Sunday 11th November 1984

I got up at 10.00 and rang Doug. He said he could come swimming, so at 10.30 we picked him up and went to Stockton baths. However, there was only the little pool open so we went to Thornaby and did some geronimos.

At 12.00 we went to my house and I had dinner, then we went to the mud track (popping in for a drink at Doug’s on the way). We went on the swings down the track, then at 5.00 I came home and had tea.

Then I listened to the charts, and at 7.15 I watched Ever Decreasing Circles. At 7.45 I watched Big Deal, at 8.30 I watched Just good friends and I went to bed at around 9.00.

A mumbled apology down the phone to Doug for yesterday’s unforgiveable aberration (not going out to play because I was tired) and all was well again. Well enough, in fact, to forsake the Remembrance Day coverage on BBC1 and drag my tired Dad down to Stockton baths for a splash around. Except – brace yourself -

THERE WAS A ‘GALA’ ON!!!!

I never quite knew what a ‘Gala’ involved, but – peering through the huge glass frontage of the swimming pool – it seemed to consist mainly of well-to-do kids in expensive-looking trunks being cheered half-heartedly by yawning parents from the top-level ‘viewing gallery’. We never knew when there was going to be one, so a swift about-turn to an alternate pool became a frustratingly regular feature of our Sunday morning swims.

So back in the car, and over to Thornaby, where Doug and I flagrantly disregarded the below (semi-legendary) warning poster…

…and made a nuisance of ourselves doing ‘geronimos’ (or, to give them their official title, ‘bombs’) for an hour, scattering terrified infants and grumpy-faced pensioners alike to the far corners of the pool while my oblivious Dad forged ahead with his regulation forty lengths.

We were always ravenous afterwards, so we’ll have wolfed down a plate of beans-on-toast each, balanced on our knees in front of Weekend World in my front room, then knocked off for a bit of adventure during the rest of the day.

When I think back to my childhood nights in the front room, listening to the Radio 1 Top 40 countdown with one ear pressed to the speakers while my parents tried to watch Antiques Roadshow, I always think of one night in particular. And, looking at the charts for this particular week, it’s this one!

I can’t explain it, but there’s just SOMETHING about this night that distills the very essence of that exciting pre-Christmas period of 1984 into one lovely, intoxicating, jumbled-up mess of sentimentality. Paul McCartney’s ‘No More Lonely Nights’, Phil Oakey’s ‘Together In Electric Dreams’ and – brace yourself – Limahl’s ‘Never Ending Story’ can instantly rekindle the feeling of this long-lost evening, and – oddly – the wild, romantic dreams I had as an 11-year-old… of dressing up in a long coat and muffler and kicking through the leaves on a black, Autumnal night with a bit of warming synth-pop in my heart and Debbie Jarvis clinging onto my arm.

And this was also the first time I heard Nik Kershaw’s ‘The Riddle’, whose strange, meandering narrative seemed to suggest the tangled, exotic puzzles of my beloved Fighting Fantasy books (a feeling that lasted until 2001, when I saw Nik Kershaw himself describe the lyric as ‘bollocks’)…

And then a song whose video I was utterly entranced by, particularly as - I’m sure – it was widely touted as the most expensive video ever made at the time it was released. Yep, Duran Duran’s Wild Boys (WILD BOYS!!!)…

Around this time, I’m sure I remember the band making an appearance on Noel Edmonds Late, Late Breakfast Show to perform this song, and Noel asking the studio audience if any of them had ever met Duran Duran before. To be greeted, naturally, with a resounding ‘No….’.

‘I’m sorry, but you have…’ replied Noel. ‘You all have…’

He then revealed that the the entire band had been disguised as BBC doorstaff (in uniforms and peaked caps) as the audience had filed into the studio two hours earlier, and every single member of the crowd had had their ticket checked by a member of Duran Duran. Not a single one of them had realised.

Great stuff, and the band went up in my estimation immeasurably after that. I still love that video as well, and remember Simon Le Bon (possibly on the same Late, Late Breakfast Show) revealing that he’d come close to drowning when the crew had taken a lunchbreak and left him strapped to the windmill with his head underwater. ‘I’d have left the bugger in there as well,’ said my Dad, rustling the back page of the Saturday Evening Gazette.

Pop stars just aren’t ridiculous, pompous and portentious enough any more, are they? Listen to the lyrics of Wild Boys, and the hapless Duranees clearly though they were espousing deep, complex philosophy to a public eager to lap up their every proclamation. I like that. The current lot just want to get a bit ‘jiggy’ and wear tasteless jewellery. BRING BACK OVER-INFLATED PRETENSION IN POP!!!

Saturday 10th November 1984

At 5.20 I watched The Tripods, then we came home, and at 6.30 I watched Bob’s full house. At 7.00 I watched Cannon and Ball, at 8.00 I watched Hi-de-hi, at 11.00 I watched Pushing up daisys and at 12.00 I went to bed.

What motivating factor could have dragged me out of bed on a freezing Saturday morning, and into the clammy passenger seat of my Dad’s Reliant Scimitar? Why, DWM, of course. Doctor Who Magazine. We’ll have slung the car into an empty space on Yarm High Street (no parking discs required in those days – it was a brutal free-for-all) and my Dad will have wandered down to whatever Manly Retail Outlet he required (Butch Stuff ‘R’ Us, specialising in iron filings and drill attachments. GRRRR!) while I slunk into Robinson’s Newsagents to peruse the racks.

Looking for DWM was always a nerve-racking task. In those heady, pre-internet days, I was never sure of the release dates, and they often seemed to waver a couple of days either side in any case. So I’ll have wandered into the musty, overwhelmingly brown gloom of Robinson’s (I can still picture the tiled floor now, covered in the muddy imprints of pint-sized wellington boots) and scanned the racks for just a tiny, colourful glimpse of Peter Davison’s head sticking out from behind a Woman’s Weekly or the TV Times.

And yay! On this occasion, at least, my quest bore fruit!

I should point out with depressingly predictability that Yarm, a town with a population of around 10,000  and several surrounding villages outside that, no longer has a dedicated newsagent. When I was a kid there were, as far as I can remember, three shops in the High Street alone…

1) Robinson’s (bang in the middle of the High Street on the left hand side as you walk down from Conyers school) 2) Another whose name escapes me ALLLLL the way down the end of the same side of the street, and 3) another on the opposite side of the road, a smaller affair that nevertheless did a nifty line in Cola Bottles and aniseed balls.

