Feeling My Age

Strolling down Garratt Lane the other day, Child A spotted these curious structures outside Garratt Park primary school. My son was born forty years after me, yet we still have similar basic expectations of what you might find in a children’s playground: swings, slides, roundabouts, climbing frames – that sort of thing….

But WTF were these bizarre structures? [More]

Photo taken with Instagram

Wife just told me the silliest joke I’ve heard in ages…
Q: What do you call someone who cuts hair between two rows of houses?
A: Ali Baba.

Pic: taken with Instagram

On Sunday Child K woke us up with morning tea on a a beautifully laid-out tray with a bunch of tulips for Mothers Day. Looking through the photos on my phone a couple of days later, found she’d used it to photograph the tray before bringing it upstairs for her mum. Nice work, that girl!

From the Children’s Historical Literature Collection,
University of Washington Libraries
Struwwelpeter was first published in Germany in 1845 under the title “*Lustige Geschichten und Drollige Bilder” and was described as “one of the earliest and most successful author-artist picture-books for the very young.” Its author, Heinrich Hoffmann, was a German psychiatrist and the superintendent of a “progressive” mental hospital. This book, supposedly intended to be therapeutic, was written for his three-year old son. It was reissued as “Struwwelpeter” in 1847 with added stories and pictures. In 1848 it was translated into English.

Why did my parents think it was a good idea to give their infant children a book of 19th century horror stories for their early years reading ? I don’t know, but they did.

These gothic cautionary tales included characters such as Fidgety Phil (who could not sit still) and Little Johnny Head-In-Air. Not to mention The Dreadful Story Of Harriet And The Matches.

But most gruesome of all was the tale of Little Suck-A-Thumb, a tale of maternal cold-heartedness that so terrified my brother that the pages had to be permanently paper-clipped together in the book.  I wouldn’t want to alarm you unduly, but if you’re over 18 you can click below at your own risk to see what happened to him…
Read the story of Little Suck-A-Thumb

From Dad’s diary, 31 January 1960
We now have our first television set. It cost the tremendous sum of £5 and is a second-hand Bush with a twelve inch screen. Our neighbour Mr Clitheroe, who has a radio shop, supplied it and I expect the aerial to cost as much as the set.

The thing works very well, apart from a high pitched whistle which I’m told not everyone hears – being above their audible frequencies – and which is inherent in all television sets. This last assertion of Mr Clitheroe’s I rather doubt.

Second hand sets are so cheap because in our Never-Had-It-So-Good society the latest and biggest television set is a status symbol. Also, our set does not receive the commercial programmes – and was rejected by its’ last owner on that account…

The model Dad bought was a TV24, introduced by Bush in 1953 before ITV had even been dreamed of. So it only had the one (BBC) channel  in blurry low-res black and white – to see what was “on telly” you just turned it on and waited for it to warm up.

During the day they broadcast the test card (above) to help installation engineers adjust aerials and picture settings. Actual programmes only started in the afternoons – while at the end of the evening everything stopped and the screen just went dead with a whistle to remind you to turn off the set.

This photo is by Mike Bennett and comes, with grateful acknowledgement, from his TV museum website at oldtechnology.net

“Vulgar” was Dad’s favourite adjective to describe everything he disliked about popular culture. The only music heard in our home during the first five years of my life came from Bach, nursery rhymes, or The Scottish Students Song Book (of which more another time).

Then in 1955 Dad’s fastidious cultural regime was shattered by the brash and unashamed vulgarity of Bill Haley’s Rock Around The Clock – brought into the house on a 78rpm disc by my my older brother. It stuck up two fingers at everything that Dad held dear and was followed in due course by the likes of Tommy Steele and Dave Brubeck in his son’s record collection.

But for vulgarity nothing could beat the  Paddy Robberts album “Strictly For Grown-Ups” – which my brother bought as printed sheet music and quickly mastered at the piano. These were satrical folk song parodies of one kind or another. The Ballad Of Bethnal Green made fun of both contemporary youth culture and the working classes – and won an Ivor Novello Award as Best Novelty Song Of The Year. The shortest song in the album was also the nastiest:

Now when she was young she was pretty
And nobody called her a cow
Her face was just like a lily
Take a look at the bloody thing now
(“A Short Song” by Paddy Roberts)

Although Roberts later released a barrel-scraping album of playground standards called “Songs For Gay Dogs” the word was meant in the earlier sense of “fast” or “risqué”. There was nothing gay in the modern sense about Paddy – his song Lavender Cowboy poked gentle fun at both macho Western movies and effeminate gay men:

He’d round up the cattle a-ridin’ side-saddle
Because he preferred it that way…
(“Lavender Cowboy” by Paddy Roberts)

I have to admit the whole family, me included, found it hilarious at the time.
More about Paddy Roberts

Back in the day a top tip for slacker lads who’d just moved in with a new girlfriend used to be: clean the toilet. It would only take half a minute and would be certain to get noticed. It might even briefly fool her into believing you were housetrained …

After living with my wife for 25 years, however, this morning’s little effort isn’t going to fool her for a moment.

Rupert Davies as Maigret. BBC publicity shot – from Wikipedia

Our family were late adopters of TV – Dad held out against what he called “the gogglebox” until about 1960. Even then we were a single-channel BBC-only household. He was too frugal – and too highbrow –  to lash out the extra cash for an ITV aerial and tuner.

