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...