All independently run, naturally, and all with the kind of musty, dark, but incredibly homespun and non-corporate atmosphere that those places inevitably generated. The odd bit of peeling wallpaper, and newspapers resting on bare wooden shelves with the occasional builder’s pencil mark visible, but I loved them all to bits. Shop No 2 moved further into the middle of the High Street sometime in the mid-1980s before closing altogether before the end of the decade. Shop 3 lasted until about 1997, and then vanished without warning. I just turned up to buy some Diet Fanta one day and found myself confronted by a mystifyingly empty and desolate-looking unit.

There were still a pair of smoking boots behind the counter.  

Robinson’s – my favourite, if I’m honest - underwent a traumatic regeneration (halo of light, copies of the Reader’s Digest circling around it) sometime in the early 1990s and rebranded itself as ‘Country News’ – a bit brighter and slicker, but still independently-run with a nice, homely ambience. I went in there virtually every day during my teens and twenties to buy a paper, or an NME, or any number of assorted chunky magazines… Select, Empire, Q or the Fortean Times. It became part of the lifeblood of Yarm, a hub for all of us to keep in touch with the outside world. It also gave me one of my best mates in Chris ‘Smudge’ Smith, as featured in the Star Wars chapter of ‘Wiffle Lever To Full!’ He was a long-haired student working behind the counter, and – in the mid-1990s – we used to chat about music and football when I wandered in to peruse the racks. Yep, still looking for a tiny, colourful glimpse of Peter Davison’s head sticking out from behind Woman’s Weekly or the TV Times…

And then, in (I think) 2002, it closed for good. All we have now are the usual racks in Spar and Sainsburys. Booooooooo.

(If any passing Yarm-ites can fill in a bit of information about any of these newsagents, I’d be really grateful – it’s terrifying how much my memory has blanked out… can you remember the layouts of any of these shops? Was Newsagent 2 the one where the counter faced you as you walked in?)

Anyway, mission accomplished. Back home to work on my map of Conyers school and its surrounding fields for art homework, and then… hmmmph…. zzzzzzz…. yep, I was dozing off at my station. So, Doug… I’m really sorry. I was half-asleep on my yellow bedspread when you arrived at the back gate, all cheery and ready for mischief and surrounded by at least half-a-dozen bawling younger kids that you seemed to have acquired on the half-mile walk from your house. I sleepily and grumpily sent you away for the first time ever, and then lay back on my bed for 30 seconds before a huge pang of guilt set in.

And now it’s back! How can I still feel so bad about something of no consequence that happened 25 years ago, when I was 11? Shape up, Fischer. Be a man. Buy some drill attachments.

And Saturday tea-time at my Gran’s, as per usual. This was a strange transitionary period for visits to my Gran, really. Throughout the first eleven years of my life, I’d spent pretty much every weekend over at her bungalow in Acklam. We’d head there straight after tea on a Friday, and my parents would stick around for a cuppa before driving back to Yarm for a Friday night pint in the spit-and-sawdust Cross Keys or George & Dragon. I’d spend the rest of the night messing about with Panini Sticker Books and watching Are You Being Served in the company of Lisa Wheeldon, the girl who lived in the house round the corner. We’d been born barely weeks apart, and had been weekend friends for as long as we could remember.

I’d be up in time for Swap Shop on a Saturday morning (watching Dollar videos in Star Wars pyjamas and crunching toast in front of Noel Edmonds), and then my Mum would arrive on the No 13 bus and me, my Mum and Gran would head to Middlesbrough for a shopping expedition. Until 1981 or so, this inevitably meant – yikes! – buying a Star Wars figure from the dream-like wonderland of Romer Parrish toy shop. After that, it was a Doctor Who paperpack from WH Smiths, or a ZX81 computer game from Boots or Uptons, with its Dallas-style winding staircase.

And then, more often than not, I’d stay over at my Gran’s house AGAIN on the Saturday night… watching Basil Brush and Doctor Who, then 3-2-1 and Game For A Laugh, often accompanied by my thirtysomething Uncle Trevor and Auntie Rose, on their way for a Harp Lager in the Endeavour pub round the corner. It was only on the Sunday morning that I’d be ferried back to Yarm to resume my normal, everyday life.

By 1981-ish, though, it was generally just Friday nights that I spent round there, and - by early 1984 – those had gone as well. I spent my weekends at home with Doug and the ZX81, and just accompanied my parents on their visits to my Gran’s for tea. I think she was becoming a bit forgetful by this point, so we were moving towards having her over to our place for the weekend rather than me being dumped over there. By 1985, our spare room had pretty much become my Gran’s weekend residence.

So anyway… teatime in Acklam, and – no doubt – cream cakes from a cardboard box sitting rapt in front of The Tripods. And then home in time for Bob’s Full House, which became a minor obsession of mine…

I still think it’s one of the greatest TV quiz shows ever produced, and it always felt like a vital chunk of a childhood Saturday at home in front of the telly. Anyone who dares to suggest otherwise is wallied.

Friday 9th November 1984

NON-UNIFORM DAY!

I got up at 7.30, and put on my gegs, black shirt, white tie, black trousers, white jacket, green sock and orange sock. At 8.30 Doug and Gaz came and we went to school. First was Gym, then French, followed by Geog. At 12.00 I had dinner*, then we played tennis without rackets.

Next was maths, then music, then science. At 3.40 I came home, then at 5.00 I had tea. At 5.10 I watched Crackerjack, then I played Destroy Death Star. At 7.00 I watched Blankety Blank, at 7.00 I watched What a carry on, at 8.00 I watched Play your cards right, and at 9.00 I went to bed.

*At this point Conyers had raised £875 for Ethiopia, including £28.00 from our class!

We did a lot of work for charity, but we didn’t like to talk about it…

Yep, the repercussions of Michael Buerk’s heart-rending news report on the Ethiopian famine were continuing to sweep the country. Including Conyers School, where – amazingly – I’ve an inkling that the idea for a fund-raising non-uniform day (translation: come to school dressed like a knob, and pay for the privelege) had actually come about as the result of (yay!) PUPIL POWER!!!

I’ve very vague memories of a polite, neatly-written petition being handed into some school dignitary or other, and the idea being quickly approved.  And so, barely a fortnight after I’d first seen that devastating news report (on Wed 24th October), I found myself, erm, dressing up like Shakin’ Stevens and throwing a pound coin into a Flora margerine tub passed around our form class by the lovely Miss Wilson.

