Your children think you are a sad old dinosaur, you don't dare reminisce with your friends because they will think you are older than you look. Come on in here, we don't know you!
Is my memory finally becoming completely unreliable? - Having driven around the UK with our (then) seven year old daughter who insisted we only filled with petrol from a National station so she could get yet another Smurf, I'd hate to think we'd deprived her of another source, or were those National stations really Esso stations?
We still have the massive Smurf collection, much enjoyed by grandchildren when they were younger, but once again packed safely into their box and put away for great-grand-children - the mind boggles!
Where in Canada do you now live? I live in Saskcatchewan. Brilliant site that Mark has. Lucky all that Cider didn't kill off too many cells for his memory to work. Mark, You may know some of my Family. Know anyone by name of Mullins?
Dear me...I am bad at remembering names. I am embarresed at how few school mates I remember. If you give me some hints on your Mullins it may jog something...to give you some idea on my contemporaries I was born in 1960...ak, 50 next year...
I could well be wrong, I can picture a plastic character with ESSO scrawled acroos its chest from the Biscuit Tin but maybe it wasn't a smurf, some thing smurflike? Wannabe Smurf? Maybe it was Esso's competitor to a smurf, defienitely said ESSO on it though.
I don't remember Esso smurfs, but I do remember an Esso keyring I think my dad had, with a little man with a flame shaped head, and an all white body. I also remember, not only Olympics coins but also football coins, (world cup?) with pictures of players on one side, that went into cardboard holes. I don't think we ever got a whole set. I also remember my dad saving up coupons to get roly poly glasses from the garage, we had a couple of those, and they used to put the petrol in the car for you, my dad used to say, '£5 of four star'. That was when petrol was in gallons, not litres too, of course. Hate to think how much a gallon of petrol would be nowadays, lol!