The Little Blue Bag

With my lunch today, I had a packet of Walkers ready salted crisps. This reminded me of when I was growing up and there was no such thing as ready salted crisps. Oh no, there weren't scores of different flavours either, the choice was plain or cheese and onion. The other thing about them was that they were do it yourself in the salt department. By that I mean that each packet had in it a little twist of blue waxed paper which contained the salt which you then had to sprinkle on and then give the bag a good shake to distribute the salt evenly over all of them. This was even more fun if you were sitting in the pictures and all the kids were shaking their bags so you could hardly hear what was going on on the screen. You may think that this was a lot of trouble to go to but you would be wrong. Firstly, there was no guarantee that there would be a little blue bag in the packet, peculiarly, whenever my Dad had a packet, he never had a blue bag in it and would go off ranting about it and secondly, sometimes there were two or even more blue bags as the machinery at the crisp factory had obviously not done its job properly. Some years ago, Smiths tried to reintroduce the little blue bag but it didn't catch on which is a pity because it added an element of excitement to opening a packet not knowing if the little blue bag would or would'nt be in there.