtedly seen as the cream of the crop, if you’ll pardon the rather obvious pun. In more recent years there have also been new flavours of Baileys released, including mint chocolate and caramel, and there was also a short lived attempt at creating a Baileys based alcopop, called Baileys Glide.

“Ambassador, with these Rocher you are really spoiling us!”

Any article about Ferrero Rocher would be incomplete without the above immortal line and a picture of a giant pyramid of those golden balls, so I thought I might as well get those bits out of the way to start off with!

Introduced in 1982, and despite (or perhaps because of?) some truly terrible advertising, Ferrero Rocher have somehow managed to become the after dinner party treat of choice, usurping previous king the After Eight mint. If you want to give a little gift to a more discerning person, somehow Ferrero Rocher seem to fit the bill perfectly.

To be fair, they are actually quite nice to eat, with their perfectly roasted hazelnut, crispy outer shell and that lovely gooey creamy stuff in the middle. They do give off a certain air of luxury, especially with their elegant gold foil presentation, but the thought of that TV commercial is still never far away, is it?

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Stuck for a gift for a sweet toothed Eighties fan? Here are a selection of items I’ve come across which might solve a Christmas present for you!

Firstly, I’ve made no secret of the fact that I’m a big fan of Ghostbusters, so you can imagine the massive grin that appeared on my face when I saw that Firebox are offering you the chance to buy your very own box of Stay Puft Marshmallows.

They come in packs of 24 marshmallows, which are a decent size and certainly look delicious – all fluffy and cube like. For some bizarre reason they have also been caffeinated, so they should give you both a sugar rush and a caffeine wake up call! At a penny under 25 quid they aren’t cheap admittedly, but they do come in a nice presentation box featuring a picture of who else but Mr. Stay Puft the Marshmallow Man.

If Marshmallows aren’t really your thing, perhaps jelly sweets are instead? Firebox have something for you too in the form of a Giant Gummi Bear!

These really do have to be seen to be believed. These big boys are equivalent to around 1400 regular sized Gummi Bears, and are no less than 24cm tall. They are available in cherry, blue raspberry, cola and orange flavours. Remember when your Mum used to tell you “don’t eat it all at once“? I think in this case that is probably sound advice.

And if that is just too ridiculously big for you, then there’s a slightly more sane (only slightly) version coming in at 11cm tall which is also mounted on a stick, making it possibly a little easier to eat to boot.

In my entire life I’m pretty sure I’ve only tried R White’s Lemonade a handful of times, yet if I was asked to name a manufacturer of lemonade I have no doubt it would be the R White’s name that I would mention first.

I’ve really no idea whether R White’s is any better or worse than any other brand of lemonade (though I suspect it is one of the better ones) so why is it that the mention of lemonade instantly conjures up the R White’s name for me? Quite simply, it’s because of the TV advert for it.

The “Secret Lemonade Drinker” ad was first used to advertise R White’s in 1973, and was used until 1984. It featured a man creeping downstairs in his pyjamas in the middle of the night to go and feed his addiction to a certain fizzy lemon flavoured beverage, all played out to a brilliant backing song, which starts off in hushed tones and ends up building to a rock ‘n’ roll crescendo, which wakes up his wife who comes down to investigate.

The song was written and performed by Ross MacManus, with help from his teenage son Declan, who went on to change his name to Elvis Costello and have a successful music career!

Here’s the ad in all it’s now-slightly-faded-looking glory…

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Today’s post is my little way of taking part in Blog Action Day 2010, a yearly event which takes a subject of world importance and attempts to catch people’s attention by asking bloggers to write a piece on that subject. This year the chosen topic is water, so here goes…

In the mid to late Seventies, bottled water started to appear on shop shelves. Brands such as Perrier and Evian were sold on the premise of them being of a much higher quality, and therefore better for you, than plain old tap water.

Another difference was that it was also available in carbonated form, so you could still enjoy a fizzy drink with your meal, but without all that extra sugar and flavourings.

Whilst most normal people initially scoffed at the idea of paying for water when it was effectively free when you turned on a tap, by the time the Eighties rolled around drink bottled water was becoming the trendy thing to do. People also started to become far more health conscious and sales of bottled water started to rise, with more and more brands joining the market.

The growth of the bottle water market has now reached the point where the global value of the bottled water market is said to be approaching an incredible $86,000,000,000! This huge amount of money is quite frightening, particularly when you consider that the vast majority of the total can be attributed to sales in countries where most people have access to perfectly adequate tap water.

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