Friday 6th July 1984

Woke up at 7.50 and got up at 8.10. At 8.30 I went to school and it was Topic groups, then we had a maths test. After that we went out and when we came in, Tucker and I did a picture for Topic. Had dinner at 12.00 and then we went out for rounders but got beat.

At 3.15 I came home and played football, and at 5.00 I had tea. Then I built a model Spitfire and at 7.05 I watched a repeat of Doctor Who and the king’s demons. At 7.30 I watched Simon and Simon and then I went out and played football with dad.

At 9.00 I went to bed.

Ooooh, a maths test! Three days after having our language skills assessed, it was time to shuffle back into the specially laid-out school hall (individual tables, austere silence, Mrs Mulhern pacing up and down wearing knuckledusters) to see how many of us had progressed beyond counting on our fingers (or, if we were really advanced, whipping off our Debenham’s socks and counting on our toes as well. Thankfully Christopher Herbert never managed to count beyond ten, so we were spared the overpowering pickled bunion whiff of his bare feet)

I was never as good at maths as I was at writing, although I’d got a dartboard for Christmas in 1980 (instead of a bloody Millenium Falcon, grrrr) so I was pretty adept at speedy mental subtraction. I never really got the hang of fractions, and long division defeated me completely, so much so that I broke with my usual reserved sang-froid one rainy Tuesday afternoon in 1983 and issued a formal complaint to Mrs Keasey.

‘Why do we have to do long division?’ I asked, rooting around inside my left air with the tip of a Berol Notewriter. ‘It’s stupid and pointless and it’s not as if we’ll ever use it in real life’.

‘Stop complaining,’ she sniffed. ‘Long division’s a handy skill to have in life, just like all written arithmetic’.

26 years on, I’m starting to feel a little vindicated, as I’ve now managed to reach the age of 36 without doing a scrap of long division (or indeed any other written arithmetic) since the day I sat my GCSE Maths exam in the summer of 1989. If I need to count to more than 10, I can always take my socks off. And if I need to count to over 20, I tend to ask other people to take their socks off. I’ve hosted some cracking parties over the last two decades.

I got an ‘A’ in GSCE Maths, by the way. F*** knows how.

Good to see Tucker and I collaborating on yet another ‘picture for Topic’, only two days after Doug and I had finally finished our deliberate week-long faffing over the previous, no doubt almost-indentical, piece of felt-tip artwork. I actually heard a snip of Jeremy Vine’s show on Radio 2 today, and one of his topics was ‘Is your child’s school deliberately winding down in the run-up to the summer holidays…?’ I can’t help but think if the rate of industry at Levendale Primary School has wound down any further over the last 25 years, the place might now actually be running backwards in time. I’ll have a walk past there tomorrow and see if I can spot an 11-year-old Stephen Mason trying to feed a protractor to Christopher Herbert.

The ‘model spitfire’ that I built was a bona fide Airfix kit, bought for me the previous Christmas by (I think) my Auntie Norma and saved for a rainy day. So, with my natural rebellious streak coming to the fore, I actually constructed it on a really sunny evening. Predictably, I managed to get my fingertips stuck together with modelling glue, and the sight of the half-completed aircraft provided my Dad with a chance to reel off his proud repertoire of German phrases, stolen wholesale from the 1950s British war films of his youth. These were, in order of preference…

1. Achtung, Scccchpitfire!!!
2. Gott in Himmel!
3. Schnell! Schnell!
4. Ja, Das Ist Mein Underpants

I’m not entirely sure which film the final phrase came from, but I imagine it was Anton Diffring that said it. NB My Spitfire didn’t look anywhere near as good as the one in the picture above. Its wings were all lop-sided, and it had smeared glue (and little fragments of toilet paper) all over the fuselage. Never… in the field of human conflict… has such a pig’s ear been made of an Airfix model… by such a ham-fisted little oik.

