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Sweets – It has taken me years of trying to remember what this sweet treat was, people told me it didn’t exist or that I must be thinking of Wham bars but NO! I was right, there was another Cola flavoured chew bar that Ramish sold. Before I announce what is was though, let me enlighten you a little as to why it has been stuck on my mind.
There aren’t many nostalgic memories I have of secondary school and on the most part, I hated everyday of it. True, I met friends who I would kill for, even today but still – Secondary School was hell in my books. Now depending on how old you are will depend on what happened in the playground during break and lunch times. We were lucky at Parmiter’s and had quite a good canteen with affordable sausage or bacon baps, giant toffee cookies and Yazoo milkshakes however, there was always a need for something more, something that wasn’t allowed. The banned item? Sweets. Ok, so we were in no way as suffering as children today who can’t have a chocolate biscuit in their packed lunch without being told ‘you’re going to be obese’ and having it confiscated. Parents though well meaning and normally good at putting a sweet treat in, never put what a child really wanted and that was something purely made out of sugar and designed to rot your teeth then and there.
This brings us to playground sweet sellers. If you were sensible or received any sort of pocket money, you could easily double it up by selling penny sweets at a 100% inflation rate if not higher. In the mid to late 90’s there were two sweets of choice, sherbet straws (Rainbow Dust etc) or my favourite (and something I finally remembered the name of) Barratt Kola Woppa bars.
Sherbert straws were incredibly cheap to buy from our local Newsagent and could easily be hidden in a blazer pocket. Often they were sold at 10p a straw which if I remember rightly was at least a 500% markup! I was never a big fan of these so managed to avoid looking like a child Coke head.
Kola Woppa bars on the other hand were my all time favourite; I could have eaten those all day, every day and never got bored. I used to buy 10 at a time from Ramish at 5p per bar then at school, I’d make sure there were two for me and then the rest I sold at 10p. I wasn’t going to get rich but I did manage to ruin my teeth and stay hyped up on sugar.
Seeing that I am talking about school and what treats we used to have, let me take you back to primary school for the final two nostalgic treats I’m reminding you of.
At Primary School most kids packed lunches had a yogurt included, and even to this day Petit Filous pots are consumed in copious amounts by children. If you were lucky and I’m talking ‘Sainsbury’s has run out of Petit Filous and these were on offer’ sort of luck then there were two brands that had all the kids on your table jealous.
Fiendish Feet were friggin’ amazing and it wasn’t because of their flavour. I’m sure they were perfectly fine when it came to flavour but let’s face it, these things had feet and faces drawn on them. What more could a kid ask for?!
I never got this next brand as a child (and let me confirm, I still haven’t had one as an adult either) but do remember a kid at Killigrew having one weekly at lunch times. Frufoo’s were made by Onken, looked like a UFO and more importantly had a toy hidden in the middle. Consider it as the Yogurt version of Kinder Surprise. I was so envious of the kid who had these and always pestered my mum for them.
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