70s & 80s icons we said goodbye to in 2018

Jim Bowen
Sunday tea-time sadly doesn't exist anymore.  Tea-time doesn't exist anymore.  And Sunday evenings are gloomy affairs now, in which one last gin and tonic only marginally raises my spirits as the weekend dies a slow death and another week at work raises its arse over the parapet and starts to tangibly strain.  But once upon a time, Sunday evenings were idyllic; so much so, that not even Gloria Hunniford's twee chat show or Harry Secombe's Highway could detract from it.  And that is partly thanks to Mark's and Spencer's and partly thanks to Jim Bowen.  My mum's Sunday tea was a lovely, smashing accompaniment to Bullseye.  I'd be biting into a Mark's pancake, adorned with a thick layer of Primula cheese spread with ham (and admiring my teeth marks) as Jim welcomed the players, making the correct assumption that the gentleman would be throwing the darts and the lady would be answering the questions.  Sometimes, there'd be two ladies and one would have arms like Popeye and a haircut like Bluto and Jim knew she'd be holding the arrows.  I'd be drizzling salad cream over my perfectly round chicken slices, tomatoes, pickled red cabbage, pickled onion and mash, as the prizes were announced -  'iiiiiiiiinnnnnnnn one, a toaster and teasmaid' ('that'll save you going downstairs,' Jim would say to the ladies), 'iiiiiiiinnnnnnn two, a drill set for the budding handyman' ('or woman,' Jim would add, winking at Popeye-arms).  And I'd be peeling chocolate from a tea-cake and then licking the cream off a chocolate meringue as Jim pulled a wad of notes from his pocket to send one couple on their way as another played on to miss out on a small car or win a speedboat ('We live 60 miles inland, Jim!')  And the jaunty theme music would fill you with glee and the glee would get all mixed up with your Mark's tea in your tum and life was wonderful.

Geoffrey Hayes
Geoffrey from Rainbow was the glue that held together the disparate and dysfunctional motley crew of Bungle, George and Zippy, all of whom quite clearly had special needs and who would - without Geoffrey playing single foster parent - have ended up homeless and vulnerable, probably picked up by some unscrupulous circus owner and kept in tiny, excrement-soiled cages that they'd have to share with dwarves and bearded ladies.  Geoffrey was a much-respected man of principle, against whom the children of the 70s aligned their moral compasses.  If Zippy was being a shit, Geoffrey would say so.  If Bungle indulged in one of his bouts of petulance, selfishness or sheer bloody foolishness, Geoffrey would give him a gentle reminder that he was only a phone call away from being shipped to Russia to dance for the communists.  And Geoffrey was the only one who didn't perv over Jane from Rod, Jane and Freddy.  In a decade in which male disinterest in women would immediately prompt accusations of 'batting for the other side' or being 'a bit dodgy', Geoffrey drew no criticism from any quarter.  In some ways, I think he might have been Jesus.

Bill Maynard
'Selwyn Froggitt's on his way, never mind, oh never mind,' went the theme tune.  That's all I can remember about it.  Couldn't tell you who Selwyn Froggitt was, except that he was played by Bill Maynard, who made a career out of playing shifty buggers.  He played a shifty bugger in Heartbeat and The Gaffer and shifty buggers each time he appeared in a Carry On.  IMDB uses the more prosaic epithet, 'curmudgeonly reprobate' and that serves to remind us middle-aged shifty buggers that we are exactly that, because we were conditioned to idolise curmudgeonly reprobates back in the 70s.  Bill Maynard is probably up to no good with Roy Kinnear and Peter Butterworth in the after-life right now.

Eric Bristow
Eric Bristow looked like your uncle and won some epic battles against the likes of Bobby George (who looked like your other uncle, the flash one with the jewellery that fell off the back of a lorry), Jocky Wilson (who looked like my Scottish grandad) and John Lowe (who looked like most people's grans).  And then he went and lost to that young pretender, the cross eyed usurper and spoiler, Keith Deller.  Deller ruined the romance of darts and no one's named a baby Keith since.

Chas Hodges
A friend of mine (in her 30s) once told me that her friend (also in her 30s, let's keep this anonymous) was in a relationship with Dave from Chas and Dave (in his 70s).  That's some age gap.  Not sure that it lasted that long.  Maybe there was no pleasing her.  Anyway, I didn't know which one Dave was until Chas died and it turned out that Chas was the one on piano with hair that looked like a mid-80s wet-perm.  But who can blame her, because everyone loved Chas and Dave.  Even if you hated Spurs, the two cup final songs from 1981 and 1982 were good fun and showcased another of the many talents of Ossie Ardiles (the others being acting in Escape to Victory and his lesser known work winning a World Cup medal in '78).  Things went downhill after Snooker Loopy (awful awful song) and from then on every Chas and Dave record was released by K-Tel, retailed for 99p and had 200 tracks on it in one long medley.

Burt Reynolds
I found out later on that Burt Reynolds started out as a serious actor - I only saw Deliverance in my 40s and knowing what was coming, I fast forwarded the 'squeal like a pig' scene - and then he grew a moustache and became a comedy actor.  Smoky and the Bandit films were ok, but nothing beats the Cannonball Run films.  Burt pissing himself laughing with Dom DeLuise (the 70s answer to Jack Black) in the out-takes, shown at the end, is the most infectious laughter in cinema.

Denis Norden
In its first decade or so, It'll Be Alright on the Night WAS funny.  Denis Norden standing with a clipboard (yes, fuck you, autocue!) and turning too slowly from one camera to another, always delivered a witty, sardonic nugget of commentary that actually enhanced the comedy of the clips.  In later years, that same format and a much shitter script made the show seem tired and the best out-takes had all been used.  But credit where credit's due and thanks to Denis, the term 'cock-up' has had an enhanced role in our common vernacular.

Glynn Edwards
Glynn Edwards was in every episode (I suspect) of one of the best TV shows of all time:  Minder.  He might have always had the same expression on his face - glum resignation - and over numerous years his lines rarely extended further than saying, 'Ello, Arthur,' 'Ello Terry' and making some reference to the former's unpaid tab, but he was integral to the success of the show.  Reliable, predictable, routine... you realise later in life that these things are to be aspired towards.

Margot Kidder
The Superman films have never been bettered and never will be bettered, and Margot Kidder played Lois Lane with a voice like Marge's sisters in The Simpsons (that is, with a 60 a day fag habit-induced gruffness) and a fuck-you attitude that made her totally unsexy (which made you wonder why Superman could possibly fancy her).  Her Hollywood lifestyle, from what I read, makes Keith Richard seem like a monk.

Gig Bastards II (or how I learned that I need to stop going out)

Quite a few lessons learnt tonight.

Lesson one.  Sometimes you can recreate the past, repeat an experience, infuse it with enough nostalgia to achieve that alchemic synthesis of present and past joys to remind you that life can sometimes be good, REALLY fucking good; but sometimes, an attempt to dig up the past gets a bit too Burke and Hare; and grim.

My second year at university - a year of indulgent post-adolescent over-introspection - was soundtracked by a few appropriately melancholic albums of the time, one being The House of Love's 2nd eponymous album, the one with the butterfly on the sleeve, the one with Shine On and The Beatles and the Stones.  They even came to Reading to play the Union and it was a brilliant gig, branded into my memory like all of 1990's highs and lows (and there were a fucking lot of each).  So, as I walked past the Roundhouse earlier this year - working opposite it as I do - and seeing a poster advertising their first album on the curved walls of that most beautiful of venues, I was taken aback.  The House of Love disappeared after their 3rd, complete turd of an album.  Why was that poster there?  I looked it up on t'internet and discovered that they were playing a 30th anniversary gig to celebrate their debut album from 1988.  Remembering the Reading Uni gig and my love of album #2, I bought myself a ticket.  And I went along tonight...

Lesson one, continued and slightly expanded:  Remember the bad bits as well as the good!  I'd completely forgotten that at some point in the past, I had decided that I really did NOT like the first album and consequently made an unusual decision to actually dispose of my copy of it.  Therefore, when I read that the gig would involve the band playing the celebrated 30 year old album in its entirety, I thought to myself, 'Oh, I've not listened to that in a while, that'll be nice'.  As opposed to, 'Oh, that album was shit and I threw it away.'  That realisation resurfaced a few songs into the gig.

