Bottled up in the past.

It's  always interesting as to what can call back part of your life that you'd forgotten. A quick memory or casual incident that probes deeper into events and times that are lying dormant. They say there's a book in all of us, and indeed it seems like there is. My current oeuvre "So you want to be a corporate actor?" is now in the typesetting process, and how exciting it is to see it laid out on the page. All my random scribblings formatted into something professional and eye-catching.  I will be talking about it at the " Surviving  Actors" fair at the Radisson Blu hotel in London next Saturday, February 9 at  11:30 AM  and for those of you who just can't wait to get your hands on a copy, there will be a prepublication offer for all people attending the seminar.

 It was while I was off "being a corporate actor" in Rotterdam this week that part of my distant memory was stirred. Rather than pay the somewhat hefty prices of the bar, or the minibar in the Holiday Inn Express,  I walked out as I often do, to find a supermarket and buy some crisps and a bottle of tonic water to accompany my watching of BBC Northern Ireland. Why on earth BBC Northern Ireland is shown in Holland is a mystery with which I am not going to engage? Suffice it to say that while it might be acceptable to sit in Rotterdam and watch BBC News Southeast, it makes one feel much further from home than necessary as one finds out what is going on in  Belfast.

I paid for my tonic water and crisps at the till to a friendly looking Dutch girl - her clogs obviously hidden under the counter, but the long blonde plaits in her hair swinging free - and obviously looked a little confused as I handed over the requisite number of Euro coins. "It's for the bottle" she said in her easily accented English. The Dutch are so proficient in English that it is very easy to forget they do have language of their own. Best summed up by pronouncing the name of their largest airport - Schiphol. It'll make you sound Dutch, or it'll make you sound like Sean Connery.

Anyway back to the checkout. What she actually meant was that the reason there was a €.30 surcharge on the bottle of tonic was that this was a deposit for the bottle. To encourage you to return the bottle, rather than throw the glass away into a random litter bin, a small charge was made. Its a principle with which I'm very familiar with. It was part of my childhood. My mother's parents had two shops. One was a general stores selling everything from Tampax to teabags and the other was an off licence. When I was very small, people still came across the village green with jugs to have them filled with the draught ale that my grandfather sold from the pumps. At the age of four, he would lift me up, stand me on the edge of the sill tray, and with both hands I would grasp the pump. I would then lean back and pull a full jug of beer for him. Anyone who saw my recent performance in "The  Secret Of Crickley Hall",  as a barman, will know that my pint pulling ability seems to have gone rapidly downhill since then.

The draught beer was eventually a thing of the past, and we only sold bottled beer. Bottled beer that came in dark brown and dark green glass bottles of all shapes and sizes. And in order to get all these bottles back, they all had a penny on them. This was the deposit you got back when you handed bottles over the counter. People would come into the shop with large shopping bags full of glass bottles to hand them back and get money in exchange. Grandad would store the bottles in crates in the garage, and they would be collected by the brewery at the same time as their next delivery. It would seem to me to be an efficient way of recycling. Done without any brouhaha  or fuss,  it quite simply worked.

It also allowed for fringe benefits and bottles that were thrown into hedgerows and back gardens could be great treasure for small children on long summer holiday scavenger hunts. A good afternoon bottle hunting could sometimes yield the price of a bag of sherbet lemons. Stuart Dodds, a childhood  Robin  to my Batman on these childhood bottle searches, came up with the idea of storing our loot in their shed. Then one day we walked into grandad's shop  with nearly three shillings' worth of bottles. For those of you not familiar with pre-decimalisation, that's about 36 bottles. What was termed by my Grandad as "a bloody lot" as in "Where'd you get this bloody lot then?

 The reward was paid and we had great delight in spending it on a whole range of confectionery and a bottle of pop. Dandelion and burdock as I seem to remember, and of course……. there was a penny back on that bottle too.