Competition Closed: Nostalgia Week Day 1: Eilish’s Memories

In the first of our Nostalgia Week posts, here’s are some childhood memories extracted from the spluttering neurons shooting blanks in Eilish’s mind.

- Sinead

TELLY

Pajo’s Junkbox

It’s Saturday morning and you’re jacked up on Cornflakes with 15 spoons of Siucra. There’s a punk, anarchist rat with a pink mohawk presenting a childrens’ TV show on RTE 2. Alongside him is yer wan who played the nun in the ‘Lent’ edition of Fr. Ted (most recently seen as a cleaning lady in a Meteor ad. One time I saw this woman having coffee in Avoca and was almost starstruck). Pajo was bad-ass. He wore a leather jacket and (if I’m not making this up) may even have had a piercing or two. I can’t confirm this because THERE ARE NO PHOTOS OF HIM ANYWHERE ON THE INTERWEBS. Anyway, he was amazing and a reminder of the time RTE may not have had any money, but at least they had imagination.

Pajo's Sidekick

Community Games with Aonghus McAnally

This used to be on the Dempsey’s Den every year around about May and caused severe pangs of jealousy in my girlish heart. For I wanted myself and my friends to be amongst the lucky groups of school children who traveled to Mosney to throw themselves around obstacle courses in the rain. I especially wanted to play that game where you slid around on a massive sheet of polythene covered in water and Quix. I think this game may have also involved throwing wet sponges at someone trapped in a head block. Sadly, it never came to pass. Instead, I had to content myself with pretending to be in Mosney while jumping around on the tops of silage pits.

Aonghus Mc Anally

FOOD

Champion Crisps

10p a bag and with a plethora of flavour sensations including greenish-brown Worcester Sause and nuclear-pink Prawn Cocktail. Along with Wham bars, the staple of National School lunchbreaks - well, in north Mayo at least.

Weetabix

This might be Burke family specific since I believe about 50% of the food ingested in my home during the 80s was in the form of Weetabix. I now can’t stand the stuff, but back then the yellow box was an ubiquitous feature on our kitchen counter-top. Also, there was the added bonus of all the great stuff Weetabix used to give away on tokens. My favourites were the educational books they did - I owe some very specific knowledge about the different shape of straight vs curly hair follicles to the Weetabix ‘Body’ book series. There’s probably still a drawer at home stuffed with tokens from Weetabix boxes, NCF milk cartons, Connacht Gold butter (of the gold foil variety) and not forgetting the super un-PC Lyons Tea minstrels.

Big Time bars

Major product benefits included being made of such hard, dense toffee that they could last the guts of a week. And of course their tiny 10p price tag. I once lost a tooth on a Big Time bar, but if my memory serves me correctly I just washed the blood off, wrapped it back in its yellow plastic wrapper and kept it for later. Nice.

OTHER STUFF

The 1 pound coin changeover

Another distinct ‘memory’, which I may or may not have conjured out of the ether myself, is watching the Six One news on the day the shiny new silver 1 pound coin was issued. Gone were the dirty, crumpled green notes featuring Queen Maeve, to be replaced by a slimline coin with a some sort of a deer on it. The sound of a jangling pocket no longer meant you had about 83p in there; in fact now you could have a couple of quid, even if it was all in coins. The changeover also made it easier to get money out of aunts and uncles for sweets since they were more likely to part with coins than notes.

If you enjoyed that and you’d like to win the first of our prize packs containing a pile of awesome including Macaroon Bars from Wilton Candy, CDs and DVDs from EMI, double passes for Mish Mash and the Comedy Cellar at TheInternational Bar, a Rubiks Cube, a gift voucher for Abrakebabra, Den goodie bags courtesy of RTÉ and double passes for the 90s season at Screen Cinema then here’s today’s question:

In the TV series Dallas, Who Shot JR?

Email your answers to [email protected] by midnight and a winner will be selected at random and announced in tomorrow’s competition post. Good luck!

The competition is now closed. Congratulations to our winner, James Montgomery. Keep an eye on Culch.ie/nostagia throughout the week for more chances to win.