Andrew Gilhooley's Blog

Have you ever had a memory of something that absolutely no one else seems to remember? Where you ask people about it and they look at you blankly, so much so that you wonder if you dreamed it?

One such memory for me is of a brand of soft drink my friends and I used to enjoy during the summer holidays of our youth in the 1970s.

I very clearly remember going to the Hartleyburn Avenue Post Office in Hebburn and buying a soft drink called Merry Fizz. I remember it as coming in a few varieties; lemonade, cola and orange were all available for sure, there may have been others.

What differentiated Merry Fizz from other fizzy drinks was its packaging. It didn’t come in a bottle or can, but rather a sort of tube made from transparent, colourless plastic. The ends of the tube were crimped closed, so it had the shape of a small, elongated pillow. To drink the soda inside, you peeled back a piece of sticky tape to reveal a circle of holes, rather like those on the top of a tin of Ajax or Vim:

You would insert a straw in one of the holes and the others would allow air to enter the tube. Once you had finished the drink, the tube could be squashed flat and thrown away. This was long before recycling was a thing! I remember something being printed on the tube about “Merilite packaging”, which I presume was something to do with the manufacturer.

(As a side note, images of Ajax and Vim tins are hard to come by on the internet themselves. Could these be forgotten products too?)

I only recall Merry Fizz being available in this form for a year or too. Eventually the snazzy, space-age tubes were replaced by much more pedestrian plastic bottles. For years I tried in vain to find information about this product. I had no success until quite recently I chanced upon a discussion of something that sounded similar. A product called Meri Mates was manufactured and sold in Scotland at around the time I was drinking Merry Fizz in North East England.

As you can see, the tube shape with crimped ends, the pull tab and “MEROLITE” (not “Merilite” as I remembered it) all check out. Could I have mis-remembered “Meri Mates” as “Merry Fizz” too? Quite possibly this could be an example of the Mandela Effect at work. I definitely remember it as “Merry Fizz” though! Name notwithstanding, it was a real product, and here is a newspaper article profiling the company that made it.

Do you remember Merry Fizz / Meri Mates? How about other products now lost in the mists of time? If you do, I’d love to hear from you – please contact me via the comments.