Lesson two.  I hate people at gigs (I kind of hate people in general, but at gigs it's a particular form of hatred, as outlined in the 'Gig Bastards' part one post).  Now, three days ago, I went to see The Decemberists with my daughter and it was so good that my fellow human attendees could do nothing to spoil it.  But tonight, as I grew increasingly bored by The House of Love churning out song after song from an album that I disliked, I had no distraction at all from the insidious anti-social and irritation-inducing machinations of people on the fringes of the audience.

Because that's where I was.  With no desire to carve out a space in the front or middle of the crowd, I found a wall to lean against at the side, still close enough to enjoy it, as the Roundhouse's intimate size makes every view a good one.  As each wave of gloomy disappointment washed over me a few bars into every song for those first 40 minutes, I found myself tuning in to the gig bastards all around me.  The talkers, the spatially unaware, the crisp-cruncher... But I told myself that patience was required, that I would move once the first album had played out and those great songs from the butterfly 2nd album inevitably followed.

As it turned out, I had to move earlier than that, because a bloke who'd opted to plonk himself in front of me, a bit nearer than he would have done had he not been spatially blinkered, dropped a fart that rose through the air and swiftly made that half metre journey from his arse to my nostrils.  I moved three times, from one group of talkers to another, at one point being barged into by some rude cunt (I actually saw it coming, so admittedly moved a bit into his path and stiffened my shoulder, anticipating his lack of manners and likelihood of walking into me anyway.... it's been one of those weeks, I'd already tripped up 3 other rude bastards on the commute to work).  So, by the time The House of Love trundled sluggishly into the opener from album 2, a wonderful track called 'Hannah' with one of my favourite segues ever when it turns into 'Shine On', I had become so pissed off with 'people' that nothing could have made me enjoy that song.  Not even an excellent version of it, which it wasn't.  Next up came 'The Beatles and the Stones', a gentle and beautiful song that demanded silence, and yet, the fuckheads who were here as much for the beer and chatter with their friends, considered the music a mere background to their night out and chose to accompany the song with conversation, stabbing through the ambience, pissing all over the magic, nonchalantly ignorant that people would prefer to listen to the band rather than them.  Cunts.  I left at that point and went home.

Adding a crust of crap to the night was the fact that travelling to the Roundhouse felt like travelling to work, because it pretty much is, plus the train journey throwing up all the usual tribulations of enduring the noise of phones from (other) selfish bastards; and the fact that one pint of lager in the venue was unpleasant enough to make me feel too nauseous to buy another.

So, lessons number three and four:  Don't go to gigs unless ALL the circumstances are right; and think carefully about not going out at all, because other people going out are really, very, fucking irritating and I am even more of a misanthrope than I was when I started this blog about 7 years.

Part-time job bastards

Life parades its conveyer belt of human bastardness before your eyes in twisted Generation Game style.  The catchphrase is not, 'Didn't you do well,' but instead, 'Aren't they complete wankers?'  And although society's undesirables whizz past you in huge numbers as you go about your daily business of commuting or walking round town or driving, these people are not the ones you remember.  Bruce won't ask you to list them to win them.  The ones you remember most, the ones you experience on a deeper level, who grind sluggishly past you - as if that conveyer belt has a sticky turbine - thereby leaving their stain indelibly on your mind, are the ones you have the misfortune to work with.  We are all afflicted with work colleagues who cling tenaciously to our existences like unwelcome clagnets round a hairy bottom.  You don't like them, but they're just there.

I've had the good fortune to work exclusively in secondary schools since I was 22.  Teaching tends not to attract many bastards (there are a few exceptions) and the same is true of support staff in schools as well.  But in the 6 years of doing part-time or temporary jobs prior to this, I endured the company of several objectionable cunts.

Topping this list was the assistant manager at the Turk's Head pub in Reading when I was at university.   His name - at least as far as the bar staff was concerned - was 'Shithead'.  There's nothing like granting a slither of authority to someone with a chip on his shoulder on account of being a general failure in life, to transform that person into a petty, power-wielding despot, reigning over his kingdom of irrelevance.  Shithead looked down on us students serving behind the bar with all the disdain of someone who had fucked up at school and claimed to have more common sense than us sorry academic low-lifes.  It's true to say that life is full of people with far more intelligence than someone who is university-educated; but Shithead was not one of them.  Throw in his vain and sleazy behaviour towards women and you have someone whose tick-list of qualities remains forever tick-less.

In second place was Mr J, the manager of Palmers Green Tesco, where I spent a year working while doing my PGCE/ teacher training.  The J was short for Janus - he was Polish - and really, it would have been more apt not to keep the J from his name and drop the rest, but to do it the other way around.  Mr J maintained a sneer that suggested that there was a constant smell of shit under his nose - unsurprising since his mouth was in that area - and he seemed incapable of understanding why any of us part-timers failed to match his level of consideration for a poxy, 5-aisle, fucking supermarket.  He paced around slimily barking out orders in a voice much like Boycie from Only Fools and Horses, suffixing every command with the word, 'yeah'.

'Face up cereals, yeah.'
'Clear away those boxes, yeah.'
'Get that mopped up, yeah.'

This streak of piss totally failed to comprehend my level of indifference when issuing me with a formal warning for some misdemeanour or other, I forget what, but I was training to be a teacher, I was actually teaching during the day for parts of that year, and he seemed to expect me to give some small crumb of a shit about his small crumb of a shit supermarket.  What a cock.

In third place was the foreman at a sauce factory in Edmonton.  He and the factory were like something out of the 60s.  The white and black workers had segregated social areas.  Not by rule, of course, but down to the fact that none of the black workers smoked and most of the white ones did, so the existence of smoking and non-smoking staff rooms created a situation much like a Mississippi diner in 1955.  The foreman was just as much an anachronism, looking like Jack the conductor from On the Buses and to match that face and voice he had a similar personality.  We'd been sent to the factory - where we spent the day placing jars of condiments into plastic trays - by an employment agency, we being myself and my mate, Fabio.  When we arrived, the foreman's first words to us were, "Oh that's a shame, I thought they'd send me a couple of dolly birds."  Dolly birds.  Jeez.

But I think I got off lightly overall.  Any of you reading this and anyone you know, no doubt, have endured these sort of people in your time.  Perhaps you are doing so now.  I had other part-time or temporary jobs in which everyone was a delight to work with... The Beefeater Restaurant in Enfield, two different branches of Coutts Bank.  I suppose that 3 out about 100 ain't bad.  It should almost restore your faith in human nature.  But let's not over-react, eh.

Poo, bum bums and willies

'Your Dad, he loves a fart!'

That was the first thought that leapt into my cousin Gary's head when I last met him and mentioned my dad.  Our family, when we were kids, was characterised most distinctively by its inexorable devotion to all forms of lavatory humour.  We all loved a fart, we all laughed at poo, bums and willies.  (Well, mine and his mums both retained enough grace not to descend to our level, but they'd still chuckle away).  And we haven't grown out of it.

If you have read previous blog posts of mine, you won't be surprised by this revelation.  Out of curiosity, I have scrolled back to discover that, far from being in any way eclectic or diverse in my subject matter, I have tended to draw inspiration from a very limited pool of interests.  These are, in order of ubiquity:

• contempt for modern society
• the 1970s and 80s
• poo

But to be honest, poo has seeped into most posts focussed on the first two subjects as well.  My blog is FULL of shit.  Many will find this off-putting.  It makes you wonder how they cope with their own daily ablutions if they turn their noses up at the mere mention of a Richard the Third.

Having perhaps exhausted the subject of the glorious brown stuff, I'm inclined to focus on the two anatomical features lined up alongside it in the title.  Firstly, bums.  In today's hyper-sensitive and over-serious society, it may escape the wit of many that much of my childhood in the home was spent indulging with my brother in pulling each other's pyjama bottoms down and shouting out, 'BUM BUM!'  Such inappropriate behaviour has repercussions later in life.  I'm not sure my wife enjoys me shouting 'BUM BUM!' when I happen to see hers.

The concept of the 'moony' seems to have disappeared these days.  Late teenage years full of drunken nights often found me playing the moony card in an attempt to raise a smile (or at least to humour myself).  Usually from the top deck of a bus, or towards the top deck of a bus from the street.  I say 'late teenage years'... it might have stretched a little into my 30s.  My personal favourite moony was performed in Crouch End on a staff night out.  Clocking a couple sat eating at a table for two right next to the floor-to-ceiling front window of a restaurant, I  dropped my trousers outside in the street and pushed my bum against the glass, inches from their plates of food.

I don't do that anymore.  Not in Crouch End anyway.