One of my literary heroes (and good friend, bless him) Harry Pearson points out in his excellent book ‘Achtung Schweinhunt!’ that, spiritually, the Second World War lasted until at least the late 1970s in this country, and he’s right… I have distinct memories of us boys drawing Vulcan and Lancaster bombers on scraps of paper at school in around 1978, and playing ‘German spies’ in the playground possibly a couple of years after that. Commando, Warlord and Victor comics were also still very widely read, and taught a generation of grotty British schoolboys that Japanese soldiers all shouted ’AAAAAIIIIIEEEEEEE!’ as they died. 

I’m sure our school library also had a fair selection of action-packed Second World War-themed books for children, including a full range that tied in with the Action Man toys… in fact, yes! Here you go…

This is the one that I definitely remember being there, but there were others – including ‘Snow, Ice and Bullets’ (based on a February afternoon in Thornaby) and the marvellously-titled ‘The Tough Way Out’. And, on a slightly unrelated tangent, I’ve just been reminded by writing this rubbish of the other themed range of ‘Boy’s Fiction’ stocked by our school library… Willard Price’s ‘Adventure’ series…

I don’t think I ever read a single one of these, but Timothy Scott used to rave about them. Maybe I should give them a go sometime.

And wow, a Doctor Who repeat! These were few and far between in the 1980s, and as my family had yet to join the video recorder revolution, an absolutely unmissable opportunity to watch some ‘old’ Who on the telly. The King’s Demons is a strange little two-parter from Spring 1983, with Peter Davison’s Doctor visiting the 13th Century and discovering The Master faffing around in the court of King John, seemingly in an attempt to derail the Magna Carta. Nobody seems entirely sure why, but the story does contain Doctor Who’s own C3PO, a fabulously camp and tormented shape-shifting robot called Kamelion… (who, brilliantly, can play the lute)

I saw this on TV and instantly wanted one of my own, especially as he looked a dab hand at long division.

Thursday 5th July 1984

I went out and played football till tea at 4.45. At 5.00 I went out and played on the tarzie, and stayed out till 7.30 when I watched Top of the pops. At 8.00 I watched Hi-de-Hi and at 8.30 Dad took some penalties at me. Went to bed at 9.00.

Silent reading! How marvellous, I’d forgotten all about this long-lost, hilarious phenomenon. With Levendale Primary School being a progressive, forward-thinking school staffed entirely by Guardian-reading, left-wing maniacs, naturally we were allowed to read our own books any time we liked during the school day. But we bookish types HAD to accept that our own, private reading might – at any moment – be interrupted by Christopher Herbert attempting to set fire to his Y-fronts to avoid an afternoon on ‘the apparatus’, or Philip ‘Slackie’ Slack crashing through the wall of the library on a demolition ball.

So, once in a while (usually when the noise of chatter, babble and raucous 11-year-old laughter had reached ‘Iron Maiden headlining Castle Donington’ decibel levels), Mrs Keasey would silence the entire Upper Band with a piercing ‘RIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIGHTTTTTTT’, follow it up with a screaching ‘FINGERS ON LIPS EVERYBODY’ (which had to be adhered to under pain of death – or, even worse, being sent to the Amazingly Hairy Mr Chalkley’s office) and then declare that we would have to endure AN HOUR of SILENT READING.

At which point a deathly hush would descend upon the school as we sheepishly snuffled into our Doctor Who, Fighting Fantasy and (if you were a girl) Chronicles of Narnia paperbacks. The ‘hour’s silence’ would usually last for about thirty seconds before the first muffled fart piped up from the boy’s corner, swiftly followed by an outbreak of stifled giggling, and then a high-pitched shriek as an upturned compass was prodded into Stephen Mason’s arsecheek by a maurading Slack or Sugden. Within two minutes, the hubbub had ascended back to ‘Judas Priest soundchecking’ levels, and Mrs Keasey would be forced to intervene. ‘RIIIIIIIIIIIIIGHTTT!!!!’ etc… and the whole, sorry business would start over again.

It’s amazing how much funnier things can seem when you’re actually not ALLOWED to find them funny. Moderate, ‘Green Alert’ farts that would have barely raised a titter in the safety of the noisy classroom became the source of tearful hysterics when transposed to a tense assembly situation. At which point, you had three potential options…

1. Ride out the giggle storm by doubling over in the customary ’Mahatma Gandhi Lotus Position’ that we adopted on the shiny hall floor in assembly, and trying to laugh silently without being noticed. This resulted in your bright red, snot-caked face being inserted between your knees while the rest of your body shook uncontrollably like some kind of epileptic dung beetle.

