Gros Michel bananas
For some time I have been consumed by the thought that I no longer like bananas because I’m hankering for an extinct variety I tasted only as a small child. This didn’t occur to me until I read – maybe 10 years ago – that the universally grown Gros Michel variety disappeared due to blight, to be replaced by the now universal, and allegedly less good, Cavendish, sometime in the early 1960s. Recent research suggests there are a lot of people out there with a kind of obsession for this lost banana. The good news is I could order some from a specialist grower in Florida; the bad news is it would cost $360.
Tim Dowling
Pret’s frappe coffee light
Discontinued this year in favour of “iced coffee”, which is just boring cold coffee rather than the sweetener-packed ice-cream sundae masquerading as a drink that I loved. Embarrassingly, in soft drinks I have the tastebuds of a six-year-old.
Jess Cartner-Morley
Clarks’ Desert Mali boots
Not to be confused with the Clarks desert boot, I’ve had the same pair of brown (beeswax, to be precise) Desert Mali boots for 11 years. They’ve been resoled three times, I’ve worn them in hurricanes, floods and snow, and when I briefly dabbled in motorcycle riding. I planned to buy a replacement pair but they stopped selling them. I’ve tried other, more expensive boots, but nothing has compared.
My entire wardrobe is based around a single, now extinct, pair of brown boots
For the last four years, I’ve checked eBay, Poshmark and Facebook Marketplace twice a month, but have never found a pair in my size. Sometimes stores will tease me by pretending they have them, but they never actually do. I did manage to buy a used black pair off eBay but they’re just not the same. Beeswax is a classic colour for a leather boot: unfussy, untreated, ready for action and the choice of Indiana Jones, it teams easily with black, blue or grey jeans, or smart trousers, and can be worn in the office, pub or, well, the desert. My entire wardrobe is based around a single, now extinct, pair of brown boots.
Adam Gabbatt
House By Mouse by George Mendoza
The book was about Henrietta, an efficient mouse architect who designed houses for her animal friends: a mid-century bachelor pad for Fox, a bamboo waterside palace on stilts for Frog; a pear-shaped cottage (complete with music room) for Spider. George Mendoza’s 1981 children’s book House By Mouse spawned my adult obsession with houses and interiors. It was also a rare book about a woman (OK, a mouse) being brilliant at her job. My mother has that well-thumbed copy, but the book is out of print and copies can go for more than £200 on eBay. I would love to see this book back in circulation so I can buy a copy for every child I know.
Lucy Pavia
Haribo dolly mixtures
I have a mouth full of sweet teeth, and am continually outraged when limited editions get discontinued (jelly’n’ice-cream Fruit Pastilles, you exist only in my memories). But the biggest treachery came when Haribo stopped including dolly mixtures in their creepily named Kiddies’ SuperMix in the early noughties. For a while I bought industrial-sized bags wholesale, but my supply dried up years ago, and their delicate coconutty flavour has never been replicated. Don’t even talk to me about Barratt’s.
Joe Stone
Smiths’ Cheese Flavoured Moments
There are internet threads and Change.org petitions dedicated to the return of these heavenly morsels. (Yes, I’ve signed.) While refusing to confirm or deny if they will ever return, Smiths taunts Cheese Flavoured Moments lovers by keeping the image of the packet on the backboard that displays Scampi Fries (perhaps the worst crisp ever invented) and Bacon Fries (fine, but can’t hold a torch to CFMs) in pubs. Every so often I spot the backboard in a random pub and a surge of excitement floods my tastebuds. Finally! They’re back! Only to come crashing down seconds later when I realise they’re Scampi Fries. But the deliciousness of those exquisite, synthetic, cheese-filled cereal parcels will live rent-free in my memory for ever.
Helen Seamons
Twinings’ original lapsang souchong teabags
Ever since I moved to the US, my mum has sent me tea from England (Twinings’ Earl Grey and lapsang souchong). You can obviously buy tea in the US, but it’s not the same – you never know what Americans get up to with their foodstuffs. Last year, something odd happened with my shipment. Normally you can smell lapsang a mile away; it’s like a foil-wrapped forest fire. This time, however, I couldn’t smell anything. Uh oh, had I got Covid and lost my sense of smell? No, it just seemed that this batch was botched; no delightful smokiness, just faint notes of musty socks.
I went into a deep and prolonged mourning that I can’t even alleviate with a good cup of tea
My mum, bless her heart, wrote to Twinings to ask if they’d tweaked their lapsang formula, and they wrote back saying they hadn’t. But a few months later they admitted they’d had “challenges with sourcing” the original blend and had replaced it with a new blend called Distinctively Smoky that was “reminiscent” of the original. People were up in arms. Lapsang lover Winston Churchill turned in his grave. And I went into a deep and prolonged mourning that I can’t even alleviate with a good cup of tea.
