BOTTLED UP MEMORIES

It’s very refreshing, in many senses of the word, to see that the enormous Coca Cola Company (which, I’m told, owns the world’s largest share of bottling plants as well as huge tracts of property in Eastern Europe) continues to produce good old-fashioned cola in good old-fashioned glass bottles. And this is Coke.  Not Diet Coke, although that is also bottled; neither diet, caffeine-free Coke, which is simply a travesty of a drink.  No, this is Coke.  Straight.  And I like it.  I am aware that these days it contains the demonic high fructose corn syrup, but as I ordinarily drink one small bottle every blue moon I can hardly hear the funeral directors rubbing their hands with glee.  Yet.

And it is also a drink with gallons of personal nostalgia, for swallowing it (and I believe that the only way to drink Coke is from the bottle through a straw) I am transported back fifty years to the Snack Bar and Diner in the coastal village of Polzeath in the far south west of the old country.  For it was there, on rainy days, that our parents would take us for a treat. We got to sit on window stools, chrome frames and red leather tops in true U.S. fifties style, and drink Coca Cola.  From the bottle with a straw.  And even on those days when the café windows were so steamed up that we couldn’t see out, and the condensing droplets ran down onto the narrow Formica shelf, we sat there sipping, listening to a juke box, and feeling hip, groovy and cool all at the same time.  And so grown up.

 Polzeath High Street with the Snack Bar on the corner (1950s)

The building now houses a bookshop and newsagents