Memories - early or general

I'm sure you're correct. I bought my traditional-style leather briefcase with 'Green Shield Stamps' just as I was starting university. Great buy. I still have it in use today!

When I bought my first kitchen electricals I hit the jackpot. Phillips had an offer of a bundled microwave with a free kettle for £40 and it was the last day of the offer. The Co-op had a half price sale that had just started and I got Green Shield stamps too. I got the lot for less than the kettle cost on its own normally.

Who remembers the rolls of "caps" that we used to buy for our cap guns? They came in a small round white cardboard box and I think they cost 1/2d or 1d a box. As well as using them in guns, you could also buy a "cap bomb", these were a traditional bomb shape, made of coloured plastic, but with a metal spring loaded point. You could cut the caps up, pull the plunger down and put the caps in the slot. When you threw it up in the air, the weighted nose made it turn and come down nose first, exploding the caps on impact. Wasn't long before you realised yo could put more than one cap in. The sulphur stunk a bit though!!

Yes, I had a metal 6-shooter when I was 6. And later a cap-bomb. We all had them. In fact, any boy who didn't have one, well there was something wrong with him at our school. We used to put a live cap on the paving slab and whack it with a big hammer. That worked. I once put loads of caps together in a pile, and when I hit it with the hammer, the force of the explosion violently shot the hammer up in the air, nearly ripped it out of my hand it did. Kids today... missing out on their education.

What a coincidence Slim - here's me, aged 6, with my six-shooter....

A colder, wilder era. My mum had a thing for knitting at the time and when I was a few years younger than your photo Rob, she knitted me an Aran sweater so tough it would have stopped bullets. It had bits of heather in it and was so rough and stiff I could barely bend my arms. I looked like a cute but anxious scarecrow. Much later she asked why I never told her it was such a bad jumper and I teased her that if I got put in a hairy straight jacket when I was good, what would she do to me if I complained.

So you could afford caps! The lads in our street had to say "Bang"! It was a real treat for them if they could get caps. I remember my brother doing that trick with a hammer or a brick. The worse Aran I ever knitted with was for a fishing jumper for my step grandad. It was oiled Aran to make it waterproof. Apparently sea fishermen never wash their jumpers and keep the fish oil in them. It was awful to knit with and it smelt as well.

Not sure if they have been mentioned before, but did anyone else have JACKO ROLLERSKATES? I had the all steel wheel extendable model. They increased in size by undoing a wing nut on the underneath and pulling the 2 halves apart and then re-tightening at the new size. They had a thin strap with a buckle over the toe section and another thin strap around the ankle. The major problem was that the wing nut always rattled loose and you instantly went from size 3 to 7 and you ended up scraping your knees!!

Yes Mick, After years of orthopaedic foot & leg surgery, I had Jacko skates & loved them. I still have them, substantially modified, where they are fixed to a timber board & used for heavy furniture moving.

Today I remembered something else from my childhood in the early 1970s. It might be just me, but was anyone else under the impression that plain white drawing paper was a bit of an expensive luxury back then? It would sound strange to youngsters today, when you can buy a whole ream of 500 A4 sheets for about three quid - but I recall it being quite a big thing for my mum to be able to afford a drawing book, which only contained perhaps 10 pages. I used to love drawing so much, but I remember having to be very sparing and only use "proper" paper for special pictures.

It must have been . When lined, wide printer paper came in, I remember a lot of that rather than drawing paper, with strict instructions to use both sides, even when one side was already printed on.

Hello, Bleached paper was increasing in price so much that plastic paper for drawing offices became a cheaper alternative. That's what kick-started the green ticket incentive for landowners to grow trees & receive a subsidy for doing so. Wiggins Teape were paying £3 per ft for a six year spruce. I did an audit at Wiggins in 1973.

Paper was very expensive when I was at school. Even loo roll. As a kid, there was never any soft toilet tissue, which was yet to be invented. Okay, maybe posh/rich people had it, but we never saw it. There was only Izal - that horrible stuff which was a bit of an oxymoron - whilst described as "paper", it couldn't have contained less paper! We had thick, low quality writing books for jotting down notes - these were called "rough" books. In later years, our course work notes proper, and assignments, were not done in books, but on lined filing paper. It was a funny size - we never had A4, A5 and all that, but ours was somewhat smaller than A4 (imperial, I guess, maybe quarto or something), with two holes punched on the left, and a ruled margin. It came in packs of 40 sheets, and was a higher quality paper. I remember a teacher admonishing one lad for scribbling down his rough notes on this premium paper. Some of the lads used to try and amass as much of this stuff as if it were gold. A friend reckoned he never had to buy any paper during the whole of his three year stint at uni, using the stuff he'd purloined at school.

Thanks folks, glad I'm not alone in remembering that. And Helen, yes, printer paper.... when one of my uncles used to visit, he'd often bring for me a pile of "computer paper" as he called it - a seemingly endless, perforated length of printer paper, covered with pale stripes, and holes all the way down each side. Not ideal, but it nicely did the job when we didn't have "proper" paper to draw on. Squared "graph paper" also filled the role occasionally, as can just about be made out in the background of these rather amateur drawings I made when I was 11, in 1976. Somehow I have the feeling that those names will live on far longer than most more recent players' names!

I don't know if mine were Jacko's - brand names weren't as important then - but I had adjustable skates with some sort of a key. I used to skate on The Brooklands pub car park and if you know that, you know how steep that fabulous stretch of tarmac was. It was usually clear when we went down because of the pub closing times then but occasionally an unfortunate pedestrian used to have to leap out of the way. We were not skilled skaters. This reminds me of taking the empties back to the Brookies pub, this was a regular source of income for me.