Sydneysider memories again... Besser Block incinerators in just about every backyard in suburbia.

Golden Breed, Crystal Cyliders, Billabong and Rip Curl when they first kicked-off their clothing ranges.

Paula Duncan..... Hmmmmmm

Norman Gunston interviews.

A slack-jawed kid of 13 or so watching Blondie sing Heart of Glass (or something similar) on the tele - to me, nobody else!

Sammy Sparrow/Garry O'Callaghan on the radio.

Casey Casom (I believe he still syndicates American Top 40).

Roy's Roast Duck at Baulkham Hills.

The Red S supermarket at Winston Hills, shopping either went home in paper bags or was delivered for you.

Cut Price Food barn.... Where do ya geddit?

My old man bitching about having to pay 29.9 cpl for super (standard pings like a b*****d he muttered) at the Total servo in Baulkham Hills again.

SOLO service stations.

Dad always had either Pablo or Maxwell House coffee in his work ute. Building sites always had two or three fellas wandering around with Makita caps on...

Home delivery Buttercup bread (in the white/blue/yellow pannos), orange/silver/red foil tops on milk bottles and the inch (or more) of cream on top of the home-delivered milk. You'd have to get the bottles inside pretty quick in the morning if there were crows about as they'd get into the milk. Milk money so innocently left in empty milk bottles out at everyone's from gates overnight for the milko (with the cow-moo horn) to pick-up during his rounds. Some kids worked out it was an easy pocket money source...

Joe Hasham - Electronic Sales and Rentals ads on TV.

Tony Packard's "Up the Windsor Road" ads

Backyard cricket, or even down the park at the bottom of my street where kids from far and wide would congegate and we'd have our own "World Series Cricket" where each kid would be their cricket hero - there'd be a "Joel Garner", a "Clive Lloyd", a "Marshie" etc and any other cricketer you could imagine. Fights would break out if someone dared take your "name".

Throwdowns.

Foil ashtrays on the tables of McDonalds, along with Southern Fried Chicken, McFeast etc.

My Commonwealth bank book had manual entries and was stamped by the teller each time.

Farmland where now stands thousands of homes, massive industial estates where I used to blat around on my first trailbike in the early/mid 80s.

Drive-ins when I was old enough..

Catching the train into town and sneaking into the Coogee Bay Hotel to go and see some Aussie band. That just happened to be Cold Chisel...

More groups/bands I saw (some of them many times) in the mid to late 80's: Mental as Anything, The Angels, Rose Tattoo, The Black Sorrows, Johnny Diesel and the Injectors, Dragon, Gangajang, The Hoodoo Gurus, The Radiators (I dream of Jeannie with the light brown hair....), Midnight Oil, Noiseworks, Paul Kelly and the Coloured Girls. I think the only O/S artist I forked out to see was Robert Palmer at the "Ent Cent" as Doug Mulray used to refer to it. There were many other (lesser known) local bands - The Party Pigs etc etc. We were spoilt for live music and venues then.

I need to stop writing this, life was so much more "simple" then.