Fizzy pop...

Fizzy drinks seem to have become public enemy number one. Well, they are full of sugar and these days far too many of them are drunk far too much of the time. But there was a time when a bottle of coke or a glass of lemonade, with a wax-coated paper straw to drink it with, was a real and occasional treat. I’d sit in the car in the car park of a country pub and feel like a king as I slurped my bottle of whatever savouring each tiny sip. I remember how the straw used to go soggy if you kept it between your lips for too long and then it was useless. I used to dream of growing up and getting a job just so that I could drink a whole bottle of pop every day. Two on Sundays.

Yes, fizzy drinks used to come in bottles, glass ones, not plastic, and I can’t remember when the canned drink popped up for the first time. Some bottles had screw tops, others wired bakelite flip tops that you jimmied off with your thumbs. I even think some were covered in thick metal foil that you peeled off like a milk bottle. I certainly don’t remember ever pulling the ring-top tab of a can when I was a boy. I can’t even remember when they came in. Somehow though, I’m sure that fizzy drinks used to taste better out of glass bottles, or am I looking at that through raspberryade tinted glasses?

I loved the limed flavoured Corona. "Every bubble's passed its FIZZical!" shouted the little bubble man in the cartoon ads for the knobbly-bottled drinks. The idea of glugging down an army of bubbles and then belching out their remains appealed to my juvenile mind at the time. It came in lots of other flavours too: cherry, white and yellow lemon, raspberry, dandelion and burdock, and that awful cream soda stuff which I detested. I think there may have been a cola as well and something called cydapple which was an apple flavor fizzy, but I can’t be sure.

There was something about Corona that screamed summer, hot afternoons on riverbanks sitting in the shade of a tree and then dropping the bottle off at the shop to collect the deposit on the way home. These days the riverbanks are littered with cans and plastic bottles. Progress eh? Coca-Cola or Pepsi? Fanta or Tango? Sprite or 7up? Corona or R.Whites? Ginger Beer or Ginger Ale? Irn Bru or Tizer? The debates were endless, but everybody had a preference.

Today there are more soft drinks on the market than you can shake a sugary stick at. Six types of coke at least, blueberry, loganberry, bubble gum, grape, cucumber, even bloody bacon, and of course there are dozens of fizzy caffeine based energy drinks – rockstar, red bull, full throttle, monster - where there used to be only Lucozade which back then was caffeine free. And you only got it if you were off school proper poorly. 

Just one final question before I pop off... Did anybody out there really like Cresta?