Author Topic: Your pick and mix top five  (Read 2714 times)

rogerzilla

  • When n+1 gets out of hand
Your pick and mix top five
« on: 17 September, 2019, 05:51:43 pm »
I'll start this off.

  • Foam bananas
  • White mice
  • Pink pigs' faces
  • Chocolate peanuts
  • Jazzies
Hard work sometimes pays off in the end, but laziness ALWAYS pays off NOW.

Re: Your pick and mix top five
« Reply #1 on: 17 September, 2019, 05:53:19 pm »
'Gainsborough' strawberry creams

Mrs Pingu

  • Who ate all the pies? Me
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Re: Your pick and mix top five
« Reply #2 on: 17 September, 2019, 07:16:05 pm »
Probably not now being as I am old and have sensitive teeth but when I was younger
Cola Cubes
Crispets
Flying Saucers
Do not clench. It only makes it worse.

ian

Re: Your pick and mix top five
« Reply #3 on: 17 September, 2019, 09:42:14 pm »
Hmm, this was a daily conundrum, really the most vexatious issue of my younger life (before the lacy dawn of the Kays catalogue lingerie section). Go large and include a max-factor item – a Curly Whirly (back then the size of a ladder) or a Caramac (no one to this day knows what they are made of, but it was rumoured to grow in Scotland) would set you back an ungodly 7p, a Wham bar about 5p, forcing you into major Mojo territory (two for a penny) to bulk up. Alternatively the spread. Jazzies a deffo, as were the white mice, and bonbons (both colours). Anything made of foam was generally good (bananas and shrimp). Cola bottles (fizzy!) galore (better than cubes, unless they're pineapple). Random liquorice allsorts especially the bobbly aniseed one that probably tastes of old people, which children either love or hate. Flying saucers were a bit disappointing, a proper sugar fix was in the sherbet fountain, the liquorice straw would generally gum up quickly, forcing you to basically snort it like a junior cokehead (that was how Daniella Westbrook got started, sherbet). Drumsticks were mostly essential (to this day, some of my fillings are actually a drumstick amalgam). Fried eggs were a bit disappointing. Fizzy peaches, which doubled up as one of your five a day (health hadn't actually been invented back then, sugar could get you through to the evening meal*). Nobody touched Fingers of Fudge, it was fact that you'd grow up to be 'kiddie fiddler' if you ate them.

It was important to remember to leave room for the Fruit Salad (see, well ahead on the climb towards five-a-day before it had even been invented) and Black Jacks, significant parts of any balanced diet.

We used to steal loads of pick n mix from Woolies as they never figured out that putting it at the front was a temptation too much for passing school children on dares. That and employing a guard who had last seen action in the war. The first one. My friend Robert D. was the king of sugary klepto, the emperor of sweet plenty, he'd rob bags of the stuff. Utterly awesome, well, until we saw him buying it. That said, he nicked the money for it from his mum's purse, so kudos. (As a step-up from catalogue jubbles, his dad had the most impressive library of printed smut, which was curated and loaned on thoroughly reasonable terms and with typical kleptic aplomb by his son). By the by, back when Friends Reunited was a briefly a thing, I checked up what he did now, and he's a financial advisor.

Good god, my childhood was carved out of sugar. On Saturday, me and my thirty cousins (to be pedantic, thirty-three) would buy entire kilos of broken biscuits from the market and then go bounce around like we were trapped in a giant pinball machine. The only stricture our collective parents placed upon us was that whatever we did, it was somewhere else because they had cigarettes to smoke.

*potato fritter and chips, or if you were willing to go more exotic, potato fritter and half-and-half chips and rice with curry sauce, though your mum wouldn't let you back in the house if you smelled of curry. Curry didn't actually exist, only chip shop curry, that was only available in the cheerfully racist 'Chinkie' chip shop which, to the best of my knowledge was run by a bloke called Norman who likely couldn't find China on a map of the Orient.

ian

Re: Your pick and mix top five
« Reply #4 on: 17 September, 2019, 09:50:16 pm »
Oh, wait, was that top five. I'm still coasting down from the sugar rush, decades later.

1. Jazzies.
2. Foam bananas
3. White mice
4. Shrimp
5. Fizzy cola bottles.

But really, every day was a plentiful pancreas-poking sugar safari back then.

I really don't eat sugar these days for some reason.

Mrs Pingu

  • Who ate all the pies? Me
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Re: Your pick and mix top five
« Reply #5 on: 18 September, 2019, 08:43:06 pm »
oh yeah, fizzy cola bottles.
Basically anything fizzy or sour
Foamy bananas are minging.

What are jazzies?
Do not clench. It only makes it worse.