Arwa Mahdawi
View image in fullscreenImages of tea and trainers: Alamy
Teeth-whitening Q-tips
I used to buy them online. You’d snap them in the middle (like a glow stick) and the liquid soaked into the cotton-bud end. Then you’d rub it over your teeth and it would remove all the stains and they would glow white. Only trouble was, they had a lingering chemical flavour and made your gums feel like they were burning. But I always thought that was a small price to pay for luminous teeth. Anyway, the website stopped selling them (probably for obvious reasons) and I couldn’t find them anywhere else. Probably for the best, but I still miss them.
Edith Pritchett
Skip It
As a child with decent hand-eye coordination, netball, using a diablo came pretty easily to me. But what I really wanted was to be good with my feet. So, naturally, I got a Skip It. We called it by its correct name – “the jumpy thing” – and it involved spinning a plastic ball on a plastic rope round one ankle while you jumped over the ball with the other leg. It was brilliant, using (I think) the centripetal force that propelled Chris Hoy around the velodrome.
I miss the contained danger you simply can’t buy in a toy shop any more
It was also incredibly dangerous (tripping and bruised ankles – and they once stood in for nunchucks at my school). Sadly, it was discontinued in 2009, although you can still get something smaller and lighter that looks like a dog toy. But I miss the contained danger you can’t buy in a toy shop any more because of strict (but valid) health and safety reasons. In hindsight, I’m surprised it lasted as long as it did.
Morwenna Ferrier
Baxter’s hard water pomade
Trying to figure how to tame my dense, frizzy mop has been a life’s work. I was 36 before I chanced upon a product that didn’t seem as though it was made for someone else’s hair – and so I pledged my troth to Baxter’s hard water pomade for ever. That is, until suppliers in the UK ran out, with all the “Go to checkout” buttons turning into “Email me when back in stock” ones. Reader, it never came back in stock. It’s still sold in the US, but the shipping fees are absurd and so I’m back in the tonsorial wilderness once more. Help!
David Shariatmadari
Dunlop Green Flash
Beautifully designed, a nice nostalgic tinge (very much a PE plimsoll), a touch of 00s/Strokes cool. They’re the perfect I-just-threw-these-on shoe. One of those rare items that are truly stylish and cheap as chips. I don’t want to wear the same expensive Veja sneakers that everyone else is wearing, nor do I want a supermarket knock-off that is more than likely made in a sweatshop and will fit horribly. I just want my Green Flash.
Sophie Harris
Hard Candy nail polish
I loved these nail polishes in the 1990s. They felt different from the cheap ones you’d get free with magazines or in pound shops. I liked the wild colours – it wasn’t easy to get bright shades then, and Hard Candy were one of the first. The plastic ring on the bottle was also a draw – they felt fun and playful and just a bit different. On reflection, as an adult, I can see that they were also a way of aiming beauty products at teenagers, which was a big part of 90s beauty marketing. But I still think about those shades and smile – it felt rebellious to walk around with pastel-blue nails.
Anita Bhagwandas
Time Out magazine
When I moved to London in the 1980s, Time Out was indispensable. Not only did it have its finger on the city’s pulse, it listed every single gig, film, exhibition, club night and whatever else was going on that week, along with the price, time, address and nearest tube or bus stop. If it wasn’t in the mag, it literally wasn’t happening. Just browsing the thousands of events listed in minuscule type was a thrill, and choosing a club or underground film was invariably on Time Out’s nod.
I haven’t found a gig or film website that is half as thorough or well curated, not even Time Out’s
As with so many publications, the web did for it, in 2012, though it limped on as an inferior free mag, with no listings, for 10 years. The problem is, despite all the internet’s interactive wizardry, I haven’t found a gig or film website that is half as thorough or well curated, not even Time Out’s. Instead, I’m often left wondering: “Am I missing a brilliant new jazz band or the chance to watch The Third Man for the 19th time,” simply because I don’t know they’re on? So please, someone invent an online version where I can find every event in one place again. You’d make a fortune – and I could rest easy.
Gavin McOwan
Hummus (in Portugal)
Moving abroad as a Briton reveals the deepest, darkest crevices of you and your base cultural desires. I moved to Lisbon in 2020 and, as much as I love the city and its custard tarts and cod dishes, I miss the taste of home: heavy shortcrust pub pies, rhubarb crumble, jerk chicken. But what irks me most is the absence of hummus in Portugal. Lisbon, a cosmopolitan and thriving city of global cuisines, is devoid of large supermarkets in its centre, where I live, which means a limited choice during the weekly grocery shop. The first time I requested hummus, a shop assistant informed me that it was a “special item” that was hard to find. He wasn’t wrong. My quest to locate it spanned months. I took to TikTok to ask locals, who told me hummus was, in fact, everywhere. I felt gaslighted. Then I realised that “everywhere” meant one or two small Portuguese-brand supermarkets, would cost a whopping €3 a tub and taste artificial. I’ve now sourced an own-brand version at a Lidl near me. It will have to do.
Georgina Lawton