2. (Dodgy tactic, this) Attempt to ‘expel’ the giggle by ACTUALLY LAUGHING, but disguising it as a cough, and repeatedly patting your chest with your open palm afterwards and feigning an athsma attack. I once threw myself into this approach when Stephen Mason inexplicably whispered the phrase ’Pig’s knackers’ into my ear during a school play based on the Parable of the Talents, and earned myself a FILTHY look from Mrs Mulhern.

3. Thinking deliberately of horrible subjects that were guaranteed laugh-free zones…  dead puppies, the Yorkshire Ripper, Spandau Ballet, that kind of thing. This was usually enough to stave off a moderate giggle attack until the next whispered obscenity was passed along the back row.

I love the fact that I was able to race outside for two hours thrashing around on my garden tarzie at the very second that I’d finished eating my tea. I was probably still stuffing a slice of Battenburg down my face as I raced through the back door. My parents found this utterly inexplicable, and the feeling was mutual… my Dad was usually still mopping up the last of his gravy with a slice of Mother’s Pride when I started jumping up and down shouting ‘DAD! DAD! DAD! COME AND TAKE SOME PENALTIES AT ME! DAD! DAD! DAD! over the closing credits to Willo The Wisp…

‘Bloody hell, give my dinner a chance to go down…’ he’d reply, wearily. I had no idea what this meant, and – as far as I was concerned – your dinner ‘went down’ the very second that you swallowed it. After that, it had surely ceased to be your concern? I’m sure exactly when my body started to make the switch over to the dark side, but now – after a full meal – it’s usually a matter of seconds before I’m asleep in front of The Weakest Link with an open copy of the Evening Gazette on my knee. I am 36 years old.

And Top of the Pops, yay! Here we go, on with the motley…

• Cyndi Lauper – Time After Time [Repeat Performance]
• Frankie Goes To Hollywood – Two Tribes [Performance]
• OMD – Talking Loud & Clear [Performance]
• Prince – When Doves Cry [Promo Video]
• Shannon – Sweet Somebody [Performance]
• Thompson Twins – Sister Of Mercy [Performance]
• Ultravox – Lament [Performance]

Presented by the still-going-strong Jimmy Saville, no doubt bouncing Radio 1’s young pretender Mike Smith up and down on his knee…

You’ll notice it took three and a half hours before my Dad’s tea ‘went down’ and he was able to come outside and take penalties at me, which doesn’t sound too bad at all to me these days. DAD! DAD! DAD! DAD! DAD!!!

Wednesday 4th July 1984

Woke up at 7.50 and got up at 8.10. The bus didn’t come so dad took me in the car. Got there at 9.10 and it was assembly. When we came out Doug and I finished our poster, then read till 12.00 when I had dinner. In the aftenoon it was maths groups so I did maths all afternoon.

Came home at 3.15 and went out on the tarzie, and at 4.45 I had tea. At 5.00 I went back out again and played on the tarzie. At 7.30 I came in and watched the Agatha Christie film ‘And then there were none’ and at 9.00 I went to bed.

Brace yourself – today’s diary entry has INTRIGUE!!!

Agatha Christie would have been proud of  me, because today I present for your delication and delight a mystery that I defy any big-nosed Belgian sleuth worth his waxed moustached to solve.

Why have the opening four lines of my diary on this day been written once, comprehensively Tippex-ed out, then re-written over the top?

Here we have Exhibit A – my 1984 Diary Entry from Wednesday 4th June. As you can see, the first four lines, up to and including the phrase ‘Got there at 9.10 and…’ have been written over a solid mass of caked, white Tippex thick enough to stick bathroom tiles to the wall. I wonder what I’d written that was so appallingly piss-poor that my only option was to obliterate it from the history books (well, alright…. book) and start again?