Impressively our youthful form teacher had, like most of the rest of the staff, thrown herself into the spirit of Non-Uniform Day by dressing IN a Conyers school uniform. I imagine more than a few adolescent fantasies were kindled 25 years ago today. Rumours quickly swept the school that one of our sexiest, most curvaceous teachers had bent down to retrieve a dropped board rubber and given the fevered classroom more than just a flash of stocking top. But enough about Mr Harrison for the moment…

Anyway, a few scattered memories from the day:

1. I’m pretty sure I’d come to a tacit agreement with Doug and Gareth ‘Gazzie’ Jones the previous day that we’d ALL dress up in vaguely ludicrous gear – black shirts, white ties, luminous socks, and so on. Only to discover, in the morning, that they’d stitched me up completely and turned up in their normal, regulation sweatshirts and jeans. I like to think I got the last laugh, though… we walked to school with them looking like my roadies.

2. Marc ‘Thompson’ Thompson nicking my mirror glasses (or ‘gegs’ in case you were wondering) just before we entered our form groups and using them for a devastatingly funny ‘New York Cop’ routine, slamming small boys up against the wall and giving them the ‘Hey Buster, what’s da big idea…’ treatment in a breathy, Brooklyn accent. When he gave them back to me, he told me I looked like a ’mod’, which I took as a rather spiffy compliment. Not sure if it was intended as one, though.

3.  The same glasses were borrowed by the lovely Susan Hindley during our science lesson, who promptly dropped them on the tiled floor and knacked them. I got them back with one arm hanging off (from the glasses, not from Susan Hindley), which Jo Spayne found hilarious. I walked home in a sullen sulk, which isn’t easy to do when you’re wearing one green and one orange luminous sock.

When I got home, my Mum was doing something unpleasant to fishfingers at the kitchen sink, and I had a minor grumble about my glasses before she started to tell me a tale of even greater woe about a fellow family member. It’s to my eternal discredit that I can’t remember the details at all (‘Auntie Ivy’s had all her teeth removed, and a new fireplace put in…’, that kind of thing) but I do recall the conclusion to the conversation which was… (brace yourself…)

THE FIRST TIME I SWORE IN FRONT OF MY MOTHER!

I appreciate today’s urinal-mouthed generation might find this difficult to appreciate, but back in 1984 – although we cussed like navvies in each others company – we sneaky children of ‘Fatcher’s Britain fawned around our parents in a permanent state of butter-wouldn’t-meltdom. I had definitely never let slip a single swear word in either of my parents’ company before this. However – as my Mum concluded her story – I raised my eyebrows to the dining room ceiling and began to utter the immortal phrase ‘Bloody hell’. 

I say BEGAN to utter it, because I didn’t actually finish it! I got as far as ‘Bloody’ before a cold wash of fear descended over my body, and I realised what I’d done. So I concluded the phrase by switching clumsily into one of my acknowledged kiddie-friendly experessions of surprise. So what I actually said was, pathetically, ‘Bloody… erm, Gordon Bennett!!!!’

At which point my mother laughed uproariously. ‘GOT YOU!’ she grinned. ‘You were going to say “bloody hell” there, then realised who you were talking to!!!’ 

I was so embarrassed, I spent the rest of the evening hiding beneath a cushion on the sofa. ‘Do you swear at school?’ she asked, as I made a rare foray into the open to play ’Destroy Death Star’, a Star Wars board game that I’d received for Christmas in 1978 and kept on top of the wardrobe ever since. 

‘No,’ I mumbled, lying shamelessly through my teeth. With the benefit of 25 years of hindsight, I should have brazened it out, winked, and said ‘Do I f***, you cheeky bugger’. It was another six years before I started swearing in front of my parents regularly, and after that there was no turning back.

Thursday 8th November 1984

At 3.40 Doug came and borrowed a spanner from my house, then I did some more of the cover for Iceworld Adventure. At 5.00 I had tea, and at 5.30 I watched Grange Hill. Then I did homework.
At 8.00 I watched Don’t wait up, at 8.30 I watched Zoo 2000, and at 9.00 I went to bed.

Bless you, Mr Warren! One of the most amazing and downright fun hours of science I ever had at school. Why? Because this was the day we looked at wibbly-wobbly grotties through a microscope!

(We had to write the boring theory first, of course. This is what we were looking for, a few cheeky Protozoa floating around on little plastic slides dotted with drops of pond water…)

Amazing though it sounds for one so geeky and downright swottish, I’d never looked down a microscope before. They were contraptions that I’d only ever seen in bubbling laboratories in Children’s Film Foundation productions (usually with a grumpy, whiskery Patrick Troughton shooing flare-clared 1970s kiddies out of the door) or in boring Programmes For Schools and Colleges on BBC2 during rainy, illness-cursed afternoons at home.

I couldn’t wait to have a shuftie down a REAL LIFE MICROSCOPE though, and – fantastically - this is what myself, Jo Spayne, Chris Byers and Vince Potter saw on this dreary, overcast morning 25 years ago today… 

Yep, some real-life Parameciums floating around before our very eyes! Really, I was HUGELY excited by this. It felt like looking through a portal into a different dimension, a whole secret world of monsters and aliens living on a parallel plane of existance to my everyday humdrum universe of beans, chips, schoolwork and Spandau Ballet*. I think even Vince Potter got a bit over-excited and did a little Vorticella dance by the bunsen burners.

*Actually, I take that back. There’s nothing humdrum about beans and chips.

Amazingly, this spirit of exciting classroom discovery continued into Music, where we studied a rum little tune that’s since become one of my favourite pieces of classical composition…

Yep, the amazing ‘Danse Macabre’ by Camille Saint-Saens. As played to us on a portable cassette recorder by Miss Stainsby, whose untamed, frizzy hair stood visibly on end as she enthusiastically talked us through the Grim Reaper fiddling wildly in a graveyard (cue titters from the lads) and leading an army of rotting skeletons into a frenzied jig around the tombstones. A bit like Michael Jackson’s Thriller video, but French. And with a better tune.

I was intrigued by the gruesome premise, and threw myself lustily into the comprehension exercise that followed…

A! Get in! Incidentally, prior to this, we’d studied Saint-Saens slightly-lesser known work ‘Carnival Of The Animals’, and I was equally fascinated by the brilliant sense of humour that runs through the whole fourteen-movement suite. Saint-Saens’ ‘animals’ include, perversely, both fossils and trainee pianists, whose movement consists entirely of discordant keyboard-hammering and the faltering practice of scales. I’d considered converting the whole lot into a ZX Spectrum game at one point. The only drawback being that, at this point in my life, I didn’t yet own a ZX Spectrum.

