Francie Quinn 2nd blog for MYCookstown. How did we manage without chilli sauce?

Wednesday 31st July 2013

Francie Quinn 2nd blog for MYCookstown. How did we manage without chilli sauce?

How did I ever manage before sweet chilli sauce came along? It's lovely stuff, whether splashed over your spring rolls from the Chinese or your onion bhajis from the Indian or along with your sausage supper from the chippy. It is delicious on pizza or a tortilla wrap and I even use it as a salad dressing. Yet it only seemed to appear a few years ago and now it's everywhere. In fact I am a bit suspicious about it and its sudden rise to prominence. Excuse me a moment while I put on my tinfoil hat so the CIA can't read my thoughts, but I think its part of a huge international plot. It probably has some weird secret ingredient and they want us all addicted to the stuff so they can control us and turn us into mindless drones for the New World Order. You may scoff but the signs are there. People who are already completely under the influence turn a funny reddish-orangey colour and behave like brain-dead zombies. If you don't believe me just watch 'Geordie Shores', 'Take Me Out' or 'The Only Way Is Essex' etc etc! And big Julian on utv is way beyond help at this stage!

But, joking aside, there are loads of things in our lives that we now think are essential but which are relatively recent additions. Younger readers may find this hard to believe but it's not that long ago that we somehow had to survive without mobile phones! Yet survive we did! We were able to get through our day-to-day lives without any difficulty and our contentment was not noticeably diminished by our not being able to take photographs every 5 minutes of our friends posing/falling over/being sick. We would regularly head off to Donegal on the session and no one would hear tell of us, or us of them, till we'd land home 3 or 4 days later reeking of stale Smithwicks and Major cigarettes. Thank god photographs of those expeditions don't exist, there are some things better left unseen.

Remote controls are another case in point. If you're anything like me, and most people I know, you might as well cut off our hands as try and remove our remotes. The concept of actually having to get up off your arse and walk over to the TV to change channels is as alien to us now as the idea that there once was a time when you couldn't ring up and arrange to have a chicken curry delivered to your front door.

And it's not that long ago either when, if you wanted to see your favourite TV show, you actually had to make sure you were in front of the TV at a certain time on a certain day. I still remember the first video recorders coming in, huge bastes of things that required a degree in astro-physics to programme to record whatever it was you wanted to watch. The other downside, of course was that even if you had successfully managed to set it to record Top of the Pops or The Old Grey Whistle Test, when you sat down to watch it you discovered that  your mother had taped Songs of Praise' over it!

Fast-forward (pun intended) to today with dozens of channels to choose from; when we can, if we wish, use Sky-plus to record Coronation Street for eternity, or until it comes to an end because all its actors have been arrested, we can pause and rewind live TV or go online to catch up with shows we still somehow managed to miss. That would have seemed like the stuff of science-fiction when we were struggling with our top-loading VCRs. mind you, these technological advances may all be well and good but when you see some of the stuff on there I sometimes yearn for the old days. I refer you to my earlier remarks about 'Geordie Shores' etc.

Feel free to share your own thoughts on here, could you survive without your mobile phone?

Are there rows in your house over who has control of the remote?

What one item could you not manage without?

Let us know.

Till next time,

 bye bye now!