General Chat

It was always my fault there was no money at home, I was lead to believe!

As I recall, every week, when my mother went shopping, there was always cigarettes at the top of the list and there were always a couple of those enormous chocolate bars in the shopping bag when she came home which was fair enough, I suppose, because there might sometimes be a tube of Smarties for me.

In retrospect, the item I find most puzzling about the weekly shop was the glue. This was in the days before we knew about sniffing and, anyway, sometimes it was Copydex and just nobody would want to sniff that! There was always some glue, always, usually UHU or the said Copydex and, sometimes, by way of a change, there might be some that reminded you of that cold you had.

My mother has been dead twenty odd years and I think I may have bought a couple of tubes of superglue in that time but there were dollops of glue on all sorts of things.Things she never used would be stuck together again and put back in the drawer to remain unused but with glue on.

The other weekly purchase was Rennies. I can never remember when Fred did not have a pocketful and usually a mouthful of them too. He was on two packets a week when he had his stroke. They put him on one of those capsules in the hospital and he stayed on them for seven years until he died just about the same time as I finished his last packet of Rennies.

I know it was their money and they could spend it as they chose, not necessarily on me, but what an odd choice of pleasures they did have!

My Mum's shopping ALWAYS included 1lb of loose leaf tea, and 4lb sugar, regardless of whether we needed it or not. It was dutifully upacked and put in the kitchen cabinet. It got so full that when the doors were opened it practically fell out. In the end Dad forbade her from buying any more until the supply went down.

In retrospect I think it was 'War mentality' when tea and sugar were rationed and she felt secure in having a good stock in!

Harmless. <3 <3

I am a bit like that with loose leaf tea but we do drink it by the bucketful.

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Mum had her tea, and collected the stamps on the packets. I had the cards inside.

Freshwater Fish and Butterflies.

I can still recognise a Cabbage White and a Red Admiral.


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Oh yes, we had loads of those albums. I can particularly remember the ones about space.

Of course, that was something the glue was needed for, but not in the industrial quantities it came home.

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..are you sure your mum wasn't a secret glue sniffer, Sharron?
How many tubes did you find after she died?

I doubt it, she would have had to have taken her fag out to do that!

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