I’m guessing I was so used to starting my diary with the hypnotic mantra ‘Woke up at 7.50 and got up at 8.10. Got the bus at 8.30 and first at school…’ that I scribbled this down without thinking, before remembering that ACTUALLY the bus hadn’t turned up, and my Dad had been forced to back his grumbling Reliant Scimitar out of the drive and race me over to school just in time for Mrs Keasey to look up from her giant sticky-back plastic-bound register book and say ‘Robert Fischer…? Has anyone seen Robert Fischer this morning? Doug? Have you seen Robert…?’ 

At which point I’d have slouched through the door, sweating and mumbling, and slumped into a plastic grey seat that, when I got up from it ten minutes later, would have had an embarrassingly conspicious line of arsecrack-shaped sweat along the middle. Hooray!
 
I’d forgotten how much of a Holy Grail our teachers’ register books were as well. Mrs Keasey used to hold hers up vertically, like a paranoid bingo-player, and any stolen glimpses of the contents were the Levendale Primary School equivalent of hacking into the Pentagon Computer (which I think was about to happen in an episode of Whiz Kids)

As far as I remember, it looked like this…

FISCHER Robert  OOOOO  OOOOX  XOOOO

And so on, with ‘O’s being days on which I was present, and ‘X’s being days on which I was watching Pebble Mill At One at home, pretending to be ‘chesty’ and swigging virulently treacly Lucozade from a dimpled glass bottle with orange cellophane around the top. Do teachers still call the register at school, or is it all done with microchip neck implants and barcode readers these days?

Anyway, the ‘poster’ that Doug and I were STILL working on was the ‘Don’t Bugger About With Fire’ affair that we’d started on Friday 29th June. Doug and I were both half-decent artists, so – let’s face it – we could feasibly have knocked this off in an hour. The fact that we managed to string it out for FOUR WHOLE SCHOOL DAYS is, I think, testament to our sterling powers of prevarication and healthy admiration for the pace of the old Gastropod Molluscs. Quite frankly? IT MAKES ME PROUD TO BE BRITISH. Now, whose turn is it to put the kettle on?

And, ah yes… Agatha Christie. ‘And Then There Were None’ was, of course, a glitzy mid-1970s film adaptation of a 1939 book that originally had a very different title indeed. I’m actually slightly impressed that, at the height of ‘Love Thy Neighbour’ and whatnot, anyone involved with the film actually saw fit to use the alternate title, although - somehow – WE at school definitely knew what it was.

‘Do you know what the original book’s actually called?’ said Ian ‘Ozzie’ Oswald to me, over a playground game of ‘Stuck In The Mud’ one sunny dinner hour in the summer of 1984.

‘No…’ I shrugged.

‘Ten Little Niggers’, he whispered, incredulously. Even in 1984 we were a bit taken aback by this discovery, which I’m quite pleased by now – especially considering that we were pupils at a school whose entire non-white British population (as far as I can remember) consisted of a lad called Matthew, whose dad was from (I think) somewhere in central Africa, and a girl called Pippa, whose father was Chinese. And both of them had still been born and raised on Teesside.

You’d think, given the popular culture of the time (remember, The Black and White Minstrel show was a popular BBC1 ratings winner until – yikes - 1977) and the fact that we’d all grown up in a resolutely white, middle-class area, that the very mention of the naughty N-word would have had us tittering into our sleeves.

But it didn’t, and somebody should probably take a bit of credit for that. No idea who, but definitely somebody…!

Anyway, I really enjoyed the film, with its uber-70s cast of Oliver Reed, Dickie Attenborough, Elke Sommer and Charles Aznavour, and I should probably check it out on DVD at somepoint. In the meantime, it’s just struck me - 30 minutes after I started writing this rubbish – that the global Tippex market has probably completely collapsed now, hasn’t it? Is there a possibility that the cracked four inches of solid Tippex caked onto my diary page exactly 25 years ago is actually worth something?

If someone offers me enough money for it then I’ll chip it off the page, and the mystery will be solved…

Tuesday 3rd July 1984

Woke up at 8.00 and got up straight away. Got the bus at 8.30. At school we read, then it was the fourth year language test. At 10.05 We went out, and when we came in Doug and I did some more of the Topic poster.

