You don't need to be very old to remember times before these - maybe you have been happily texting and comping online since your first days as a comper, but even so new ideas are constantly coming along to challenge you. But I'm one of the comping dinosaurs - those people who can remember the days when the ONLY way to enter a competition was by post. And stamps were cheap enough to mean that it wasn't an extravagant hobby.
In fact I can clearly remember the very first time I entered a phone-in competition. I won too! The prize was a compact disc - the first one I had ever seen. The trouble was, it was several years before I had anything to play it on. So, as a nostalgia trip for the older compers and to show younger ones how life has changed, is my own "Do you remember" list - please add your own memories as comments!
Do you remember .....
- When if nothing arrived for you in the first post, there was still the second post to look forward to?
- Going to bed with a notebook beside you to scribble down ideas for all those tiebreakers going through your head?
- Queueing up in Kwik Save for six items, all on separate till receipts?
- Before till receipts came along, that drawer full of Heinz and Nescafé labels ready and waiting for their next competitions?
- Looking forward to Competitors Journal every week?
- Every issue of the Radio Times and the weekly women's mags containing entry forms for the latest comps on food and household products?
- SHE magazine with its bumper competition pages and my own personal favourite, the Crozzle (a blank grid with a word list that you had to create a crossword from)?
- The smell of the entry forms on washing powder packets?
- Trying to fit a margarine tub lid into an envelope - and getting grease everywhere?
- Spending hours, days or even weeks making lists of words from a phrase - a task that can now be done with a few clicks of a mouse?
- Wanting to cut the entry token off a bottle of washing up liquid - but it was near the bottom and you had only just opened the bottle?
- Needing to own a whole shelf of reference books, or make frequent trips to the library, to access facts that you can now find in a split second?
- Walking along the High Street of a small town and picking up at least a dozen different entry forms?
- Trying to find a pen that would write on bread wrapper entry forms?
As a child I still remember fondly colouring in the weekly picture of 'Tufty' the squirrel that was printed in the local free paper and posting my entry (in an envelope!), I even won a book once, Happy Days.
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