My parents' decision to send me to all boys' school only served to foster such behaviour.  There is a plethora of solemn, serious or important situations in which an undetected pinch of your mate's arse challenges him to supress an untimely giggle - during mass (Catholic school, remember), when being told off by a teacher, buying a ticket on the bus, while trying to chat up a girl in a pub.  You have to draw the line somewhere, though.  Usually only funerals.

While on the subject of all boys schools, there was one practice that I never participated in and really didn't understand; and that was drawing willies in biro on every human being pictured in a textbook.  In history, Chamberlain and Hitler meet in Munich in 1938 to sign a peace treaty and each has his cock and balls out.  In French, a comic strip of two people discussing how many pets they have and each has three dogs, two hairy bollocks and one willy.  And in Religious Education, Jesus and his disciples preached to Jews and Gentiles with their genitals hanging there for all to see.  My reluctance to draw a penis or two in a textbook wasn't for fear of being caught, it was more that I thought it was a bit poofy (excuse the parlance of the day).  So instead, I tended to draw poo coming out of people's bums, landing on the floor and steaming a bit, once there.

As humorous as I find poo, bums and willies, I find the thought of any links between them somewhat unsavoury.  But the thing that unites them is definitely a further object of celebration and that is PANTS!  Everything about pants is funny, from the sound of the word to the idea of sitting around in them to the embarrassment of messing them.

And so, one day in the future, I daresay a member of my family will ask my son about me and then add, 'Your dad, he loved a poo.'  And I'd like to think it will be said at my funeral.  And if my best mates John and Dalboy are there, then I hope that one will pinch the other's bum.

Great Escapism

Coincidentally and with apt timing, my plan for this blog has just been symbolised by the last two things I looked at on telly,just as my fingers hovered over the keys and my eyes scrutinised the blank rectangle on my laptop.  The first was a trailer for a forthcoming series of documentaries on 9/11.  The second was Ozzy Osbourne in the passenger seat of a motorhome, eating a crate of ice-cream.

When I'm not working and when I'm not undertaking mundane domestic duties and when I'm not worrying about people I care about, I indulge myself in some form of escapism.  Meaning, that when the soiled underpants of Modern Life afford me some respite, the last thing I wish to do is entertain myself by pulling those pants back over my head and sniffing.  Which is what most TV entertainment amounts to.

I've given up watching the news.  Disingenuously, it always starts and ends with a smile, a deliberate shit sandwich in which the filling would be better introduced as, 'Look at how shit life was today, somewhere'.  The grim spawns of the news are all those documentary shows, hundreds of them, which present in more depth the many iniquities of humankind and the plethora of tragedies that inflict themselves upon us.  Yes, yes, that's all very sad or despicable and yes we should be aware and try to do something to help, etcetera, etcetera… but for fuck's sake, why are we saturated with so much gloom.  Both on TV and through social media.  And people soak it up, like kitchen towel in a puddle of rancid sewage.

I know I'm courting the accusation of burying my head in the sand (rather than in the aforementioned metaphorical underpants) and my excuse is not just that the view is so much better down there, but that choosing to remind myself that modern life is rubbish won't prompt me to do anything about it.  That sounds callous.  It's not.  I work in a school where 70% of students are officially 'disadvantaged' (by income, not by the cruel twist of fate that put me in charge of them) and I support a family, which very often really needs my support.  And outside of that, I try to avoid harming people (though I am happy to annoy or upset them if they deserve it).  If everyone did similar things in life, then there wouldn't be so much grim reality being paraded before us on telly, because reality would be considerably less shit.

Which brings me back to Ozzy Osbourne eating a crate of ice-cream as his kids drive him around the USA on a road-trip that is pure bloody escapist entertainment and a reminder that THIS is the kind of thing we should aspire to doing, rather than wallowing in the mire of misery that we can't solve by simply wallowing in it, wringing our hands, damning others left right and centre for causing it, allowing it or ignoring it and by adding to our own caravan of gloom.

Pause... now a hospital documentary has appeared on the telly.  A man is groaning in pain.  My wife has elected to watch this for some reason beyond the realms of my comprehension.  If you were in a hospital room full of people groaning in pain, you'd want to get the fuck out, wouldn't you, not watch and listen with interest?  Life's got enough of a miserable stench to it, without doing your pits with Lynx Dogshit while you contemplate Life's miseries as a form of relaxation.  What I find is needed is Air Freshener, escapism, something to form a contrast, a distraction, a buffer, something that is not JUST MORE REALITY.

Hence my guiltless indulgence in frivolity, fantasy, trivia, self-amusement, nostalgia, absurdity, nonsense - anything that can act as an opium against the churning malaise of modern life.

That is all.  As you were.

Student inter-railing and a catalogue of cock ups

This is a true story.

In 1990, four of us students - myself, Phil, Geoff and Ziggy - set out to spend a month travelling from one European city to another, back-packing with an inter-rail train ticket and an appetite for culture and adventure.  The route was planned out in advance and we expected to visit about 12 cities and travel through 9 countries in 30 days.  What we didn't plan for was a 5th traveller, a stealthy stowaway who ripped the arse out of our naïve optimism and orchestrated a series of mishaps that meant that by the 11th day - following ten consecutive days of maintaining a perfect 100% score on the 'Crap-scale' - we admitted defeat and headed home.

That gate-crasher was Mr Cock-Up and (summarising from a diary I kept at the time) this is what the little bastard did to us...

Sunday 2nd September - Departure
We met at Liverpool St station with a couple of hours to kill before our train departed for the port of Harwich and as you'd expect from 4 young lads about to go on holiday, we fancied a beer.  Pubs didn't open in the City on Sunday afternoons, so after an aimless walkabout, the drinking was postponed until we boarded the overnight ferry to Holland.

Monday 3rd September - Amsterdam
At about 3am, after far too many lagers and a liqueur called Underberg, we slept on the floor (all seats having been nabbed by that point).  I threw up before disembarking, then threw up again on the train from the port to Amsterdam.  Geoff left his shoes on the train, having changed into his moccasins (or kebab shoes) for comfort, and had to run along the platform to get back on and find them.  We didn't feel up to walking much after that heavy night, so we had a boat tour around the canals, which proved very long and very dull.  Following this we had McDonald's for lunch and spent the afternoon in the Irish Pub (Cokes for me, due to the unsettling effects of the 'Chunderberg'), made another McDonald's trip for dinner and then boarded an overnight train to Berlin, securing a compartment to ourselves with fold down seats that created a big bed with lots of space in which to sleep...

Tuesday 4th September - Berlin
But at 2am, the train broke down and we had to get off and board another, which seemed to have no empty compartments, so we squeezed into the narrow bit of corridor by the bogs and tried to sleep here.  A couple of hours later, Geoff found us 4 empty seats in a compartment, so we settled here to sleep, but were woken by the ticket inspector at the border between West and East Germany, who informed us that our Inter-Rail tickets were not valid in the East.  We had to pay, but didn't have enough in Marks.  The inspector spoke no English and confusion ensued.  In the end, he let us stay on board having paid what we could.
Disembarking in Berlin, a beggar approached us with his hands behind his back.  He must have been concealing a CS gas cylinder, because once he'd walked off we started to suffer from stinging eyes and fits of coughing.
We booked into a cheap hotel, the Pension Krone, and as I planned out what sights to see that afternoon, each of the others fell asleep, before I too followed, thanks to the disturbed nature of the previous night.
When we awoke at 5pm, we decided to postpone sight-seeing until the next day and instead found the Irish Pub, where we spent the evening.

Wednesday 5th September - Berlin (2)
At breakfast, we asked Geoff if he would order for us, as he was the only one with O-level German.
'Ask for 4 coffees, Geoff' one of us said.
'4 coffees please,' Geoff asked the woman serving us.
'IN GERMAN, GEOFF!' we reminded him.
Our walking tour of the city was done beneath a curtain of rain.  The Brandenburg Gate was concealed by scaffolding and was minus its Victory statue.  At least the Wall and the Reichstag were interesting.
We finished the day in McDonald's and the Irish Pub.

Thursday 6th September - Munich
The overnight train to Munich was hot and cramped, as we shared a couchette with 2 other people and I got very little sleep, almost cracking up at times.  In Munich, it took ages to find the Youth Hostel we'd planned to stay in, mainly because we got off at the wrong U-bahn station and we were misdirected by any locals that we asked.  When we found it, we had to queue for 2 hours 45 mins to check in.
We did some sight-seeing that afternoon and in the evening, as we sat on the pavement outside the hostel, I got some obvious eye-contact from a nice German girl, who I attempted to chat-up using Geoff as an interpreter.  (All he could really ask her, though, was how many brothers, sisters and pets she had... I don't think he got a grade A in his O' Level).  It seemed to be going well, until Phil let go an enormous fart, which caused her to walk off.