Mrs Pingu

  • Who ate all the pies? Me
    • Twitter
Re: Your pick and mix top five
« Reply #6 on: 18 September, 2019, 08:43:21 pm »
Oooh skull crushers!
Do not clench. It only makes it worse.

ian

Re: Your pick and mix top five
« Reply #7 on: 18 September, 2019, 08:56:51 pm »
Oh, I love foam bananas. That's a sentence that looks wrong but feels right.

Jazzies are little chocolate buttons with coloured bits on top. There's no upper limit on how many you can eat.

Re: Your pick and mix top five
« Reply #8 on: 19 September, 2019, 08:50:36 am »
Foamy bananas are minging.
This.  The shrimps are horrid too.
Cola bottles, fizzy or otherwise, are lush.

ian

Re: Your pick and mix top five
« Reply #9 on: 19 September, 2019, 09:03:20 am »
Some of you people have gone wrong.

Re: Your pick and mix top five
« Reply #10 on: 19 September, 2019, 10:39:51 am »
foam shrimps
foam bananas
cola bottles
cola cubes
cola pips

by foam I mean the ones that would dissolve in your mouth, not the newer ones that are an aerated jelly
I do not like Percy pig or any of his stupid friends

Have they stopped the shandy beer bottles/beer glasses? I remember them being bigger than coke bottles


Re: Your pick and mix top five
« Reply #11 on: 19 September, 2019, 09:50:29 pm »
Worryingly I can remember getting 8 black Jack's or fruit salads for a penny 👀
the slower you go the more you see

hellymedic

  • Just do it!
Re: Your pick and mix top five
« Reply #12 on: 19 September, 2019, 10:00:30 pm »
I was thinking that for me, these were mostly 'penny sweets'.

Black Jacks and Fruit Salad gave most sweets for the penny. I loved them all (and enjoyed the guilt from eating non-Kosher confectionary!)

ian

Re: Your pick and mix top five
« Reply #13 on: 19 September, 2019, 10:04:39 pm »
In my time, only mojo chews were sub-penny. There was plenty of penny stuff as you stepped towards a big-ticket item like a ladder-sized Curly Whirly.

Re: Your pick and mix top five
« Reply #14 on: 20 September, 2019, 06:24:49 pm »
Worryingly I can remember getting 8 black Jack's or fruit salads for a penny 👀

Ah, it was only 4 for me  :)
We are making a New World (Paul Nash, 1918)

Re: Your pick and mix top five
« Reply #15 on: 20 September, 2019, 06:50:13 pm »
Youth.................  ::-) :)
the slower you go the more you see

Paul

  • L'enfer, c'est les autos.
Re: Your pick and mix top five
« Reply #16 on: 20 September, 2019, 07:01:48 pm »
Worryingly I can remember getting 8 black Jack's or fruit salads for a penny 👀

Ah, it was only 4 for me  :)
I think We were getting two-a-penny in 1976.
What's so funny about peace, love and understanding?

ian

Re: Your pick and mix top five
« Reply #17 on: 20 September, 2019, 08:32:13 pm »
Blackjacks and Fruit Salads were 1p in the 80s.

hellymedic

  • Just do it!
Re: Your pick and mix top five
« Reply #18 on: 20 September, 2019, 11:29:44 pm »
Worryingly I can remember getting 8 black Jack's or fruit salads for a penny 👀

Ah, it was only 4 for me  :)

Inflation and decimalisation.

They might have been 8 for 1d in 1964; by 1972 they were 4 for 1p I think; that's quite a hike!

Re: Your pick and mix top five
« Reply #19 on: 21 September, 2019, 12:02:56 am »
Blackjacks and Fruit Salads were 1p in the 80s.

Four for 1p in the 70 as Helly says.
I think you'll find it's a bit more complicated than that.

Re: Your pick and mix top five
« Reply #20 on: 21 September, 2019, 08:10:31 pm »
Blackjack was my nickname at school.
Those of you who know my full name, might understand why that may've been.

nicknack

  • Hornblower
Re: Your pick and mix top five
« Reply #21 on: 22 September, 2019, 08:49:43 am »
Blackjacks and Fruit Salads were 1p in the 80s.

Four for 1p in the 70 as Helly says.
I'm sure I remember calling them 'farthing chews' back in the late 50s - 60s.
There's no vibrations, but wait.

Re: Your pick and mix top five
« Reply #22 on: 22 September, 2019, 09:08:05 am »
Cola bottles
White mice
Fruit salad
Cola bottles again
Fudge cubes

Bought for somewhere around a half-p or a penny (not d).

After that I think I more went for things in a packet
Space dust
Did dabs
Star Wars cards (didn’t like the bubble gum)