It was that decade in which the generation that grew up never having it so good, sought some mild middle-class comforts for their shaggy-haired, flared-jeans-clad kids (like me) and in the process instilled a sense of low expectation in regard to the concept of luxury.
Tinned fruit salad for instance. The thrill of eating just one of the meagre number of cherries you’d find in a tin of fruit salad was beyond any experience I’ve had since from Tesco’s Finest range. See, I expect that to be good. But the sheer scarcity of cherries in any tin (relative to grapes) bestowed on that product a special character that you just cannot recreate in our disgustingly opulent supermarket aisles these days.
The gradual integration of “dessert” into our routine tea-time meals was a defining feature of the period. Fuck Jamie Mockney-Twat Dick-Face Oliver, I was cooking while he was still scooping the shit out of his own nappy and eating it. I handled an electric hand-whisk like Hurricane Higgins handled a snooker cue, and I could conjure up ANY Angel Delight from the whole range of four flavours. If Dad won on the horses that week, Mum might even let me open the fruit salad and use the sole cherry to decorate this dessert. (If he lost, we’d make do with a few Galaxy buttons.)
Some people have likened Primula cheese spread in a tube to chilled smegma. But when they started adding bits of ham to this product, then JESUS MARY AND JOSEPH that was it for my boring old crisp sandwiches at school, I was having cheese spread AND ham from ONE tube in my Mother’s Pride every day for the next five years.
As for drinks, Christmas always provided an occasion to break out the treats. Aged about 7 or 8, I’d knock back a whole BabySham (which came in wonderful bottle-shaped glass thimbles) and a glass of Advocaat and lemonade. A Snowball may have looked like whipped-up phlegm and jizz, but it was the TASTE OF CHRISTMAS. Not even Cresta’s range of pop from the milkman could beat that.
But you didn’t need to wait for Christmas to enjoy a Lucozade, you just had to wait until you were ill. In those days, it wasn’t a recreational drink. It was medicinal. And the bottles were mysteriously housed within a film of frustratingly sticky orange plastic wrapping, which so pissed you off that you just had to finish the whole bottle as your mum was having none of that nonsense of opening and closing it and getting increasingly sticky at each attempt.
These were the treats of the kitchen, compensating for the fact that it was only on your caravan holiday that you got to eat out in a restaurant and even then it was always highlighted by your dad that the gammon and chips was the most reasonably priced at £1.50 a plate, hint hint.
Mum and dad had their own treats, their own moments of consumerist infidelity. True, they needed an ashtray and a large one at that (or else they’d have to stand up during The Duchess of Duke Street to empty it) but did they really have to buy an ashtray STAND to put alongside the sofa? And as much as it got good use, a cigarette lighter that was the size and weight of an adult’s bowling ball was perhaps rather decadent and impractical. But then we lived in a house with a waste disposal unit. We had all the fucking mod cons.
And our car had a tape player. Not that my parents owned more than about three tapes and each of these would have been chewed up in it, because every tape player chewed tapes at some point. Luckily the seatbelt laws allowed one of the kids to climb through from the back seat and deal with this problem. My first tape was the Baron Knights. A comedy treat that was.
And on that note, I’d like to say to any of you Billy Two Shits Big Bollocks who have just gone out and bought some new iphone 4S or whatever it is you’re being fisted for, you’ve been spoilt to the point of cuntdom and you’ll never see the beauty or feel the joy in a Kit Kat that they’ve forgotten to put the wafer in. I pity you.
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