Friday 7th September - Munich (2) and Salzburg
Geoff lost his locker key and had to pay a fine.  Then he found it.
We spent the morning at Dacau Concentration Camp and got on a train to Salzburg that afternoon.  Thinking we had secured our own compartment, we celebrated our luck, but then found out that only the first 3 carriages were crossing the border into Austria.  We were in the last carriage of about 20.  We had to run down the platform, heavy rucksacks threatening to send us toppling over.
We made it just in time and after a short journey, disembarked in a rain-sodden Salzburg and checked into the Youth Hostel.
As Phil took a shower, a message came over the Tannoy asking him to come to reception.  Someone had handed in his wallet, but not before whoever had taken it had stolen the money he had in it.
We walked around the city that evening, then had a proper night's sleep.

Saturday 8th September - Vienna
We took a train to Vienna in the morning, checked into a hotel and walked around a few sights.  In the rain, again.  We had McDonald's for dinner and bought some beer to drink in our room that evening.

Sunday 9th September - Budapest
Our luck seemed to be changing.  We had no problems getting the train to Budapest the next morning and secured accommodation in private residences without needing to queue much at all.  These were flats in tower blocks in the suburbs. The one in which Geoff and I stayed was home to a little old woman who spoke no English and merely pointed to our bedroom and gave us keys to the flat.
We took a cab back in to the city.  (The driver who had taken us out to the tower blocks had hit another car and driven off and was generally skidding and wobbling everywhere in his rickety Skoda.  This one was a bit kamikaze as well.) We had McDonald's for dinner (very cheap in Hungary in those days) and then wandered around looking for a bar.  Everywhere we tried ripped us off, charging stupidly high prices for warm, shit-tasting lager.  In the end, we just wandered around in a futile attempt to find a decent bar, before giving up and getting a cab back to the flats.
Geoff and I found that our door key wouldn't work.  As we tried to force it to turn, the door was opened by the occupant, a little old woman who spoke no English; but not 'our' little old woman.  We had the right number flat, but the wrong block.  God knows what she thought as we apologised and made a quick, embarrassed exit, hoping she wouldn't call the police.

Monday 10th September - Budapest (2)
After a McDonald's breakfast, we had a whole day of sight-seeing, untroubled for once by any rain. Buoyed by the prospect of a more sustained change in fortune, we planned a proper boys' night out.
We discovered Budapest's Moulin Rouge.  It cost a very steep £7 to get in and we weren't allowed beer and instead they demanded that we order what they called a 'Champagne cocktail' (also £6) as part of the deal.  It was actually rum and coke.  They sat us at the table furthest from the stage.  There was only one other customer and he had a table at the front. The bouncers stood near us and glared.  A woman came out on stage, took her top off and wiggled her boobs about to Rick Astley's 'Never Gonna Give You Up.'
We finished out cocktails and left, finding as an alternative, the John Bull (English) pub.  Here we reflected on how much money we had spent so far (far too much) and how much we had left for the next 20 days (far too little).  And we ruminated on how luck seemed to be going against us.

Tuesday 11th September - Budapest (3)
We met Ziggy and Phil in their flat in the tower block next to ours, only to discover that their key was stuck in the lock and their own little old woman had gone out.  So they couldn't leave the flat.  We managed to contact a warden for the flats, who came to fix the problem by removing the lock from the door and disappearing (presumably to buy a new lock).  In his absence, their little old woman returned, saw the door with no lock and started shouting at us all.  The warden returned and Ziggy and Phil were charged the cost of the new lock and labour.  We left for town at 12.45pm.
The day was again dominated by McDonald's (2 visits) and the John Bull pub and also wasting time waiting around for Ziggy who had managed to chat up a Danish girl.  (As we waited, a man tried to sell us prostitutes).
Our next intended destination was Athens, via a 31-hour train journey through Yugoslavia.  We decided not to risk it, given our constant misfortunes, so instead I got to work that night looking at train times to Italy, which would have been the next stop after Athens.

Wednesday 12th September - Budapest (4)
Geoff and I were woken by a window cleaner entering our room, throwing the window wide open (letting in the cold) and proceeding to do his job despite us lying in bed.
We had no motivation for sight-seeing and following brunch in McDonald's we sat in the John Bull pub to plan travelling to Italy.  Frustratingly, there was no easy route or timings that would suit us.  It looked like we'd have to go back to Vienna first.
I said to the other three, 'There are two trains leaving Budapest at 4.40pm this afternoon.  One goes to Vienna.  The other takes us back to London.'

Thursday 13th September - A train
It was a typically uncomfortable night again.  A couchette with 6 seats collapsing into one bed and the four of us sharing with two others, cramped, hot and disturbed by snoring and someone else's feet in our faces.  We hadn't planned for food and from 4.40 the previous day in Budapest until we were on a ferry to Dover at 4pm the next day, we ate nothing.  But at least we were nearly home.
The white cliffs looked so welcoming.  We said goodbye to Geoff when we landed, as he lived in Kent.  And we said good bye to Mr Cock Up. Or perhaps it was a moderately irate, 'Fuck off!'

That Bloody Film Made Me Do It

Now, THAT'S a good idea....

Violet Beauregarde claims that she's been chewing the same piece of gum for months, all day long, except at meal times, when she sticks it behind her ear. Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory proved influential in that it gave me an idea of how to get into the Guinness Book of World Records without much effort or talent.  I saw myself being interviewed by Roy Castle and Norris McWhirter on Record Breakers.  Roy would be so impressed by how many months I'd chewed the same piece of gum for, that he'd celebrate my achievement by hitting the highest note on his trumpet, causing his arse cheeks to clench so tightly that you'd be hard pressed to slide a credit card between them (Billy Connolly's joke, not mine).

I started my chewing marathon one afternoon and come dinner-time, I secreted it behind my ear.  But this was about 1978 and like most 8 year olds I already had a large quantity of hair behind my ear, to which the gum stuck, requiring me to cut it out with scissors, thus rendering the gum thenceforth unchewable, my hair-cut somewhat lop-sided and my record-breaking ambitions up shit creek.

There was a lot of paper-talk in the 80s and 90s about how violent films were responsible for making children do violent things.  You actually needed to be strongly disposed towards violence in the first place, of course, in which case (regardless of what films you watched) you'd still carry out violence against others.  Films merely compensate for a lack of imagination, by giving you ideas of HOW to do things you were likely to do anyway.  I was likely to do the sort of stupid shit that all kids do and films usually gave me ideas on how to do it.

When you've got younger siblings, then OBVIOUSLY you want to scare them senseless whenever possible.  The Omen was pretty bloody scary, more so given that we were brought up Catholic and therefore believed in the feasibility of the Devil walking the Earth incarnate in human form.  Consequently, all that needed to be done to make my brother shit his pants was to turn the lights off and shout, 'Damien!'  If this wasn't terrifying enough, we watched Salem's Lot later on, and agreed that the scariest thing we'd ever seen was when a dead child returned as a vampire to haunt his brother by floating outside his bedroom window and tapping on it.  Needless to say, the shouting of 'Face at the window!' when someone was alone in a room, prompted an even more traumatic soiling of underwear.  But imagine the extent to which fear flew out the back end of my brother when I hid just outside the bedroom, perched on the coal-shed roof, and then tapped on the window after he'd been inside alone for 5 minutes.

Some film-inspired actions can fortunately be seen as innocuous and merely daft, rather than psychologically traumatising.  Rocky inspired many children of the 70s and 80s to want to box, but it also caused me to drink a glass full of raw eggs.  It was like swallowing snot.  That in itself was bearable in small amounts, because in the 70s every kid was snotty and so had to swallow back the occasional teaspoonful of sloppy mucus, but a whole glass of it.... grim!

Films didn't just make you do daft or nasty things, they could also shape your outlook on life.  Every time I see a new-born baby with a full head of hair I think of the babies in both The Omen and Rocky II, in both cases the child in question looked like it had been in utero for about 5 years and had come out with not just a bushy busby of black hair, but most probably a full set of teeth and politically conservative views that most of us don't have until middle age.  I always balk at seeing babies with full heads of hair, thanks to those films. (Apologies to any readers whose own children had hairy heads, I'm sure they were much less werewolfy eventually).