(Incidentally, Saint-Saens was also a fabulously grumpy and sarcastic old sod who – according to Wikipedia – stormed out of the première of Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring, infuriated over what he considered the misuse of the bassoon in the ballet’s opening bars. Yay!)

So a fruitful school day all round, and with a bit of mystery and intrigue added right at the death. Why did Doug stop at my house on the way home to borrow a spanner? And why didn’t he just grab one from his own Dad’s copious toolkit? I can’t remember a single thing about this, so I guess we’ll never know.

Wednesday 7th November 1984

I got up at 8.30, then Doug, Gazzie and Burton came and we went to school. First was Art, then History, and I got a merit and two thirds. Next was maths, and at 12.00 I had dinner. After dinner it was French, then I got a merit in English.

Last was science, then at 3.40 I came home and started a cover for Iceworld Adventure (a new Fighting Fantasy I’m writing) At 5.00 I had tea, then I did homework.

At 7.00 I watched I’ve got a secret, at 7.30 I watched Sharon and Elsie, at 8.00 I watched Dallas, at 8.45 I watched Points of view, and at 9.00 I went to bed.

I’ve been racking my brains to work out how the hell I got a ‘merit and two thirds’ in History and I think I’ve cracked it… every time lovely old Mrs Ansbro wrote ‘Good’ at the bottom of our work, it counted as a third of a merit. A ‘Good Work’ counted for two thirds. And then, every couple of weeks, she’d tot them up, tick them off and dish out the merit marks accordingly.

I seem to have got a ‘Good Work’ for some scribblings about the Vikings, and three ‘Good’s for – respectively – a drawing of Tuthankhamen’s death mask, a map of the Mediterranean showing the Phoenician trade routes, and a cartoon of a Viking longboat with dear old Poggy Doggy resplendant on the main sail. So a merit and two thirds. Yay! You’ve got to have a system, haven’t you?    

Here’s the ‘Good’ for my Viking longboat drawing, ticked off by Mrs Ansbro as she totted them all up, 25 years ago this morning…

English with Mrs McDonald, meanwhile, seems to have been focused on those hardy classroom trouble-makers of ‘There, Their and They’re’. I’m guessing we had to write a short story that utilised all three words, because I’ve hurriedly scribbled the following…

‘They’re over there,’ said the cop.
‘They’re not. You can tell by their car,’ said 008. There was a look of determination in his eyes. ‘I can also see their footprints in the mud over there,’ he added.
There were now a load of cops there but they obviously had their hands full with the Blackgang bunch. They had had them cornered before but

Sorry, but that’s as far as it gets. The bell must have rung in mid-sentence (‘THAT’S A SIGNAL FOR ME, NOT FOR YOU!!!!!’) so I broke off, drew a line underneath with my Shatterproof ruler, and never looked back. I believe Douglas Adams used to take a similar approach to his writing deadlines.

My science work, sadly, gets bit a sloppy from now on, as - oddly – there are no more dates written in the rest of the exercise book. So it’s hard to work out what I wrote on any given day. Clearly Mr Warren’s science lessons operated outside of Time Itself, in a temporal hysteresis maintained by the Time Lords of Gallif – oh, alright, I’ll stop now.

(I should point out that no such laxity existed in Mrs Clark Without The E’s Maths class, where the FIRST PAGE of my new maths exercise book boasts the terse message ‘Marks lost for presentation – no date!’ in red Biro. Yikes!)

Anyway, we were certainly still working on vertebrates vs invertebrates (Fiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiight!!!) in our science lessons, so it gave me an excuse to slip yet ANOTHER cartoon drawing of Poggy Doggy into serious academic research…

And then  – yet again - another 1980s evening spent goggling in front of the telly. ‘I’ve Got A Secret’ was, I’m pretty sure, an ITV panel show in which grotty members of the public shuffled onstage and whispered their ’secret’ to the host, who would then tease a three-man celebrity panel (Barbara Dickson, Lionel Jeffries, Eve Pollard, that kind of thing) until they guessed it. I can’t remember the host, though, and Google brings up nothing whatsover. Can anyone help? Oddly, I CAN remember one single ’secret’ from the show, which was – brace yourself – a wheezy old duffer proudly proclaiming to the panel that ‘I suffered a hernia while playing five-card brag’.

I had to ask my Mum what a hernia was, naturally. We were halfway through Sharon and Elsie before I recovered my senses, and it was another six months before I could eat a tomato.

Tuesday 6th November 1984

I got up at 8.00, and at 8.30 Doug, Gazzie and Burton came and we went to school. First was English, then it was RE in the Science lab. After that was English again, and last was drama.

At 12.00 I had dinner, then it was French, Maths and HE. I came home at 3.40 and I had tea at 5.00. At 5.10 I watched Star Trek, then I got ready for Youth Club.

Doug came at 6.30 and we went and played Basketball with Potter and Faz, then we spent the rest of the time in the quiet room. At 8.30 I came home and at 9.00 I went to bed.

A rainy, overcast occasion, as the morning after Bonfire Night ALWAYS seemed to be. Thus allowing Doug, Gazzie Jones, Alistair Burton and me to pick our way through a little minefield of soggy, burnt-out fireworks on the pavement outside the red school gates. These sad, wet remnants of the previous day’s festivities were as melancholy a sight as it was possible to find during our collective childhoods, easily up there with…

a) a brief glimpse of lurid, screwed-up wrapping paper beneath a pile of potato peelings in the kitchen bin on the day after your birthday

b) The brightly-coloured waltzers being packed into a grey, utilitarian wagon in Yarm High Street on the pale, drizzly morning after the last night of the fair

c) A soggy, partially deflated balloon hanging from the front room curtain rail on the 2nd January, and a thin layer of fir tree needles dotted around the back of the settee on the 3rd.

We’d find charred, cardboard rockets still with the wooden stick attached, and fling them at each other in a vain attempt to recapture the freewheeling magic of the previous night. All to no avail, though. Normality, English, and RE in the science labs beckoned us like the grimmest of grim reapers. 

I don’t really have anything in my exercise books from this date, so there’s no clues as to why the location of our RE lesson with Mrs Mainwaring-Taylor shifted so dramatically. We’ll have been disappointed though, because our usual RE classroom required a voyage through the outer limits of…

(dramatic music)

…the Conyers Sixth Form area!

