This is down to you Cypress, your spam blogs have brought back memories.
Many many years ago when I was a nipper my school was on an overspill estate that people from the slums of London were moved to to get away from poverty. We lived in a place called South Oxhey and, more or less, we were all in the same boat. My school uniform was a whitish shirt, short trousers and ankle socks. I still remember those awful socks today. Because it was an era where things were not thrown away, my socks did not have any elastic in them. I would pull them up so high that it made my toes curl, than put on my brothers old shoes. I would take one step in those socks and they would slip down into my shoes making a hard lump at the end of my toes, and it looked like I did not have any socks on. The nest item was a snake belt, a big band of coloured rubber fixed with a clasp that looked like a snake. They were always twisted around, but if they broke you could tie a knot in them to hold your trousers up. Finaly, in the summer, I had a long sleeve jumper with holes in the elbows.
Wearing a uniform like that was bad but not nearly as bad as the sandwitch I had to take for my dinner. My mum would by her bread in one go, on a Saturday, so this would be a Friday sandwich. The bread was hard and the corner crusts turned up a little bit, so if you put it down on the table it looked like an ashtray.
There would be a thin spread of margerine and in between two white slabe was spam. Nobody new what it was, what it was made of or why they made it. Wrapped up in a bit of paper off I went to school.
We had a short playtime in the morning and we would all play football, hundreds of us in each team, all chasing after the ball. We would kick anything that was round, the worst balls were the plastic balls with little nobles on. They were so light that if you kicked it hard, it was like a boomarang. It would wobble about in the air then it would turn at right angles and vanish into a garden or somewhere off limits. Often these old balls would puncture, but the game went on, if you were stupid enough to try to head a burst ball, there was a crease in it and it often drew blood of gave a bleck eye.
The next break was dinner break, we were given one third of a pint of milk to go with our lunch. A group of a bout twenty of us sat together on the grass to eat our sandwitch. Some people would swap their sandwitches, as we all know the grass is greener, hoping to get a good swap. I would unwrap my Friday sandwitch shaped like an ashtray and offer to swap with anyone. But alas there were no takers. To give you some idea how bad this sanswitch was, even if a kid had a sugar sandwitch that peson would not swap. Everyone learned a skill that would help them with the rest of their lives, the ability to say no and mean it. There were banana, cheese so thinly cut the mother could have been an engineer.
I would always end up having to eat my spam sandwich, but I could never manage the crusts. Friday sandwitches were the worst of the week as the bread was six days old. My dad knew a man who new a man who could get cheap meat. So Saturday morning in the early hours he would bring in a carrier bag for the weeks meat.
This meat was so tough it was like beef flavoured gum, you could not swallow it until it was chewed for ares. My brother and I used to have big muscular jaws. Then the inevitable happened that meat ended up in my sandwhich. I would take a bite and because I was not strong enough to bite trough the meat, as I pulled the sandwitch away from my face the meat was pulled out of my sandwich. Because meat sandwitches were new on the block, for one day and one day only I could swap one. The look from the person who ended up with the meat sandwich still haunts my dreams today.
So yes I remember spam, but with memories of how horrible it was. Sometimes as you ate it, there would be a crunchy bit in it. I did not, and do not want to know what that crunch was.
Anyway Cypress thanks for bringing back my school days.