Sometimes you don't realise how much one particular film shapes your daily existence for years and years afterwards.  Everyone enjoys allowing iconic lines from a film to seep into their common parlance, as they subconsciously quote lines as part of their usual vernacular.  Often, these phrases are well known and instantly recognisable - maybe from Casablanca, The Wizard of Oz, Star Wars or Pulp Fiction. In my case, it's the film version of Please Sir!  About 10% of all exchanges with my wife comprise of quotes from this 1971 TV spin-off film.  Especially the less politically correct lines.

Finally, to conclude... Er… there's nothing to conclude.  Films just make you do daft shit.

I don't like how you listen to music

I'm assuming you're reading this blog post from start to finish?  You're not plunging in somewhere in the middle, are you?  Giving paragraph 4 a go before skipping back to 2, then forwarding to paragraph 10?  (Ha!  I said 'paragraph 10'.  That'll put you off reading any more, won't it, you attention-restricted by-product of the 21st century, you!  Actually, there are only 5 paragraphs, so don't worry, you'll get to the end before your mind screams demandingly for proper entertainment, like a ten second video of someone shitting in their tracksuit bottoms while using gym equipment.)

What you're NOT doing is clicking a shuffle button to make the paragraphs appear before you in a random order so as to elicit a sense of unexpected joy and surprise each and every time.  But you might listen to your music on shuffle.  This is WRONG.  And there are lots of WRONG ways to listen to music.

To begin at the beginning.  I grew up listening to records.  We didn't call them vinyls or even vinyl records any more than we called cigarettes tobacco cigarettes.  And unless you were a cack-handed clutz or just plain fucking careless, it was easily possible to avoid scratching or damaging records. (All the records I bought in the 80s still play without jumps or crackle, because I don't have ham fists or an illogical disregard for their preciousness.)  Mind you, you did have to monitor your environment, like not letting your younger sister into your bedroom to leap from bed to floor with a thud that caused you to shout, 'YOU'LL MAKE THE RECORD JUMP!' with the sort of panicked hostility that caused her long-term psychological damage.

I did buy some albums on cassette around this time, but for the life of me I can't recall why that was.  I had a need for music on tape in order to listen to my Walkman during my paper round and later on, when I could drive, the beige Austin Allegro in which I cut my road-teeth had a stereo that took cassettes.  But you could just tape your records onto a TDK90 (or 60 for those annoying albums that came in at 50-something minutes rather than the sacred and infinitely preferable running time of 35-45 minutes) so there was no need to BUY albums on tape.

Then clever people on telly (Tomorrow's World, I suspect) were fooled by the BIG FUCKING LIE that said that Compact Discs were better than records, both in terms of sound quality and durability.  So in about 1988, I stopped buying records and starting to get everything I wanted on CD (and then taped CDs onto cassettes for the car, until I could afford a car with a CD player, many years later.)

CDs were in fact a bit crap in sound quality until about 1993, but I didn't notice this, because the LIE was so huge.  I forgot all about records.  I stopped using my record player with the same callous disregard that Andy demonstrates when he stops playing with Woody somewhere between Toy Story 2 and 3.  And worse still, I set about buying the CD version of all the best albums I already had on record.  I even swapped my Doors LPs with my brother for his Doors CDs (again, pre-1993 versions, with a vastly diminished sound quality, like you were listening with some tights over your head) which he treasured for months before selling them to get money for booze.

Soon, CDs did start to sound better and thus began the trend for re-mastering original analogue recordings, so I'd sit and listen to Led Zeppelin re-mastered and not even think about touching the record versions, which adorned the lounge like the books in the book case that I'd read once and wouldn't read again, but kept on show for ornamental reasons.  We had two children and they were able to leap from armchair to floor and make horrendous thuds, year after year, without any danger of hearing me yell at them, 'YOU'LL MAKE THE CD JUMP!'

And then computers could BURN CDs, which was the new word for making your own compilation CD, like a tape, and for a while you could illegally download songs as mp3 files, but these were worse in quality than pre-1993 CDs and sounded like someone HAD spread jam on them, like on Tomorrow's World.  But soon iTunes sold us songs that sounded just as good as proper CDs and you could even use your computer to make inlay cards as long as no one caught you doing colour photo-copying at work.

Then, one day, when the kids were too old to want to make horrendous thuds, on a whim I started to listen to records again and (after realising that my old turntable was running a few rpm short of 33 1/3 and having to send it off to Manchester to one of the few turntable repair companies around) I realised that they sounded NOTICEABLY BETTER than CDs.  I suddenly heard what was digital about CDs, which wasn't a problem for songs that were recorded digitally, but everything pre-mid-80s recorded in analogue sounds warmer and more real on record.  Then a second-hand record shop opened where I live.  Then I realised you could buy second-hand records on Ebay.  Then everyone else started to like records again (bloody sheep) and bands started to release vinyl versions with pointless (to me) download codes.  And thus, records now outsell CDs.  And thus, I buy more records than CDs (I only buy CDs of newly released stuff by artists who aren't my favourites, simply because it's cheaper than always buying the vinyl version.)  I still make CDs as well, though laptops don't have in-built CD drives anymore, because all you young bastards are streaming songs on Spotify etc... and playing them through sound bars and you have no OWNERSHIP of music.  It's all INVISIBLE to you.

And that's WRONG.  Invisible music, on shuffle, being beamed across the lounge to a sound-bar, passing through our heads and turning our brain cells to fudgy mush, with nothing to hold in our hands and read as we listen, because we are always holding our phones and watching videos of people shitting their tracksuit bottoms in gyms rather than actually listening or wanting to know who played bass on each track.

And that last paragraph was paragraph 10.  Fooled you.  Serves you right.

I, T bloody V

I read a tweet today that concisely and accurately described how to tell you were visiting a posh house when you were growing up (assuming you grew up in the 70s or 80s) - it had more than one type of cheese and booze that wasn't bought to drink the same day.  I would add one more feature:  The people in the house never watched ITV.

Growing up with only 3 channels - and only two broadcasting companies - meant that your perception and judgement of BBC and ITV was in terms of their contrast to each other.  It was like the sort of contrast you might have between your parents' respective families, where one was better educated, reserved, dignified and a bit tight with money (like the BBC), while the other was more popularist, loud, able to laugh at themselves and fairly wanton with the old spondoolies (ITV).

To some extent, the legacy of this dichotomy between the two channels still exists.  Quiz shows are a case in point.  I used to love ITV quizzes and game shows as a kid, partly because I could answer the questions and partly because the prizes were exciting (i.e. expensive).  I couldn't answer anything on BBC.  Even Crackerjack asked kids questions that you'd now see on University Challenge.  And all they'd get for demonstrating a level of knowledge commensurate with studying for a PhD is a fucking Crackerjack pen.  A poncey bloody biro.  Over on ITV, if you knew the capital of England, guessed the price of a teas-maid or could throw a dart with any accuracy, you'd win a mini.

On the subject of kids' TV, for cutting edge, anarchic, brash and pure piss-your-pants lunacy, you clicked the 3 button.  ITV gave us Rainbow, the forerunner of BBC's The Young Ones, ten years later. (Have you ever noticed the comparison?  Zippy = Vyvyan, George = Neil, Geoffrey = Mike, Bungle = Rick; and Rod, Jane and Freddy were Motorhead, Madness, The Damned or whoever provided the music.)  BBC served up Barnaby the Bear.  Wetter than a Sunday afternoon in the Amazon.

Probably the most exciting time of the week was when Thames Television handed over to LWT (London Weekend Television) on a Friday evening.  As the iconic London panorama folded inwards on itself to the sound of trumpets and trombones and then the letters L, W and T unfurled in red, white and blue, my ten-year-old heart would race.  And then Mind Your Language came on.  Proper 70s-diversity with no political agenda.

The BBC stopped broadcasting in the afternoons.  Like a tired old grandfather, the channel went to sleep.  Meanwhile, we'd turn over to watch Derek Batey presenting Mr and Mrs or Fred Dineage fronting Gambit, both with the most garishly coloured sets, proper council estate contestants (most of us were council tenants in those days) and most importantly, ad breaks that allowed you to go to the loo or make yourself a quick Soda Stream drink or Angel Delight.

When it boiled down to it though, and you tended to realise this slowly as you grew up, the better programmes were on BBC.  Who can recall a typical Saturday night on ITV?  Not me.  Because nothing could compete with Jim'll Fix It (er...), Basil Brush, Doctor Who, The Generation Game, The Duchess of Duke Street, Match of the Day.  I can't even tell you what I ever watched on ITV on Saturdays.  Cannon and Ball in the early 80s was about the most memorable show and that was only because it was so astoundingly shit.