A strange, hallowed warren of haphazardly-arranged tables and amusing ‘artwork’, the sixth form area felt like the most exotic place in the world for two reasons…

a) it had music. At any given point, there’d be a languid, pouting 17-year-old sprawling across a pouffe and tapping his winklepickers to a tinny, portable cassette player hammering out The Smiths or The Cure or Simple Minds.

And b) it had a smoking room. Yep, read it and weep, callow youths of the 21st century! Our sixth form area had a dedicated cubby hole where 16-year-old lounge lizards could retire during their free periods and legitimately light up a Silk Cut while perusing the latest Melody Maker. Occasionally, as we passed through en route to RE, one of them would emerge amidst a noxious cloud that rolled across the rest of the open-plan enclave like a foggy night on the Irish coast. The room had clearly begun its life painted the same utilitarian magnolia as the rest of the school, but – by 1984 - had brown walls and a dirty green ceiling.

Brilliantly, the smoking room was still in operation at the end of my Lower Sixth year in the Summer of 1990. Yep, it was perfectly legal and permissable for teenage pupils to spark up a fag, indoors, on the school premises in the 1990s! And then the sixth form area was shifted to a different building, and the smoking room failed dismally to make the journey. Altogether now: ‘It’s political correctness gone mad…’

Anyway, a pretty nondescript day, and another night at Conyers Youth Club, idly smashing a basketball around the empty court with Doug, Vince Potter and Ian ‘Faz’ Farrage (hello!) before wandering home in the rain. Burnt-out fireworks getting soggier by the second.

Monday 5th November 1984

BONFIRE NIGHT

I got up at 8.00 and at 9.00 Doug, Gazzie and Burton and me went to school. First was maths, then it was history. after break it was rugby, and I won the 2 lap race.

At 12.00 I had dinner, then it was French, followed by English, then geog, then maths. at 3.40 I came home and did maths till tea was ready, and after tea I did more maths.

At 6.30 mam and I watched the bonfire and the fireworks over the road, then we went to the cricket club just in time to be late for the display. At 8.00 I came home and watched Rising damp, and at 8.30 I watched Lame ducks.

At 9.00 I watched Laugh??? I nearly paid my licence fee, and at 9.30 I went to bedybyes.

I won a two-lap race? What?!?!? There must have been some sort of debilitating leg plague sweeping Teesside over the weekend, rendering the rest of the adolescent population incapable of running more than 10 yards without crashing to the ground like baby giraffes. I’d spent the weekend mapping Caverns Of The Snow Witch in the quarantined cloisters of my bedroom so I was clearly  unaffected.

Either that, or the rest of my rugby class were just overweight, lumbering buffoons who’d spent the entire weekend stuffing their faces with cakes and roast beef, and… ah….

Anyway, I no doubt undermined my new-found sporting prowess by dancing around wildly as I crossed the finishing line, making stupid ‘whoop-whoop’ noises and gnashing my teeth. Like Gollum in rugby shorts. And I celebrated my new-found sporting prowess by writing a nice little nostalgic feature in my English lesson…

5th November 1984

My memories of primary school

I can remember standing at the brown gates on my first day at primary school, holding my mam’s hand and not wanting to go in on my own. Eventually I ventured inside with about six of my old friends from play school, and I was told to draw something nice and colourful. I must have sat at my little table for about half an hour, just looking around, before I drew a clown with a big red nose. I was mad on clowns when I was little, and was furious when the teacher ticked my drawing, because I thought she had scribbled on it!

My very first school dinner was probably my worst.  I was sat on my own by a dinner nanny, and although I was first in for lunch, I was last out. It was horrible. All I could smell and taste was that awful, lumpy school stew.

I cannot remember any more about my first day, but I know that when I was six or seven I went through an accident prone phase. Evert day I would get off the school bus, trip over my little leather satchel and cut my knee open. The next think I would know was that I was in the medical room among the smells of disinfectant and with a whopping great piece of elastoplast on my knee.

Probably my favourite time at junior school was when I was a first year junior. My best friend and I (whose name was Paul Frank) used to do really silly things like write out six pages of English upside-down in our maths books. However we never got told off and I enjoyed every minute as a first year.

At about the same time as that, a football craze swept over the school. Everyone in our class (even the girls!) either supported Nottingham Forest our Liverpool, and all the boys turned up after the winter holidays with Forest bags and kits.

So although people say that school was the worst time of their life – I must admit – I really enjoyed it!

‘8/10. Merit. Keep up the good work’ Wrote Mrs McDonald, in red Biro, at the bottom of my scribblings. I don’t know whether to find it endearing or slightly worrying that, at the age of the eleven, I was already getting soggily nostalgic about events that had happened barely three years earlier. I remember that Levendale Primary School stew, though… September 1977, and it was so far removed from anything I’d EVER eaten in the first five years of my life that I didn’t even recognise it as food. I prodded it around my tray for the best part of an hour before giving up the ghost with a few defiant tears running down my face.

Anyway, Bonfire Night! Yay!

Like Halloween, I think Bonfire Night was considerably less commercialised and ostentatious in the mid-1980s. Nowadays – judging by the constant deafening explosions in the skies above Teesside - the 5th November seems to start sometime in mid-October, and continues for at least four weeks before melding seamlessly into the Christmas party season. If I stand under the Leylandii on a rainy night and look up, it’s like being in Apocalypse Now.

Back in the 80s, my Dad would stack a little pile of garden rubbish and general unwanted gubbins (old bits of wood from the garage, mouldy piles of 1970s Radio Times*, etc) down by the compost heap, and my Mum would pop into Robinson’s Newsagents in Yarm High Street and spent £1.99 on a little cardboard box of ‘Standard Fireworks’ (which looked like they’d been issued by HM Government) and a paper packet of sparklers.

*It breaks my geeky heart to think of this now.

  
The fire would be lit at around 7pm, and my Dad would send a little procession of farty fireworks into the night sky while my Mum and I wrote our names in the blackness with the fizzing ends of our sparklers. I can’t have held one of these for at least 20 years, but I can still remember the SLIGHTLY uncomfortable feeling of those dancing yellow sparks hissing so close to my bare fingers, and the strange, unearthly burning smell they produced (the sparks, that is, not my fingers. Although actually…)

Mind, it wasn’t quite as unearthly a burning smell as my Dad managed to create on Bonfire Night 1981, when he decided our garden fire was ‘taking a while to get going’ and flung the contents of an old can of Castrol GTX across the top of it.  The ensuing wall of flame is currently working its way towards Alpha Centauri, and I remember hiding in the side garden beneath a metal dustbin lid as flaming embers of John Craven’s Back Pages fluttered down to Earth. I’m only amazed that none of us made the opening story of Newsround the following afternoon.

