Remember sweet tobacco anyone?

Another of my favourite sweets as a kid was sweet tobacco.

Again not a politically correct name for kids stuff these days, back in the sixties it didn't matter.

Sweet tobacco was a mass of sweet sugar strings, usually reddish brown in colour.

The mass came in a small paper pouch like proper adult stuff and you took out out what you wanted to eat. The taste was super sweet, very sugary.

It had different names I think too. Sweet tobacco, Pirates' Gold, maybe even sweet spice, something like that.

Ring any sweet bells readers?

what's your christmas memory?

As the Christmas festival finally turns full circle for another year and fades into recent memory its both easy to recall parts of it and already hard to remember the whole.

My enduring memory of the festive fortnight were the four days over Christmas itself spent with close family. It was a special time for the five of us, all having fun doing not a lot in particular in the same house.

What is your lasting memory of Christmas just gone?

Love Me Tender

As the possibility of finding good space toys these days becomes even slimmer, I find I am drawn to other collecting strands to satisfy my demand for nostalgia. As a boy, trains and locomotives were very much a part of everyday life, as my dad kept his own paper version of a 'blog' with scrapbooks full of cuttings from magazines and books. His passion for trains has lately rubbed off on me and was brought to the fore a few years back when I was sat in the attic in Woodsy's, rummaging through some of his old stock. Out came a show box full of odds and ends and within them, were a number of small trains. Being the incredibly generous soul that he is, he gave me them.

Amongst the different types were some tiny, single piece plastic castings with 'Life Guard' written on the side. This week, looking around the worlds attic, Ebay, I spotted some more. Today they arrived, sitting in an old kitchen matchbox.

It's almost impossible to find more information on them, but they appear to be a free premium issued with Life Guard disinfectant, probably in the late fifties, or early sixties. I certainly don't recall them, although I do remember the disinfectant!

Each little piece is around an inch long and will couple together. Hopefully, I now have one of each model - locomotive, tender, freight car, tanker and caboose.

They are lovely little things, reminiscent of the glory days of toys when children could be trusted not to try and mindlessly eat anything big enough to fit in their mouth!

Remember these toys from the eighties?

Thought I'd post some of the toys and stuff my daughter had as a kid in the 1980's. Not our generation but one day soon they'll be collected by their own if not already. Not sure of the names of all of these now.

 

Bath oil balls

playing with pleistocene

A youngster recently asked me a good question.

If oil is made of fossils like plants and dinosaurs and plastic is made from oil then are plastic toy dinosaurs made of real dinosaurs?

Whoosh!

I said it was a good one!

husquvarna bat mower

I was amazed to see this in a magazine.

I thought it was a batmobile pedal car!

It's the husquvarna robot lawn mower no less.

I keep expecting Christian Bale to leap out of this beast!

Like any bat vehicle it works best at night and here's a short clip of it in action complete with headlights courtesy of You Tube.

It may even drive in and out of its own small garage!

I suspect it uses GPS satellite technology to do all this!

Something like the SpaceX ATS or Lunar Orbitor perhaps! Ha ha

Seriously, a night roaming robot mower? Why does the lawn need to be cut when we're asleep?

gruesome christmas

As the memory of Xmo dims like a fading Pifco torch I thought I'd post a couple of pics of my Chrissie prezzies.

It was a horrifying haul of gifts from my family, who really got into the spirit.

Included were the complete DVD box sets of BBC Ghost Stories for Christmas and the US series Tales from the Crypt; two Readers Digest atlases of mysteries and legends across the UK [modern versions of similar books I had in the Seventies] and Creepy Crawls, a book describing the locations of horror films in the US and UK.

My gruesome pal Bill also provided me with the complete audio books of ghost master MR James, as well as a chilling Japanese pottery demon jar.

Its going to be a grisly few months enjoying this lot!

when did you start to drink coffee?

As a Sixties kid I drank pop.

Fizzy pop. 

There were tons of different kinds: Tizer, Dandelion and Burdock, Lemonade to name just three of my burpy faves [what were yours?]

At some point in my life I began to drink tea and coffee.

Its hard to believe, they eventually took over from pop!

I can't imagine I drank coffee as a kid. 

I know I drank hot sweet tea, cocoa, horlicks, Bournvita and occasionally bovril beef tea.

So when did coffee creep in? I've no idea! Milky coffee seems to ring a bell as a possible starting point as my old Mum loved the stuff with a Garibaldi biscuit.

When did you start to drink coffee readers?

What do you drink now?