Nowadays, the nation is divided by Brexit, perceptions of liberalism and attitudes towards male grooming; back then, you either watched ITV or you didn't.  We did and were proud of the fact.  And in its favour, it wasn't all trashy and low-brow.  I learnt more from How? then I did from Mr Sagoo my physics teacher in secondary school.  And that's what sums up ITV.  Fred Dineage was educating the kids in How? at the same time as he was encouraging gambling in Gambit.  Your know that if Fred was your uncle, he'd spend more than a fiver on your Christmas present.

Because he's I, T bloody V!

A personal history of barbers

The first barber I remember going to, aged about 6, was opposite the flats we lived in at the time. Judging by the photos of me in those days , I suspect the opening conversation went something like this:

Mum - Can you give him a cut like that boy in the film, the one he looks a bit like?

Greek barber - Which film is that? Bugsy Malone?

Mum - No, the one where the kid has 3 sixes on his head.

Greek barber - Ah, The Omen. (Picks up two bowls) Which one?

Mum - The bigger one.

More than 40 years later there is still a Greek barber in that same shop. And coincidentally I’m now back in that area, working in the school next door to him.  He constantly rings our office to complain that our students are scaring away his customers (he erroneously applies the plural every time) and demands that we come down and clear them away. He’s done this when I’ve been there to see exactly what the kids are (or rather, aren’t) doing. His ‘salon’ is between us and a chicken shop, so teenagers naturally end up standing outside his shop for a few minutes at a time. He’s a miserable bastard, who hates being referred to as a barber, once pointing out to the Head during an argument that he’s a hair stylist.  So we make a point of saying quite loudly to the kids, ‘Come away from the barbershop!’ We also laugh at his sign that says, ‘Haircuts - 20% off.’ What if you wanted it shorter than that?

I’ve got a lengthy unaccounted-for period after we moved from those flats, when I can’t remember who cut my hair, but it retained its Damien style. It was probably either the butchers or the local council. I suffered for a long time with tufts that wouldn’t lie flat.  Then we moved to Palmers Green, and I started to regularly use a cheap (and, yes you guessed it, Greek) barber who had a chair and a mirror at the back of a hardware store. Pretty sure he used cheap secateurs from one of the shelves.

I always asked for a Bono mullet, despite his attempts to draw my attention to the wall where there was a range of black and white photos from the 70s of blokes with overly-groomed, coiffered cuts, most looking a bit like David Hunter from Crossroads.  Roll forward ten years and I was working in a school in Hornsey using the Greek barber in the high street and he had exactly the same photographs. With one addition - the white (and much ridiculed) rapper, Vanilla Ice.  One for the young and trendy, eh.  I’d always ask for the David Hunter cut, though.

I was once in Golders Green at a loose end, while my wife was doing something, and I was desperate for a haircut, so I took a risk and went into a unisex salon.  For some reason they were all Japanese girls in there. And they seemed somewhat perplexed by my request, especially when I referenced clippers, as I intended to have it number 2 or 3 at the back and sides. After a search, they located some in a drawer, but the girl cutting my hair appeared so unfamiliar and so ill at ease with them, that you’d think she was handling a turd.  That haircut didn’t turn out quite how I wanted it.

Then when we moved to Borehamwood, I discovered some Italian barbers, brothers, all consistently adept with the clippers, all of whom managed to avoid exceeding the boundaries I like to establish regarding conversation when I’m getting my hair cut. That is, I don’t go there for a fucking chat, I go for a haircut. Say hello, ask about work and where I’m going on holiday and then leave it be. Thank you.

These barbers were so well suited to my ideal hair-cutting experience, that I spent many years driving back there after moving to St Albans. Until a barber’s opened up in a small parade of five shops just a minute’s walk from our house.  I gave that a go.  Not as good as the Italians, but not noticeably shit either. It was cheap and too convenient not to stick with. Even though he chatted, non-stop. Worse than that, he couldn’t chat and cut simultaneously, so by stopping to talk about whatever action films he’d seen recently, he would take about two hours to finish. (About the same as how long it took driving back to the Italians in the ‘Wood and waiting in a queue.). 

This convenient situation came to an abrupt end recently when he went back to his home country of Jordan and never returned. Shop shut, website closed down. So then what?

My son tried a place ten minutes walk away and they gave him a good haircut so I went there last time. Not sure I’ll go back. The barbers are all young, skinny jean-clad, shiny-bearded, blokey blokes, who offer you a beer over the sound of white noise from the bland song selection on the stereo. They try to inflict their own love of self-grooming on you by taking 30 minutes of pointless micro-clipping on the areas above your ears. And they called me ‘mate’ but you could tell they wanted to call me ‘bruv’ and wisely held back due to my age and permanent expression of contempt.

So there you go. I’m back in barbershop limbo. I’ll grow it long and do it myself with the bigger bowl from now on.

Palmers Greek Part 3

One of the benefits of doing a paper round, apart from the almost-too-much-to-spend income of £8-10 a week, was the feeling that Palmers Green was my kingdom. It was deserted as I walked (or for a while, roller skated on my disco roller skates) from street to street at 6am each day.  The woman who was in charge of the newsagent shop would let me take a chocolate bar for free, and because Wispa was new and an ABSOLUTE REVELATION OF CHOCOLATE JOY, I’d always take one of these, have a bite every 5 minutes and avoid chewing it (applying the fruit pastille rule) to make it last the whole round.  The only shitty thing about the job was when the tabloid newspapers introduced Sunday supplements. Those News of the World and Sunday Mirror magazines may have been full of crap, but they felt full of bricks once you squeezed them into my sack-cloth shoulder bag and attempted to stand up straight with it slung over my back.  I walked around like a hunchback (and skating with that extra weight meant that each sloping garden path I got to, I’d end up slamming into the front door at 30 mph.)

Coincidentally, linking the paper round and hunchbacks, was a girl that my mate Darren and I cruelly (but secretly, because we’re not bastards) named Helen the Hunchback.  Helen also did a paper round and my mum knew her mum.  Before I even encountered her, my mum, in a desperate effort to land me a girlfriend, convinced me that Helen looked like Kate Bush, whose posters adorned my bedroom wall at that time, and suggested that I ask her out.  This assertion may even have been the prompt that led to me deciding to take up the paper round. It wasn’t until I’d had several similarly encouraging mentions of this fabled beauty by my mum that I actually met Helen in the newsagent’s one early morning. All that she had in common with Kate Bush was her gender (and even that similarity wasn’t irrefutable).  What she did have, wasn’t a hunchback (we exaggerated with the nickname slightly), but she did have a pair of shoulders on her that meant that she could have delivered the Sunday papers to not just Palmers Green, but the whole borough of Enfield, without feeling like that gargantuan bag weighed any more than a box of Kleenex, something she wasn’t ever going to have any teenage boys reaching for.

On the subject of reaching for teenage boys, behind our back garden was a mechanic’s workshop and the bloke who worked there was nicknamed Robert the Iron by my dad. (You’ll need to know your rhyming slang to understand that one.) My Dad’s evidence for suggesting that Robert was homosexual - and therefore (in the logic of the times) interested in touching young boys - was based on three factors: Firstly he was unmarried; secondly, he lived with his mother; and thirdly he was friendly towards us.  Indisputable proof, your honour. That didn’t prevent Dad acquiescing when Robert asked if he could take me to an Arsenal game, it just gave him a lot of pleasure joking that I should watch that he didn’t sneak a touch of my bottom if Arsenal scored.  As it was, unsurprisingly, Robert didn’t do anything of the sort, but he did stop outside the ground to feed an apple to a police horse and this was even more embarrassing, so I didn’t want to go to Arsenal with him again.

Palmers Greek Part 2

Palmers Green Triangle was half a mile and two bus stops north of where we lived, so you’d never walk that far if you could help it.  It was uphill too. I once decided that I’d look pretty fucking cool if I jumped nonchalantly off the 29 before it came to a complete halt opposite Woolworth.  The subsequent stumble and unacrobatic head-over-heels - as my still-travelling body met a very static and very hard pavement - was neither nonchalant nor cool. Nor pretty.