(Can’t believe I found this clip, it’s amazing…!)

I also have fantastic memories from (I think) 1982 of Mr Hirst taking us quivering idiots into the ‘end room’ of Levendale Primary School and describing with relish the full grisly details of being ‘hung, drawn and quartered’.

‘So Guy Fawkes would have been hung by the neck until he was NEARLY dead, but still conscious… then dragged around the streets of London while the people kicked and spat on him… and then, still awake, he’d have his guts taken out and burnt in front of his eyes…’ I think we had to draw a picture by the end of the afternoon. Anyone got a red felt-tip?

Anyway, clearly our personal Bonfire Night celebrations were winding down a bit by 1984, so my Mum and I wandered across to the Young Offender’s Prison over the road to watch the traditional bonfire in the leafy square outside the officer’s houses, then – I think – caught sight of a spectacular firework display somewhere in the near vicinity, and decided to follow it. We wandered half a mile along Yarm Road to the Cricket Club, only to find the last whistly firework fizzling out into a dark blanket of cloud as we turned the corner into the drive.

So we went home and watched Rising Damp instead. Awwwwww.

Sunday 4th November 1984

I got up at 10.30 and started to map Caverns of the Snow Witch, then Doug rang. At 11.30 he came over and we went upstairs and did maths homework. Then we set up the ZX81 and played Flight Simulation.

At 12.00 we had dinner, then we played Tomb of Dracula. At 2.00 we went to Doug’s house via the Kebble estate, then we went to the mud track and played on the swings and the horse.

At 4.00 I came home and did some mapping, then I had tea. After that I did homework, and at 7.15 I watched Ever decreasing circles. At 7.45 I went in the shower, then I watched Just good friends at 9.30. After that I played Caverns again, and at 9.55 I went to bed.

Maths homework? On a Sunday morning? We must have been bored. Actually, we were DEFINITELY bored if we resorted to playing Flight Simulation on the ZX81, a game programmed by dedicated plane-spotters listening to Tangerine Dream while munching on Valium sandwiches…

Don’t be fooled by the music on the above clip… the game itself was, like all ZX81 experiences, completely silent. The computer had no sound whatsoever. Unlike Doug and I, and as soon as the onscreen prompt ‘Do You Want To Include Wind Effects?’ appeared, one of us will have lifted an obliging buttock and provided the obvious answer.

I had no recollection of ‘Tomb Of Dracula’ whatsoever, and wasn’t sure if it might even have been an ancient, dusty board game, but NO! Youtube has just spouted forth the below clip, and it’s all come flooding back! (Again, ignore the spooky music – the only soundtrack we had was Poggy Doggy snuffling around looking for Blue Riband biscuits and my Mum hoovering the stairs)

It’s really weird seeing that again… I can’t remember buying the game at all, or even playing it, but the sight of the goofy cartoon Dracula at the start has just given me an amazingly giddy rush of nostalgia. I’m now overwhelmed with a desperate desire to give both Poggy Doggy and my 11-year-old self a big soppy hug. See, I AM soft-hearted after all. I’m even starting to think I’ve been a bit unfair to the ZX81 Flight Simulator and wouldn’t mind a bash at it again…

Aside from all that, a relatively quiet, grey Sunday. I think Doug and I tootled around Yarm for a couple of hours without seeing anyone of note, just aimlessly circling our bikes around the swings at the mud track, diving in and out of the trees to avoid the rain and shouting the odd obscenity into the silence to relieve the relentless tedium. Although this MIGHT have been the day on which some passing busybody ticked us off for throwing the swing chains over the top of the frame, making the seats a more comfortable height for our rapidly elongating bodies.

‘Do you mind putting the swings back how you found them?’ he huffed, patronisingly. He was an intense-looking thirtysomething with a red face and a Barbour jacket.

‘We will, when we’ve finished,’ I shrugged. ‘We always do. It doesn’t do any harm’.

‘I suppose you think that’s funny do you?’ 

‘Eh?’ 

‘STUPID LITTLE PRICKS LIKE YOU, COMING HERE, MAKING THIS PLACE A DEATH-TRAP FOR ALL THE LITTLE KIDDYWINKS AND TODDLERS. WHO THE HELL DO YOU THINK YOU ARE??!??!’

‘Erm…’

‘TAKE THEM DOWN NOW OR I’LL TAKE THE BLOODY PAIR OF YOU TO THE POLICE STATION!!!!!’

Clearly a man with swing-related ‘issues’*. In a slight state of shock, we put the swings back to their original position, waited until he was out of sight, then threw them back over the frame and spent the rest of the afternoon concocting elaborate plans to have him tortured and executed before parading his head around the Town Hall on a spike.

*I think they’re known as ’swingers’ in certain circles.  

Naturally, he went on our mental death list, along with the elaborately-named ‘Don’t Press That Button’, a plummy-voiced sixth former from Yarm Independent School who once pre-empted a minor bit of devilment from me,  grabbing my shoulder just as I was about to press the button on the Pedestrian Crossing on the pavement outside the school. I wasn’t intending to cross the road, I was just mischievously going to make the traffic stop for no reason while I tootled on my way.

‘DON’T PRESS THAT BUTTON’ he warbled, in a very recently-broken voice, as my index finger slid threateningly out of my parka sleeve. I sheepishly mumbled some offensive retort before sidling away on my bike. From then on, whenever Doug and I saw him around Yarm, we cooed ‘DoN’T PrEsS THaT BuTToN’ in a mocking, wobbly baritone behind his back and ducked into the trees whenever he looked round. He’s probably still in therapy somewhere, mumbling about Belisha Beacons to his expensive, private psychiatrist.  

I think this was also the day on which my lengendary clumsy twattiness came to the fore and I knocked a full glass of home-brew white wine over the steaming plate of Sunday dinner that my Mum had set down on the coffee table in front of me. It swilled around the plate, and my sprouts gasped for rasping breath. ‘Oh, you dozy great pillock…’ huffed my Dad, while my Mum – ever the optimist - told me that ‘white wine is used in lots of recipes, and it all goes down the same way anyway’.

So I ate it. It didn’t make my Sunday dinner taste any better, but – to be fair - it didn’t make my Dad’s homebrew wine taste any worse either. In fact I think I was still sprinkling the stuff on my fish and chips six months later. Oddly, while all of this happened, I distinctly remember that the classic 1950 comedy film ‘The Happiest Days of Your Life’ was burbling away on BBC1, so I guzzled down my ruined dinner with Alistair Sim and Margaret Rutherford looking disapprovingly on. It all seemed curiously British and appropriate.

