There was only one good thing about going back to school after two months off and that was new stationary.
And our school days wouldn’t have been the same without such 90’s classics as Troll pen tops, Forever Friends and of course Ann and Barry Whelan.
Here are the top 15 things you stuffed into your school bag back in the good old days.
1) These books
Ah the classics…we all had one if not all of these books in our school bags at one point.
Ann and Barry Whelan taught us so much, we learned that Ann… likes… cake and Barry…likes… jam and that mum…likes…er…being …in …the kitchen?!
And your Busy at Maths book only lasted about a month before the cover started to disintegrate.
2) Which were usually covered with this
Back then you only had plastic covers on your school books if you were well off and sure wasn’t some of your sitting room wallpaper just as good.
You were mortified pulling your mum’s prissy floral wallpaper out of your bag, until you realised that most of your classmates were in the same boat.
3) Which meant you did tend to get your copy books mixed up
How frustrating was it when accidently brought your sum copy to English and spent most of the lesson trying to write in a straight line.
And what was the deal with those copy books with the super wide lines …if you really needed them to be THAT wide to be able to stay within the lines there was no hope for you.
4)You kept your pens in here
We spent most of our early teens trying to convince our parents how grown up we were but became obsessed with stationery covered in teddy bears.
Forever Friends exploded in the mid nineties and our determination to own more FF items than our friends led to a stationery arms race in classrooms across the country.
5) And they were usually adorned with one of these
They were ugly and had radioactive hair but in the 90’s Trolls were ‘the bomb.’
Aside from being the perfect accessory for jazzing up your pen, you can take them off and play with after school… or at least some of us did.
5) if you were really lucky you got some of these
Getting a set of gel pens was like Christmas and your birthday coming together.
But they were only to be used for special occasions which inevitably led to them drying out in your pencil case.
6)If not you settled for one of these … which was still pretty cool in fairness
If you weren’t lucky enough to own a slick set of gel pens a multi coloured push pen wasn’t a bad alternative.
That is of course until you tried to pull down all the different colours and it broke.
7) The novelty of these wore off very quickly
These rainbow pens seemed like a great idea -all your favourite colours in one pen and it left loads of room in your pencil case.
But then you realised how annoying it was to have to take out all the nibs when you wanted to change colour.
And it was rendered useless if you lost one of the nibs.
8)These were banned …
Bouncy balls were banned in most schools around the country … apparently this was because some kid two towns over choked on/ had his eye taken out by one.
Or at least that’s what you were told but you secretly suspected that teachers just found them annoying and smuggled them in anyway.
9) …But it was perfectly acceptable to bring in a sharp compass
Rubber balls were a no go but for some reason it was perfectly acceptable to bring in a sharp compass.
And you didn’t even really need it! You spent more time jabbing your name into the lid than actually using your mathematical set for school work.
10) These took up a lot of your break
We all got a little snap happy with these bad boys back in the 90’s.
The only downside was that they started to loose their shaped after a couple of weeks.
11) Stamping things became quite the craze for a time
These were ground breaking when they first came out and suddenly everything from school diary to your maths homework to your desk needed to be stamped.
We even spotted a couple of teachers using them.
12) You felt very grown up with a soother around your neck
Why we ever felt the need to wear a soother around our necks to look cool is still a mystery twenty years later.
Apparently the craze started from the rave scene and then spread like wild fire.
13) Your rubber could rub out ink…not!
Whenever you got a new rubber you HAD to test whether or not the blue side could erase ink.
And inevitably it just left smudges on your copy but you fell for it Every Single Time.
14) Corrector pens never last very long
Remember these? You used the white side to cover your mistake and the blue side to write over it.
Except that you often got that mixed up and remembered too late that the white side couldn’t erase ink from the blue side and wrecked it D’oh!
15) And all of this somehow fit in one of these
Looking back it’s amazing how much we carried around each day…hands up who’s started having back problems twenty years on?
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