Had dinner at 12.00, then in the afternoon Doug and I did some more of the poster. At 3.15 I came home and played out till 5.00, when I had tea. Then I went out again till 6.40, when I watched Star Trek.

At 7.30 I watched Little and Large, and at 8.00 I went out again, till 9.00 when I had a shower and went to bed.

In the words of Graham Taylor, ‘This is a test… a REAL test’.

Although, actually, it wasn’t. Bear in mind this was long before the age of SATS and the National Curriculum, so our ‘fourth year language test’ had a bit of a homespun, low-pressure feel to it. I think it was mainly to reassure our teachers that the seven years they’d spent avoiding flying Shatterproof rulers and wading through Monster Munch-fuelled farts hadn’t been entirely in vain, and that we HAD picked up some rudimentary literary skills along the way.

Still, you had to do these things properly… so the entire fourth year (all 40 of us) were herded into the school hall, made to sit at individual tables, and presented with a teeny tiny exam paper to pore over for the best part of an hour (we had to be out by 10.30 so the dinner ladies could start roadtesting the Spam Fritters). We’d do this in COMPLETE SILENCE (Stephen Mason!!! SSSHHH!!!!) while Mr Millward paced impassively up and down the aisles, like Clint Eastwood in Reactolite spectacles.

Being a bit of a bookish geek to begin with, I always quite enjoyed them. There were a few rudimentary spelling tests, and then something called ‘comprehension’, in which we’d be presented with a paragraph like this…

“Christopher Herbert woke up, wiped the slime from his scummy Stockton market watch, and checked the time. It was 9.30am, and he was late for school. He crunched across the fungus on the bedroom floor, got the dog to lick his face clean, and pulled on the jumper that smelt of cat’s knackers and fig biscuits. Within five minutes he was at the school gates, and Mr Hirst was waiting for him with a cricket bat…’

We’d then have to answer questions along the lines of:

1. What time was it when Christopher woke up?
2. Where had Christopher bought his watch from?
3. What did Christopher’s jumper smell of?

And so on, and so on. We always had to do a bit of creative writing as well, usually along the lines of ‘Write a short story that uses an aubergine, a miner’s helmet and a Koala Bear as part of its plot’.

The nature of the three random objects I was presented with was immaterial. I’d always get it round to Doctor Who eventually.

It does seem a bit strange that we were sitting a little exam only three weeks before leaving the school forever, so I’m wondering if the results were passed onto Conyers School for them to assess us for any potential psycopathic tendencies (and if you had any, you were immediately promoted to house rugby captain)

Good to see a bit of Star Trek on the telly! The original series, of course, or ‘TOS’ as it’s known to the fans (guffaw), which seemed to be repeated on BBC2 at 6.40pm on weeknights throughout most of the late 1970s and early 1980s. I watched it with my Dad a lot, who I suspect likes a bit of vintage science-fiction far more than he ever lets on. I’ve certainly got him to thank for my utter, undyling love of The Twilight Zone, which we first watched together on Channel 4 one (very) late Friday night in 1987 after catching the opening titles to the episode ‘Black Leather Jackets’ while flicking through the channels.

(Ha ha ha! ‘Flicking through the channels’. There were FOUR channels for crying out loud… and we didn’t even have a remote control in 1987, so we had to do it MANUALLY, by PHYSICALLY walking over to the TV set and pushing the buttons on the front of it. If there was nothing on worth watching, we just covered ourselves in blue woad and chased some woolly mammoths down Lingfield Road…)  

Anyone know which episode of Star Trek might have been broadcast on this particular day? I’d love to find out.

By the way, bizarrely, I saw our old dinner nanny Mrs James outside the post office yesterday. The first time I’ve clapped eyes on her since the day I left Levendale. I was terrified of her as a kid, but yesterday I held the door open for her and she gave me a lovely smile. I was *THIS* close to explaining who I was and asking for an interview, but I chickened out at the last second. I still wasn’t convinced she wouldn’t pull a whistle out of her pocket and send me inside to ‘have a think about what I’d done’.

I also had a strange dream about Jo Spayne last night. I was sitting outside Gareth ‘Gazzie’ Jones’ house working on a laptop underneath a willow tree, when Jo walked past and stopped for a chat. Within seconds he’d produced two guitars from under his coat and we were singing Frankie Goes To Hollywood songs to the neighbours.