Saturday 3rd November 1984

MAM’S BIRTHDAY

I got up at 9.30 and I went to the dentists and got my brace adjusted. Then I went to Smiths and got Caverns of the Snow Witch (a new Fighting Fantasy). After that we got the bus to the Coronation, and walked to Grandma’s.

When we got there I read Caverns, then I had a bacon sarnie. After that we went round the shops, and when we came back I just lazed around till 5.00, when I had tea. At 5.20 I watched The Tripods, and at 5.45 I watched The Late Late Breakfast Show (someone pointed out that Noel Edmonds played keyboards for Wham!)

At 6.30 we came home, and at 7.00 I watched Cannon and Ball. At 8.00 I watched Hi-de-Hi, and then I tidied my room up. At 9.30 I watched Pushing up daisys, and at 11.00 I went to bed.

Yay! Happy birthday mother! (For then and now…)

Clearly the only to celebrate was to get out of my Dad’s way for the day (he’ll have been knocking down a kitchen wall or building a new stairwell or something) and catch the 294 bus from the end of our garden to Middlesbrough, spending a relaxing day at my Gran’s bungalow in Acklam.

Stopping en route at Keith Herren’s dental surgery in Stockton, where my (Gah!!! Argggh!!! Nyaaggggh!!!) brace transpired to have been so effective that the screws needed adjusting to achieve a tighter grip on my retreating incisors. The brace had grown so loose over the last few weeks that I’d almost forgotten it was there, but I emerged from the surgery on this bitter, drizzle-flecked morning feeling like two roadside jacks had been clamped to either side of my mouth. 

I couldn’t complain, though. I wanted to, but any hint of a grumble would mean my mother wouldn’t buy me Caverns Of The Snow Witch as my ‘being good at the dentist’ incentive…

(On HER birthday, too! What a selfish, spoilt little oik I was. Oh, well, she got a nice bottle of Bombay Sapphire this morning to make up for it…)

The Coronation is a vast, sprawling pub on Acklam Road, about a mile from my Gran’s house. I’m guessing this was the nearest bus stop that we could reach from Stockton High Street, and no doubt I spent the entire 20-minute walk with my nose stuck inside my new Fighting Fantasy book as my mother sporadically directed me away from the onrushing traffic with her foot.

I don’t know for certain, but I’m guessing the pub opened its doors for the first time in June 1953. (An occasion on which – apparently - the entire street piled around to my Gran’s house, as they were the only family in the neighbourhood to own a television at that point. A fact my Dad, 56 years on, still uses as conclusive proof that my Mother’s family are the Teesside equivalent of the Armstrong-Joneses, and that 24 Rievaulx Avenue was their Balmoral)

No doubt the kettle was already on the boil when we reached the homely enclave of my Gran’s kitchen, and the dying embers of Saturday Superstore (and the start of Grandstand) will have been burbling away on the TV in the front room. I guzzled a bacon sandwich stuffed into two slices of dazzling white Mother’s Pride bread (sliced into quarters, naturally) and smothered in tomato ketchup while Mike Read played the new Captain Sensible video.

And then to ‘the shops’. I’ve written about them before, but Acklam Shops played a HUGE part in my childhood. A row of five bustling little units a hundred yards from my Gran’s front door. In order, from the left…

1. Shipman’s The Bakers. Chocolate Flake Cakes (with – bestill my beating heart – genuine slices of Cadbury’s Flake on the top), Custard Slices and Dairy Cream Cakes in white cardboard boxes with dainty red ribbons tied around the middle. All of which were a staple of Saturday evening teatimes around my Gran’s house (no wonder I was told at the age of 19 to reduce my cholesterol level a bit)

2. Murray’s Newsagent. Except lovely old Mr Murray died in 1981, so by 1984 it will have had a different name altogether… but, in the grand Teesside tradition, it remained ‘Murrays’ for the rest of eternity. Aniseed balls in huge glass jars, piled-up copies of the pink Sports Gazette (‘BORO STUNG BY HORNETS’), Return Of The Jedi sticker books and – by the door – a chest freezer the size of Denmark stuffed with Cornettos, Orange Fruities and 10p Mini-Milks.

3. Honeyman’s Fruiterers. Never went in there (see Paragraph 1, re: cholesterol level)

4. A butcher’s shop whose name escapes me. I asked my Mum today if she could remember what it was called, and she replied ’No, but I never liked the meat in there, it was always a bit too dark for my tastes’. It’s 25 years, mother. Let it go. Let it go.

5. Hinton’s Supermarket (although I think it later became a Preston, and then finally a Spar). Was Hinton’s just a North-Eastern firm? The idea of the ’local’ supermarket chain seems to have long-since vanished from the North-East, it’s all just Tesco and Sainsburys round here these days. Anyway, it smelt of cats and cheap beans, and I once went in there dressed as a Star Destroyer Commander from Star Wars, resplendent in grey shirt, grey trousers and black wellies. The teenage girl on the checkout (fluffy blonde highlights, heavy on the eyeliner) asked if I was a ’Russian spy or summat’.  I think I clicked my heels as I departed with a bagful of Bounce dogfood. I was 27.

Needless to say…. yikes… none of them are there anymore. Once the hub of the community, now completely vanished. I drive home through Acklam from work sometimes, and all five shop units are now boarded up and covered in graffiti. The last time I remember them being all present in correct was in 1995, when I took a young lady for a walk down Devil’s Bridge (I know how to show a girl a good time). I think the supermarket was the last to go, sometime around the turn of the millenium.

Can I stop weeping now?

Anyway, I’ve just had a strange, completely unexpected flashback to this day, and a quick Google has proved me utterly right – this was the day on which BBC1 – wait for it – broadcast live coverage of Mrs Gandhi’s funeral! The Indian Premier (or ‘Mrs Gandhi Yok Yok’ as she was eternally known to us Young Ones fans) had been assassinated on Halloween, although I think the two incidents were unconnected. The BBC’s coverage featured live footage of the traditional Indian funeral pyre being burnt to the ground, which came close to putting me off my Chocolate Flake Cake.