There weren’t many reasons to venture to the part of Palmers Greek that I erroneously assumed had once been the village green.  That assumption was based on its central location, the proximity of the train station and the Triangle itself, a concrete central reservation that bore no signs of ever having been a pre-industrial hub of the rural community.  I think it just came into existence by accident, because of how Alderman’s Hill forked as it met Green Lanes, and having done so, a local town planner was thus inspired to exploit the space by plonking ladies’ and gents’ subterranean public lavatories there. Nothing else, just the bogs.  Unlike aforementioned counterparts near our house, these were in use, but I never had recourse to take advantage either because I was good at holding it in or Broomfield Park was nearby or I equated public lavs with ‘perverts’.

(As an aside, ‘pervert’ was a wonderfully comfortable and even slightly cosy inclusive term for a plethora of sexual deviants, thus robbing us of the need to distinguish between paedophiles, cottagers, molesters, flashers, swingers, kinky sex participants, sex shop customers and your average user of porn, either actual porn or convenient substitutes such as the Gratton or - more desperately - the Argos catalogues.)

The only pull factors the Triangle held for us were Woolworth, Superdrug and an Asian off license. Woolies sold chart singles for under a quid.  Superdrug stocked those cheap toiletry gift boxes that served every family member’s Christmas present need.  The number of Brut Talc and After-shave sets I bought or had bought for me in the 80s would suggest that I was a significant source of income for both Henry Cooper and Kevin Keegan. And then there was the off license. The received wisdom of the time was that Asian shopkeepers wouldn’t ask your age if you wanted to buy booze, hence the choice of retail outlet for anyone well under 18 looking to enjoy a bottle of Woodpecker cider in the dark confines of Broomfield Park on a Friday night.

At the time there was only one local pub that you’d graduate to after outgrowing the park and that was The Fox, five minutes up from the Triangle and no questions asked about your age as long as you were out of nappies.  Being served alcohol here at 17 was what distinguished it from the underground gents. It’s the only place where I’ve been in a team that’s won the pub quiz, and that says far less about our general knowledge than it does about what was lacking in the minds of the regular clientele.  And I spent the final hours of the 1980s there on a New Year’s Eve piss up that was so enjoyable that at a quarter to midnight I pissed off to buy a pizza and sat eating it on someone’s garden wall as it quickly lost its warmth in the wintery night air.

Such was the retail and leisure attractions of Palmers Greek.  In part 3, I will move on to explore some other tedious old shit about the place...

Palmers Greek Part 1

I’m reading a book sub-titled ‘Now that’s what I call an 80s music childhood’ and it inspired me to want to write my own short, blog-sized version of being a teenager with evolving music tastes in that wonderful day-glo decade. But then I changed my mind for several reasons, not least a premonition that it might bore you all rigid. But the need to nostalgically and sardonically reminisce remained. And so I hit upon a different unifying theme, one that really tied the decade together for me, and that was the fact that for most of that time we were living in Palmers Green, North London.

If you imagine North London as a Christmas cake, then the inner city is the fruit sponge, stretching from Camden to Wood Green, and the white (literally in those days) icing is the suburbs of Winchmore Hill and Enfield. In that analogy, Palmers Green is the layer of marzipan in between. The only undermining feature of this metaphor is that I really liked Palmers Green, but I’d rather lick the floor in a public lavatory than let marzipan anyway near my mouth.

Talking of which, if you walked out of our house on the North Circular Road in those days, and turned left in the same direction as the three lanes of traffic heading west with enough seismic power to constantly rattle the walls of our end-of-terrace house, then within 50 metres you’d pass first a petrol station (which sold porn mags), a disused public toilet (probably home to disused porn mags), a betting shop (filled with blokes with large collections of porn mags) and then a newsagent (from where I’d never buy a porn mag, because I did a paper round there. And was too young. And, er, didn’t buy porn mags, of course.)

This was right on the big junction of the North Circ and Green Lanes and opposite the pub that changed names in that time from The Cock to The Manhattan to Legends (and much later, the Faltering Fullback and finally Polska Bar Sportowa, suggesting that the area should be referred to as Polskas Green now.) We called it Palmers Greek for reasons you can easily work out, although the town had at least as many Asian families living there, including Mr and Mrs Clark who owned the 2nd newsagents along and who weren’t really called Clark, we worked out, and who greeted everyone with either ‘Hello Friend’ (Mr Clark) or ‘Hello Sonny’ (Mrs Clark), which we found highly amusing as they drove a Datsun Sunny. Palmers Greek was grid-locked on a Saturday with Datsun Sunnys, Datsun Cherrys and many a second hand Mercedes.

From this crossroads we could travel anywhere we wanted to in the world, which tended to be northwards to school (29 to Enfield Town then some rural green bus out to St Ignatius), westwards to Arnos Grove (usually to the park there for football and failed attempts to find girls to ask out) or southwards into London (again the 29 with a Red Bus Rover illicitly shared between two.) But never east. East took you to Edmonton. Unlike Napoleon and Hitler, we knew that only misery and grim death would be the reward of going east.

That junction, which we stoically tried to keep referring to as The Cock, years after Manhattan had become the landmark pub’s name, held a few attractions for us other than the newsagents.  Green Lanes Sauna, we innocently assumed was only a sauna, albeit one popular with short fat middle-aged Greek men, when they weren’t gambling in one of the nearby clubs.  Other short fat middle-aged Greek men - who were not gambling or treating themselves to a ‘sauna’ - ran the numerous grocery stores along Green Lanes, a barber’s at the back of a hardware store (where you’d be better off asking the hardware store owner to take some cheap shears to your 80s mullet) and Hellenic Video, the Mecca of VHS films, both clean and electric blue in content.

These men were all called George, Andy or Nick and their daughters all wore heavy black make-up, black outfits and black leather coats, accessorised with gold jewellery, and their sons George, Andy and Nick juniors, spent their time in the snooker hall behind the Manhattan and the bus garage.

So you can see that far from feeling xenophobic in relabelling it Palmers Greek, we positively embraced Greeks bearing gifts, because those gifts included Greek food, dirty videos, cheap haircuts and snooker. It was only booze that we had to walk up to Palmers Green Triangle for; but I’ll leave that for part two...

The 70s were cool thanks to cigarettes

When you were a kid, what did you want to be when you grew up? I vacillated between the noble aspirations of stuntman, cartoonist and actor (ideally with permed hair); but the only constant dream that I nursed was to be a smoker.  I would have written to Jim’ll Fix It to ask for his help, but the renowned altruist had ignored my other pleas to play for Liverpool and with Adam and the Ants, so I thought bollocks to him. (Dodged a bullet there). Besides, I had easy access to cigarettes. It was ‘Fags  R Us’ at our house.  The lounge was like a Victorian pea-souper.  We collected Embassy vouchers, we had hundreds, but fuck knows what we ever traded these in for, more packets of Embassy I suspect.  And we had ash-trays everywhere, ash-trays bought as presents, ash-trays nicked from restaurants and pubs and places we visited and those posh ash-trays on stands with sliding panels.

And this is because in the 70s cigarettes were GREAT!  They came in different coloured boxes with cool designs,  not like today when they’re all in the same dark green packet with photos of diseased bodily organs on them.  How can you tell which is which? Does Embassy even exist anymore? Oh, it’s the one with the mouth close up on it, the black-gummed, tombstone teethed health warning photo that no one believes because you never see anyone with a gob like that; because actually you’d have to smoke 300 a day to look that bad and no one has been able to afford 300 fags a day since the 70s when they were sensibly priced, and not much more than sweet cigarettes in those days in fact.

But I’ve read that these days it takes just one packet to make your teeth fall out and your gums look like toes on a tramp with trenchfoot.  This is because they put all kinds of shit in modern cigarettes - rat poison, anthrax, talcum powder, toe-nails, pig’s eye lashes, paving stones, garlic, maybe even Pot Noodle powder. Back in the 70s, it was good old fashioned tobacco, tar and some pleasantly addictive chemicals. And you could tell the difference between fags as well.  Silk Cut (Slut) were your starter pack - pretty bland and innocuous, like plain crisps.  Then you might move onto Benson and Hedges, medium tar, bit more of a scratchy feel at the back of your throat, like Monster Munch.  From there, you might go Rothmans, but that was like inhaling razor blades and you couldn’t regress back down to Embassy, because your mum smoked them and they were too short; so you’d go a bit exotic and plum for Camel with their mild dung flavouring.

Don’t get me wrong, my parents never encouraged me to smoke. Each time I went to shop to buy their  fags for them, I knew I’d get into massive trouble if I smoked one on the way home.  So, I had to make do with lighting their dog ends, fresh from the ash-tray, when they were out of the room.  They’d never notice.  It’s not like I’d smell any more like cigarettes, after all.