I fear for the state of my subconscious by the end of the year…

Monday 2nd July 1984

Woke up at 8.00 and got up at 8.30. At 9.15 I went to the dentist then I went to Yarm and got a MAD magazine. At 10.30 I went to school and did maths, and at 12.00 I had dinner.

At 1.00 We came in and did topic, then I did some more maths. At 3.15 I came home and played outside with the football, and at 5.00 I had tea. Then I went out again till 7.10, when I came in and watched MANIMAL.

When it finished at 8.00 I read MAD, then I went out. Dad took some penalties at me till 9.00, when I came in and had a shower. Went to bed at 9.30.

THE GOOD NEWS!!! You don’t have to go to school till half past ten this morning. THE BAD NEWS!!! It’s because you’re going to the dentist…

Just the usual six-monthly check up, I think. To be honest, my dentist was  a perfectly nice chap… a pleasant, middle-aged* gent called Keith Herren who operated (bzzzzzzz) out of a towering, Victorian mid-terraced surgery on the outskirts of Stockton-on-Tees. The tiled hallway smelt of carbolic, there was an elaborate, red-carpeted stairway sweeping upwards from behind reception, and the waiting room was full of old Exchange & Mart magazines.

*He seemed middle-aged to me at the time, anyway. He was probably 37. And, like all 1970s and 80s professional men of a certain age, he looked a bit like Geoffrey Palmer…

Three great formative memories from going to the dentist as a kid…

1. Keith putting my four-year-old self at ease by scooting little Corgi toy cars across his surgery floor before gently helping me onto the dentists chair for the very first time. Awwww.

2. Keith asking my six-year-old self if I played football at school. ‘Yes,’ I replied. ‘What position?’ he asked. ‘Centre-forward’ I fibbed. It was the only footballing position that I knew the name of. He looked impressed. ‘Do you play for the school team, then?’ he asked, hopefully.

There followed a long, guilty pause that acted as such effective advance warning for a forthcoming lie that I might as well have sellotaped the back page of the Exchange & Mart to my forehead and written ‘THIS NEXT BIT IS BOLLOCKS’ across it in permanent marker.

‘Yes,’ I replied.

He didn’t press me any further.

3. Having six baby teeth removed under general anaesthetic, aged seven. I was terrified of the very prospect for weeks beforehand, and repeatedly told my Mum to cancel the appointment, as I was quite happy to accomodate as many teeth in my mouth as nature deemed fit.

All to no avail, and - one Thursday morning – I lay shaking in the chair as Keith adminstered a tiny but truly horrible-looking pin-prick to the right-hand side of my neck. I couldn’t help but think of the scene in Star Wars when Darth Vader tortures Princess Leia with a floating ball-shaped thing covered in hypodermic needles.

‘Keith Herren, only you could be so bold. This ship is on… a diplo… matic… mission… …. ….’

I remember seeing my Mum smiling from a plastic chair at the side of the room before the world went swimmy. The next think I knew, I was waking up in the back of my Dad’s Triumph Toledo with a blood-soaked man-sized Kleenex tissue held to my mouth… and a brand-new Palitoy Darth Vader TIE Fighter from Leslie Brown’s Toy Shop lying next to me on the seat. Ahhh, the sweet ironies of life.  

I did, of course, tell everybody at school that I ‘had gas’. GAS!!! Bloody hell, they actually DID that, didn’t they? Gassed children into unconsciousness at the dentist! Was that actually LEGAL? And is it still?

Anyway, no fillings today, Mummy. Although – terrifyingly – it was on this day that Keith dropped the bombshell that he thought my top incisors were ’starting to protrude a little’ and that ‘it could be worth putting a brace on you for a few weeks’. As far as my school credibility was concerned, he might as well have gone the whole hog and put me in flared trousers and NHS glasses as well. And sellotaped the back page of the Exchange & Mart to my forehead and written ‘I AM A SCUMMER’ across it in permanent marker. 

