Category: Flashback

When I was younger, shortly after I learned to read consistently, I became interested in checking out the ingredients list on food packaging. I didn’t really know what most of them were, but would raise my eyebrows, purse my lips, and nod as I noted that some cereal had 30% of the recommended dietary allowance of fibre, for example. I didn’t know what that meant, of course, but it sure was impressive reading.

I learned that fibre and vitamins were good things to get a lot of. Same with calcium – milk has that and we were given that at school, so it stood to good reason that calcium must be very good for you. I sought that and the vitamins out on cereal packets just to check that it had some of my RDA. Not that I knew where I was getting the rest of my RDA, but I figured that if I started off on the right foot then the rest of it would take care of itself as the day went by.

One of the things that concerned me was that only certain products contained Floz. There didn’t appear to be an RDA of Floz – I figured you just took what you were given, so obviously you could never have too much Floz. Milk had Floz, orange juice had Floz, as did a lot of other liquid based products. Solids appeared to lack any kind of Floz, though, so I figured that Floz was something that only came in liquid form.

With hindsight, the alarm bells should have been ringing right there. I should have, and probably could have, deduced that Floz was not an essential vitamin or mineral.

What I did notice, whilst examining an unopened can of Tennents Lager in the kitchen, was that Floz came in beer. Wow. That explained why Crazy Uncle John and my Grandpa drank so much of that stuff.

They were men I trusted. Men who had taught me a great deal. Thus, I decided that, as soon as I was old enough to tollerate the taste of the stuff, I’d make a point of getting a large percentage of my RDA of Floz from the same source as them.

Back in the mid 80’s I had a cassette tape that I recorded all of my favourite TV themes onto. My favourite shows, like Airwolf, Blue Thunder, Knight Rider, and The A Team, were usually shown on Friday or Saturday nights. If I liked the show enough I would crouch in front of the TV with my stereo balanced on my knee to record the theme, while the family tried their best to be quiet for me. Once a theme was on the tape I could listen to it as many times as I felt necessary to fill the void until the programme was on the following week.

Using one of those paint pens, I had coloured my TV Theme tape gold to highlight it’s importance; I didn’t want anyone borrowing it and recording over the contents. This was further ensured by keeping the tape in a small safe in my room when I wasn’t listening to it. These are the kinds of things that are precious to an eleven year old, so you’ll have to forgive what seems particularly anal behaviour in hindsight.

The original tape had been a C30 – a demo tape that I’d gotten with a Walkman my mum had bought me for Xmas ’83. As brief as TV theme shows are, by early 1985 the tape had run out of space and I needed a way of transferring the contents to a new one.

To accomplish this, my friend Brian agreed to loan me his stereo to duplicate the golden tape on the condition that he could have the original once the copy was made. I wasn’t convinced that it was an ideal set of conditions, but I needed the space for the themes from Street Hawk and Battlestar Galactica, amongst others, so I agreed.

It’s hard to fathom why, considering I’d been using jack leads between tape recorders to copy Spectrum games for a while at that point, but we used no such connectivity when we copied the contents of the golden tape to a new C90. Sitting one stereo facing the other, we pressed play on the original and record on the other and then sat in moderate silence for the half hour or so it took to complete the job.