C is for Clipper and Cable Car!

A couple more novelty, card-packaging vehicles, and first we'll have another bus, but it's not flogging chocolate bars this time, rather tea leaves! Although, why do they call them tea leaves when they are little crumbs of tea-leaves? Leaf-tea I get, tea-leaves I don't!

 

You can make a decent collection of this stuff, and that's how I've ended up with a dozen or more (no, I only scanned these four, so the rest can wait for another day!), I'd bid on a junk lot of railway accessories, and when it can time to pay for and collect them, it turned out there were two boxes under the table, with the same lot-number, full of miscellaneous bus-stuff!

 

Our scalers are a little younger now, school-kid sized, next to the conductor, who's around the 40mm mark, and again we have a product-related number-plate. The '49' still runs from Clapham Junction up to Shepherd's Bush and back, I have myself ridden it once or twice, but not for over a decade. Clipper - who still seem to be going - aren't actually on the route, being from the West Country!

While the Cable Car contained four Wispa bars. I think these might have been a present from someone who didn't know me too well, as I hate Wispa bars, a cheap, claggy rip-off of Aero, and with hardly any bubbles, quite disgusting, and I thought they'd ceased to exist (Caramac just died, so it's Gold Bars or nothing kids!), but was disappointed to see a heap of them in Sainsbury's this afternoon!

D is for Double Deckers and Double Decker's

Which is important because one of them is a single decker! B is also for a Blast from Christmases Past!

 

Christmas (and Easter) is a time when all the chocolate manufacturers, some of the biscuit makers and a few other snack-food guys like to play with the packaging (and pricing) as part of the consumer-fest which is the Western holiday season, and Cadbury's iconic Double Decker bars used to pull all the stops out, I haven't seen anything like this for years though, now it's all more blatant 'multi-packs' . . . sniff!

 

The actual, big red double decker 'London' bus, even though it's actually in the distinctive orange of the Double Decker bars, and it contained four bars so it's a bit broader that UK roads would allow-for, especially with all the cycle lanes we have now!

 

Posed with two of the 30mm copies of Commonwealth national costume ladies/dolls of the world, and calling for a bus to stop with an Alpine Horn wouldn't endear you to a British bus crew, no matter how multicultural the area!

 

Please note: the mug says 'I think, therefore I am not a Daily Mail reader'!

The weird thing about this is that it came out long before the UK had 'bendy-busses', yet was almost certainly a UK specific issue? It's also presaging the corporate colours of Stagecoach, many years before the chaos of privatisation! And I hope you've noticed the number-plates, on both models!

This too, was four bars, but two in-line stacked pairs (double-decked Double Deckers!) so is better proportioned. The Esquimau is slightly overdressed for our climate, and waving a raw, unwrapped fish is not going to go down well with the other passengers, these girls aren't really helping themselves fit-in with the locals, are they?!