Browsing the supermarket shelves today for a small bar of chocolate for my little lad (age 4), and I came across bars of cadbury's Old Jamaica that had previously been discontinued. Didn't reconise it at first, because what I always used to think of as brilliant packaging in the 70s when I was a kid - http://www.cadbury.co.uk/ourproducts...maica-1973.jpg - is no more, having been replaced by a garishly purple plastic wrapper of the new cadbury house style. I brought one anyway (for me, not my lad!) and it actually tasted as I remembered (in fact I always remember my own late dad eating it when I was little, alongside the smell of his pipe).
But it all got me thinking about stuff I used to love as a kid that is either no longer available or is a shadow of its former self. For example, curley wurleys when Terry Scott was dressed up as an over-excited school boy were, I'm convinced, absolutely massive and took ages to eat (even with the fact that most of the chocolate coating dropped off before it got anywhere near your mouth). Now they are tiny. Same goes for Wagon Wheels - once the size of a dinner plate, now little more than a standard biscuit. But at least you can still buy them, unlike Dundee Biscuits (the massive round shortbread biscuits with loads of chocolate on one side and sugar on the other), or bottles of Cresta (with the 'its frothy man' bear).
Of course not all things get worse. Cigars aside (that I have a feeling definately have improved markedly since the days of Wills' Whiffs!), beer for one thing has improved massively in the UK since the dark days of Watneys Red Barrel (slogan - if the bottom has fallen out of your world, drink red barrel and watch the world fall out of your bottom...), although I do miss the fun of a Party 7 at the party that sprayed the entire house and everyone in it after a screwdriver had finally punched a hole in it.
So for everyone else of a 'certain age' what products do you miss from childhood/youth that are no longer around?
But it all got me thinking about stuff I used to love as a kid that is either no longer available or is a shadow of its former self. For example, curley wurleys when Terry Scott was dressed up as an over-excited school boy were, I'm convinced, absolutely massive and took ages to eat (even with the fact that most of the chocolate coating dropped off before it got anywhere near your mouth). Now they are tiny. Same goes for Wagon Wheels - once the size of a dinner plate, now little more than a standard biscuit. But at least you can still buy them, unlike Dundee Biscuits (the massive round shortbread biscuits with loads of chocolate on one side and sugar on the other), or bottles of Cresta (with the 'its frothy man' bear).
Of course not all things get worse. Cigars aside (that I have a feeling definately have improved markedly since the days of Wills' Whiffs!), beer for one thing has improved massively in the UK since the dark days of Watneys Red Barrel (slogan - if the bottom has fallen out of your world, drink red barrel and watch the world fall out of your bottom...), although I do miss the fun of a Party 7 at the party that sprayed the entire house and everyone in it after a screwdriver had finally punched a hole in it.
So for everyone else of a 'certain age' what products do you miss from childhood/youth that are no longer around?
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