I was - naturally – rather proud of my vaguely demonic front fangs, and frequently constructed Doctor Who episodes in my head in which I was the 11-year-old vampire assistant to Peter Davison’s Doctor, helping him battle The Master and the Daleks in return for him turning a blind eye to my cheeky bloodsucking antics. There was no way I could gallivant across the galaxy wearing a DENTAL BRACE, The Master would laughed so much it might even have triggered his thirteenth (and final) regeneration.

Anyway, as promised, I went to a little jaunt to Albert Park in Middlesbrough last night. I mentioned in yesterday’s Blog that it was exactly 25 years since my Dad and I tried to guess the final surname on the War Memorial at the entrance to the park. Well, here you go, this is what I was rambling about…

And I couldn’t resist having a little wander around the park itself, as it was such a glorious evening. And I found at least one new arrival, someone who definitely WASN’T there in 1984…

As I’ve mentioned before, my Gran spent a lot of July 1984 in Middlesbrough General Hospital undergoing the latest in a horrible sequence of unsuccessful hip replacement operations. She seemed to bear them all with incredible dignity and fortitude, and with the benefit of hindsight I don’t quite know how she did it… I’d have been howling the place down and throwing books at people, but she always seemed to assume an amazing Zen-like calm.

Me and my parents would visit as a family, but often my Dad and I would leave my Mum there alone while we went for a wander around the nearby Albert Park, and wander along to join her later. I’m not sure whether there was a strict limit on visiting numbers in hospitals at the time (entirely possible) or if we just thought it would be better to keep out of the way while my Mum spent some gentle time alone with her OWN mother, but for me it was actually nice to spend some time with my Dad. He worked relentlessly when he got the chance (you had to in ‘Fatcher’s Britain) so it was nice just to be able to wander aimlessly around such a scenic location with him, and burble and giggle together. I’ve always shared a sense of humour with my Dad… a love of the surreal that occasionally touches on the macabre, and ‘guess the last name on the War Memorial’ is exactly the kind of brilliant game that only he would have invented for me, and I would have loved it.

Three other observations from the 2nd July 1984…

1) I had a shower for an incredible THIRD NIGHT IN A ROW!!! When, oh when, would the novelty wear off?

2) I managed to spell ‘penalties’ correctly for the first time ever! My eyebrows were starting to grow back a bit now, so I must have finally cleared all the sweat and ladybirds from my eyes and realised the error of my ways.

3) Full words in capital letters? EH?!?!? What was I, MENTAL OR SOMETHING???

Sunday 1st July 1984

Woke up at 8.30 and did the rubiks cube, then at 10.00 I got up and played football outside. The I came in and mucked on with the cube, and at 12.00 I had dinner. After that I had a ride around on the kebble estate and came back in time for Doug’s arrival, at 3.00.

We played on the tarzie, then went and mucked on at the mud track. At 4.00 we both went home and at 4.30 I had tea. Watched the Goodies at 5.00, then I went out.

At 6.10 Dad and I went to Albert park while mam went to see Grandma in hospital, and at 8.15 we went and picked her up. Came back at 8.30, then I played football at 9.00, when I had a shower. At 9.30 I watched That’s life and at 10.15 I went to bed.

The Rubik’s Cube! Bloody hell. Words can’t describe how, in pre-home-computer era 1981, this infernal instrument of torture possessed me. The bloody things were EVERYWHERE, and the perpetual click-click-click-click of rapidly rotating plastic made Levendale Primary School sound like it had been infested by a hoard of giant crickets. With geiger counters. Doing Rubik’s Cubes.

Naturally, mine wasn’t an AUTHENTIC version. I think I’m right in saying that Erno Rubik experienced some hold-ups and hitches sorting out the copyright and/or patent for his multi-coloured annoyance machine, and – within nanoseconds of HIS cube hitting the shops –  the world was flooded with cheaply knocked-off copies. So I got one of them, no doubt bought from Stockton market for a third of the price and marketed as a ‘Kubrick Rube’ or somesuch.

It was exactly the same thing, though. I spent three months manfully resisting two overwhelming temptations… 

1) Smashing the bloody thing to pieces and reassembling it in order, something the foul-smelling Christopher Herbert had clearly done when he proudly marched through school holding his cube aloft with both arms and shouting ‘Finished! Finished!!!’ as the gas alarms sounded and Mr Hirst doled out the emergency protective face masks.