But adults were role models and back then there were some clear cultural norms in relation to how men and women should hold their cigarettes.  Women had to gently pinch a cigarette between the tips of their elongated fingers and hold their hands up so that the fag was at head height, swaying in time with the rhythm of their speech. Men shoved the cigarette down low in the fingers, near the knuckle, hand half clenched, ideally holding something manly like a pint, a tool or their penis.  And when you needed two hands to manipulate any one of those things, you’d let the fag hang limply from your lips, eyes half closed to look cool, whereas in fact you’d be squinting in response to feeling like you were having a napalm eye-bath.

And what was lovely about smoking, was that no one gave a shit about you doing it.  Nowadays, you could take a dump on someone’s lap on a train and everyone would look away too polite to comment; but light up a cigarette in a carriage and you’d get a chorus of excuse mes and do you minds.  Remember how before the mid 80s you’d NEVER see anyone smoking on a train?  That’s because there was so much smoke you’d never see anything. A tube would pull into a station with smoking and non-smoking carriages and it was the latter that had all the available seats, because most people were crammed somewhere inside the smog of the smoking ones.  In a token effort to cater for the sensibilities of ‘non-smokers’ (or poofters as they were sometimes known in those politically indifferent days) buses and aeroplanes sectioned off areas where you weren’t allowed to smoke.  They overlooked the fact that smoke tends to travel and often it only had to travel a few inches to expose the whole absurdity of non-smoking sections.

For the record, my first cigarette was when I was about 8 or 9, sat on a garage roof with my mate Brett (hard bastard, made his Dad blind by throwing sand in his eye), sharing a pack of John Player No. 6.  Then at school in science we’d roll a piece of paper, set it on fire from the Bunsen burner, blow it out and quickly inhale through the tube the little bit of smoke smouldering from the end.  After that, it was as I said, the final vestiges of a discarded dog end when your mum punctuated her own smoking with a quick pop to the lav.

Like I always say, the 70s were a better time. A time when culture demanded that we share cigarettes (you never saw anyone open a packet and not make an offer to others, helped by the fact that the cost didnt work out as 50p a fag); a time when people didn’t get their knickers in a twist over the fact that you were making their clothes smell or giving them lung cancer just by smoking in a confined space with them; a time when non-smokers had to fuck off outside a building and stand in the cold to indulge in their minority habit.

And best of all, cigarettes make you look cool. Much much cooler than a battery operated metal toy that emits clouds of strawberry smelling vapour, anyway.

All in the mind, somewhere

I’ve done some reading about how the mind works and discovered the difference between the subconscious and the unconscious, but I haven’t been able to apply this new knowledge to the curious phenomena that is best described as ‘starting to shit as soon as you know you’re on the way to the toilet.’

This sense of wonder emerged once again recently as I was walking home from the station after a day’s work needing a poo. (Perhaps I should have restructured that sentence so that you don’t think my job is to need a poo.) It’s a 23 minute walk. I’d wanted a poo since leaving work, a 30 minute train journey and 15 minute walk the other end previous to this walk. So you can imagine how long it was patiently resting in the tube.  However, once I started towards home from St Albans station, the unconscious or subconscious part of my mind - I’m desperate to know which - sent a message to my bum to the effect that a visit to the toilet was imminent. It wasn’t. It was still at least 20 minutes away; but, you know, the tug of war team starting pulling too early, the eager athlete was out of the blocks before the gun, the tortoise stuck his head out before hibernation was up, the guests arrived for the party before the dips were on the table.  It kind of slowed me down clenching that in as I walked.

This sub or un conscious part of the brain has always fascinated me, ever since I was old enough to get blind drunk and discover that it was possible to find your way home no matter how dysfunctional your conscious mind was.  It’s not completely fool-proof though.  The subliminal message that jerks your drunken body into action as you approach your stop on the night bus or late train home is pretty reliable except perhaps when you’ve just moved house. This happened on my first night out in London after moving to Borehamwood, when I was completely let down by a uselessly dormant (or maybe, more kindly, untrained) subconsciousness, and I woke up in Bedford, no return train due and only one mini cab outside, which charged me £40 (a ransom in 1997) to which I very consciously responded with an indignant ‘fuck off’ before apologising and accepting the offer, only semi-consciously aware of some poor sod from my carriage who had suffered the same misfortune and who I should have shared the cab with.  My brain let us both down there.

I’m assuming the conscious feeds information into the unconscious and the subconscious retrieves it when it feels like it’s needed. For instance, my conscious mind has decided that people who barge in front of others to get on a train deserve some kind of retribution or at least a message to the effect that they are being selfish and impolite.  So every time it happens, my foot automatically flicks out to kick or trip the perpetrator, dangerously just before my conscious mind has had a chance to ascertain my chances of avoiding physical harm in the event of a violent response from the aforementioned rude bastard.  I’ve no idea how I’ve escaped ever being punched.

This intriguing part of the brain might be linked to intuition, but my intuition isn’t particularly useful. Now that I reflect on it, I can only think of two things that I ever have a strong premonition about.  Playing darts, I know as each dart leaves my hand whether it’s going where I want it to or not. That’s one example of successful intuition. The other is when I fart and think to myself, ‘that’s going to smell’ or not. (Though to be fair, a hot sensation between the cheeks usually gives it away.)

Anyway, I’m not sure I’ve provided the sort of intellectual and comprehensive psychological analysis  that Freud did in his lifetime, but perhaps he would have been even more useful if, rather than pervily banging on about how sex unconsciously impacts on all our conscious thoughts, he provided a solution to that more pertinent question of why a poo starts coming out when you know you’re not far from a toilet.

Reality TV did exist in the 70s

In my admittedly unreliable and predictably rose (or perhaps beige) tinted memory of the 1970s, there was only one TV programme that purported to be ‘reality TV’ and this was ‘The Family’.  The premise was no more complicated than a fly-on-the-wall documentary about a family from Reading.  Later, I lived in Reading as a student and coincidentally we also had numerous flies on our walls (and once I even had some Walls on my flies - that was when I dropped an ice-cream onto my lap.).  There was no angle to this programme.  This was years before Channel 4 existed and the family in question were not fat or gypsies or fat gypsies; they weren’t first dateable or undateable; they weren’t filthy rich and fucking stupid, nor were they piss poor and fucking stupid; and they weren’t all doing an everyday job that involved dealing with members of the public that other members of the public find entertaining to watch.  Channel 4 wouldn’t have touched them.

On reflection, when you’re a kid in the 70s then EVERYTHING is ‘reality TV’, because everything on TV was REAL.  Take Rainbow. That’s your nuclear family unit, that is. A mixed-species homosexual couple who’d fostered two one-armed children with learning difficulties. (Channel 4 would certainly have touched THAT family).  Wrestling on World of Sport.  Every male in the 70s stripped down to their y-fronts for a wrestle with another male on an almost daily basis, that’s what you do when you don’t have computer games.  (I still do it now if my phone battery runs down).  And  most realistic of all was the documentary about life in a department store, Are you Being Served? Anyone going into a John Lewis or C&A or somewhere similar would have noted the superfluous over-staffing (5 shop assistants for one customer every half hour); and John Inman was a real gay man playing a gay man. Arguably he was only implicitly homosexual, but up until then films and TV had been full of gay men playing straight men and straight men playing gay men - and Millenials think that THEY invented the concept of being sexually non-binary. No more so than they invented ‘gender fluid’ (as we know, that was Les Dawson and Roy Barraclough.)

There is an argument against all this, though.  In contrast to the above, programmes that claimed to have some kind of gritty authenticity actually proved to be far from realistic. Grange Hill started before I went to secondary school, so I was duped into believing that I was on the verge of experiencing similar escapades to those of Tucker, Benny, Trisha and co.  Two years later I’m in secondary school and wondering why the pupils in Grange Hill didn’t use tits and willies and poo as the fulcrum around which ALL their humour was centred.  And The Sweeney showed coppers beating up criminals, using politically incorrect terminology, drinking scotch for breakfast and  tellling women to put their knickers on and make the tea - but my Dad was a copper in the 70s and he had Frosties for breakfast, so that’s at least one thing that wasn’t quite authentic.

But on the whole, 70s TV was far more authentic than reality TV these days, which presents to us people who are not representative of the population, but instead come from the narrower demographic of vain exhibitionists desperate for attention (or, in fewer cases, vulnerable people who find it hard to fit in). These unremarkable but irritating non-entities who saturate our screens are worthy not of  TV celebrity status, but instead a Sweeney-style whack.