I do remember, in the week following, Points Of View receiving a little flurry of letters commending commentator Sue Lawley on ‘adopting a slight but respectful Indian accent throughout the course of the funeral’ which, I have to say, I didn’t notice. But then I’d been brought up on It Ain’t Half Hot Mum, so maybe I was immune to such things. I should probably state for the record that, these days, it’s considered slightly inappropriate for Western BBC presenters to adopt Asian accents for their links (although I try to slip into broad Cornish at least once a month, just to keep my listeners on their toes)

And The Late Late Breakfast Show did indeed feature the Noel Edmonds lookalike playing keyboards for Wham! A little trawl of Youtube has turned him up, and it’s a fair cop, guv’nor… (about 26 seconds in)

I’ve just remembered my Dad – who must have driven over to my Gran’s house for his tea by this point – watching this from his armchair and commentating that Andrew Ridgely was doing ‘the standard three-chord trick… about the simplest bit of guitar-playing you can get’. I think he was a whisker away from advocating the return of National Service for this heinous crime. Bizrrely, I can now recall quite clearly that – as he said this – I was standing next to the white-painted doorway to my Gran’s front room, so it’s possible I was on my way to (or from) the kitchen to snaffle some more Chocolate Flake Cake.

And then home in the Reliant Scimitar for the rest of the evening’s telly. Thanks to regular blog contributor Thing for pointing out that this evening’s Cannon and Ball show featured – somewhat incongrously - Rik Mayall as a star guest! Clearly I watched it, but I’ve no recollection of this at all. I probably still had my nose in Caverns of the Snow Witch.

It’s true though, and it’s here…!

And then Pushing Up Daisies, one of a little rash of rather adult, late-night Channel 4 shows that popped up around this time, and that I was (just about) allowed to watch in the front room… I’d probably even been given a glass of home-brew wine (especially if I’d been naughty) to glug in front of the coal fire, with the dogs snaffling peanuts from my Dad’s hand and a few sausage rolls warming up on the fireside hearth. The show starred Chris Barrie, Carla Mendonca and Hale and Pace – who, I think, first launched their ‘Management’ routine  on this programme.

I remember having no idea what ‘Pushing Up Daisies’ meant, but I did stifle a smirk at a sketch in which a captured World War II officer with a speech impediment defiantly informed his captors that he would offer them nothing but ‘Name, Number and Wank’. I was growing up incredibly quickly, and – terrifyingly - Hale and Pace were partly responsible.

Friday 2nd November 1984

However it didn’t work so at 9.30 I went in the shower and at 9.35 I went to bed. Phew!

Rik Mayall was doing the publicity rounds, wasn’t he? I’m guessing he was plugging the Young Ones book, ‘Bachelor Boys’, which 65.3% of the male population of Conyers School seemed to acquire for Christmas in 1984 (not me though, I was still gettng the Doctor Who Annual). In all honesty, I didn’t need to own it, as there were at least four copies being circulated around our form group within twenty seconds of the January term starting. It’s fabulous, and I still remember the thrill I got on learning Neil the Hippy’s ACTUAL SURNAME (‘Pye’, in case the tension is too much to bear) and the fact that Vyvyan’s full name is ‘Vyvyan Basterd’…

And hell’s teeth… is there any phrase more certain to strike fear into the heart than ‘House Rugby’? Thankfully I’d been born without the crucial rugby gene that made boys balloon to 20 stone by the age of 17, wee in each others drinks and have an insatiable, pathological desire to sing ‘The Hair On Her Dickie-Di-Do’ to single women in nightclubs. But that still didn’t stop Mr Anderson and Mr Neilson rounding up us hapless non-rugby-playing saps with a cattle prod and forcing us onto the touchlines to watch our beefier classmates knocking seven bells out of each other on a pitch consisting entirely of frozen dogpoo.

I think I spent the entire double lesson talking about Doctor Who with Chris Byers, pausing occasionally to sidestep a headlong Gaz Norman, crashing helplessly through the bystanders in a series of desperate attempts to escape a game whose rules appeared to be improvised on the spot as part of Mr Harrison’s Drama Workshop.

Still, it got us out of Geography! The game was still raging by the end of break at 10.50am, so the male population of our class was reduced to me, Chris Byers and Jo Spayne - who, despite being a supremely gifted footballer – spent pretty much his entire secondary school career tactically ‘forgetting’ his PE kit so he could stay in the warm and work on being the most spectacularly talented artist in the school instead. So Mr Flynn decided we might as well ‘have the lesson off for some quiet reading’… yay! Two more chapters of John Christopher’s ‘The White Mountains’ bite the dust.

Bizarrely, I can remember really distinctly the four drinks that I bought from our school canteen… they were basically blackcurrent squash (with, no doubt, EEC regulations preventing them from EVER being described as ‘juice’) in translucent plastic cartons, with a flimsy film lid and a bendy straw sellotaped to the side. They were rancid, but contained enough tartrazine and artificial flavouring to make them more addictive than methodone.

 It was also swiftly discovered by the amateur scientists of 1CW that if we placed the empty cartons on the ground, top down, and jumped on them with a reasonable degree of force, they exploded with the strength of a North Korean missile test, creating an ear-buggering CRACK that ricocheted off the Sports Hall wall with an hilarious, irresistable intensity.

If six of us could co-ordinate our leaps to produce a series of simultaneous explosions, then the resulting racket sounded like an RAF Tornado was flying through the main school courtyard. I also have vague memories of a FULL carton of (ahem) ‘fruit drink’ being detonated inside Vincent Potter’s sports bag, thus coating two full months worth of school work in sticky, sugary glop. But I honestly can’t remember how this actually came about… any 1CW veterans fancy filling in the gaps?

Conversely, I have no recollection at all of digging ’some creepy crawlies out of some leaves’, but seeing as Mr Byers was undoubtedly involved, I’m sure him and his extraordinary memory can help out! (PS It wasn’t the locust dissection… that’s a few weeks away)

And yes, a bit of surreptitious card-marking. Saturday 3rd November 1984 was my Mum’s 43rd birthday, so – having blammed all my spare pocket money on blackcurrent drinks at dinnertime – I was reduced to that perennial tightwad schoolboy last resort… making a birthday card myself. The conversation between Doug and I during the day went thus…

Me: ‘I haven’t got any money to buy my mother a birthday card’
Doug: ‘Make her one. It’ll mean far more to her than you going out and spending a few pennies on some cheap thing from Strickland and Holt. She’ll be delighted that you actually sat down and spent the time making something yourself…’  
Me: ‘You’re lying’
Doug: ‘I know’

Didn’t stop me, though. I’ve no idea for certain what was on it, but it WILL have incorporated a cartoon version of Poggy Doggy. Hastily coloured-in with a felt-tip pen so I didn’t miss the start of Play Your Cards Right…