He only really took to telly with the advent of Maigret that year. It was well written, well acted and above all French in origin – and this more culturally elevating than, say, Steptoe & Son or Z Cars. The series ran for 52 episodes and ended in 1963.

But in fact Dad became an avid fan of Georges Simenon’s “policier” novels, and in his early 80s he was still enjoying them in the original French as his beside reading.

There were plenty of books to get through, too. Simenon was not only phenomenally odd – according to a fascinating appraisal of his life and work by Mark Lawson – but also phenomenally prolific. The 78 full length Maigret novels and 28 short stories were just a fraction of his output.

The great nostlgic power of old TV themes is that once the series ended they were lost forever – if you weren’t alive in the UK between 1960 and 1963 it’s likely this music will mean nothing to you. But it takes me straight back to my late pre-teens in rural Essex.

It was written by Ron Grainer and recorded with Hungarian musicans. Listening to it again for the first time in nearly 50 years I especially love the sharp splanky balalaika thing answering the accordion.

Pic taken with Instagram

It’s the end of an era: our whole family has used this hairdryer for literally decades. I bought it back in the 80s while still a confirmed a batchelor. It’s faithfully blown out hot air ever since – first for me, then for Wife, and finally in due course for both our children.

Until today… when Wife tried to turn it off and the handle briefly – but spectacularly – burst into flames. She dropped it with a yell and survived unscathed, but the dryer is dead forever.

Child K has insisted on choosing a replacement better suited to her own teenage grooming requirements.

We shall not see its like again :-(

Child K left for school early one morning last week while I was still asleep. Woke a couple of hours later to find these post-it notes strategically positioned around the bedroom.

Call me an old sentimentalist, but leaving for 3 days away in Glasgow this mornings, I took a snap of them to have with me on the phone.

Last Thursday evening our whole family walked down to the Tooting Rhubarb Comedy Club, together with two schoolfriends of Child K.

Pic taken with Instagram

The venue was rammed on account of the headliner being Andrew Maxwell. His set was unfocussed and underprepared but the man has the talent and charisma to pull off a respectable 30 minutes practically in his sleep.

We enjoyed flâneur, raconteur and bon-viveur Marcel Lucont a lot more. His Stage Frenchman routine was nicely understated with some great gags, a quick wit and a slight edge of suave menace. It hinted that anyone would be extremely unwise to heckle – and nobody did. At the interval he sold copies of his book “What We French Think Of You British… And Where You Are Going Wrong.”

Lucont also gave away free cigarette packet inserts for the use of his fellow smokers. These were small tags to slip inside the cellophane with slogans such as: SMOKING IS BIG AND CLEVER,  CIGARETTES: SOMETHING ELSE WILL PROBABLY KILL ME FIRST and SMOKING IMPROVES JAZZ.

But for our family the highlight was host Anthony Dewson performing “When You’re Under Thirty You Know Bugger All” – shot here by Child K, whose camera hand shakes about halfway through as she and her friends become helpless with laughter.

[Click for lyrics]

Was startled when my 21 year old son – London born and bred – told me he had no idea where Sheffield was. Finding this hard to believe, we dug out a satellite image of Europe and pored over it together. London, no problem. Cardiff and Edinburgh, ditto. Glasgow and Manchester a tad shaky but in the right general area – as were Portugal, France and Italy.

Greece was harder – he located it high in the Balkans – and  Switzerland was up in Russia next door to Finland. When asked to point out Birmingham he jabbed a finger at Tyneside.

But he soon had his revenge by asking me to point out the Dead Sea, Romania, Hungary and Bahrain. No idea, son. No idea.

Between December 2009 and December 2010 our little family lost so many close friends and relatives that by New Year’s Eve we were emotionally shellshocked. We drew a line under that awful year by walking up to the common at midnight to send off sky lanterns to remember the dead.

This year Wife was keen to avoid the standard sky lantern kits with their wire frames and paraffin wax blocks. We made a special trip to Party Superstore in Clapham Junction for “environmentally friendly” packs without wire or petroleum products. Despite suffering an arson attack and severe damage during last summer’s riots the joke and fancy dress shop had reopened quickly and defiantly – and on New Year’s Eve it was heaving with customers.

Just before midnight last night, as a bombardment of rockets and fireworks echoed from around the horizons buffeted by a chilling wind, we tried to light the first of our eco-lanterns. Would it inflate? Would it f***. The waxy cardboard rectangle in the mouth of the balloon flared halfheartedly for a while, but the wind kept blowing the paper sides of the lantern in onto the flame, while gusting cold air up inside it.

In the end we gave up, struggled for a further five minutes to extinguish the damn cardboard, then went indoors to drink a bubbly toast to our absent friends and relatives instead.

The best description of sky lanterns and how they are supposed to work is on the lovely takelifewithagrainofchocolate blog by Karen Townsend – from which the picture below is reproduced with grateful acknowledgement. Her lanterns used bamboo struts and worked perfectly – trust the Americans to get it right.

Wife gave me an iPod for my birthday a couple of years ago to replace one I’d somehow managed to lose on a train. Click to zoom image and read the loving dedication engraved on the back.

Taken with Instagram
Boxing Day 2011: Child K in her Christmas Pyjamas…