2. Taking all the little sticky labels off and putting them back on again in order, no doubt with bits of dog hair and bobbly fuzz from the front room carpet still poking out from the undersides.

In the end, the Puffin Book Club came to my rescue with an unprecedented Third Way. My heart leapt when I saw the following tome for sale amongst all the Nina Bawdens and Whizzkids Handbooks…

And I snapped it up immediately. Well, alright, not QUITE immediately… I brought my 80p into school, then had to wait another week for that impossibly exciting cardboard box to arrive in Mrs Keasey’s cupboard, late on a Friday afternoon. I then spent ALL of the Friday evening, ALL of the Saturday morning and ALL of the Saturday afternoon at my Gran’s house, attempting to translate the impossibly complex series of diagrams in the book onto my infuritatingly unresponsive cube.

The Multi-Coloured Swap Shop passed me by. Grandstand came and went. Jim’ll Fix It? Little and Large? Pffffft. And then, at 8pm on the Saturday night, shaking, quivering and with my nerves completely shot, I finally admitted defeat. The cube looked no nearer to completion that it had before I’d bought the book, so I did the only decent thing available to me - passed the whole lot over to my Uncle Trevor and went outside to play on my bike.

‘Oh, I’ve been meaning to give this a go…’ he smiled. ‘I’ll have ten minutes with it before I go the Endeavour’.

Four hours later, aside from the constant blur of fingers and the occasional muffled swear-word, he hadn’t moved. The completed cube was handed over to me at midnight, just as BBC1 started to play the National Anthem and announce that ‘Our friends at Radio 2 will be broadcasting throughout the night…’

‘There…’ he gasped, exhausted and utterly mentally drained. ’Don’t ever say I don’t say anything for you’.

‘BRILLIANT!!!!’ I beamed, and danced around the bungalow for thirty seconds before – two minutes later – getting bored and randomly clicking the cube back into its usual mind-buggering mish-mash of colours.  By five past midnight, we were back to square one. Poor Trevor has never quite been the same since.

Anyway, when I say ‘did the rubik cube’ exactly 25 years ago today, I don’t actually mean that I completed it… I just randomly rotated a few slices, maybe getting one side in order before realising that any further progress would completely bugger up the work I’d already done, and I might as well call it a day and fiddle about with the tarzie instead.

Alright, a quick random memory from this day – at Albert Park, my Dad and I tried to transcribe the Latin inscription at the top of the war memorial, and then spent a little bit of time trying to guess what the last surname on it would be. I think I went for ‘Wilson’ and he, cannily, went for ‘Yates’. But I can’t actually remember who was right! I was going to make a film there last night but forgot to take my camera to work with me… I’ll try to nip over to Albert Park tonight and see what I can get.

Saturday 30th June 1984

Woke up at 8.30 and got up at 10.00. Doug came down and at 11.30 we went to the mud track and had a muck on. At 1.00 We came back and had dinner, then we built an assault course. At 2.30 we went and saw Arnold the cow, then at 4.45 We went and played football on Conyers.

At 5.10 Doug went home and I came back and watched Whiz kids. Had tea at 6.00 and at 6.10 I watched Pop quiz. Then I went out and played on the tarzie, and at about 8.00 dad came out and took some penaltys at me.

At 9.00 I came in and had a shower and at 9.15 I went to bed.

The Fischer family personal hygeine revolution starts HERE!!!

Can you spot the amazing, exciting and unprecedented new addition to our executive lifestyle? Yep… a SHOWER. The refurbishment of our (very 1970s looking) bathroom was one of our major household projects for the summer of 1984, and you’ll remember I spent a decent portion of the previous Sunday hacking at tiny strips of floral wallpaper with a bendy kitchen spatula.

Things were clearly moving on apace, and my Dad spent this whole, blazing, uncomfortably hot Saturday fiddling about converting our clanking bath taps into a modern shower unit, and constructing a sturdy rail and curtain to reduce the chances of his idiot 11-year-old son turning the bathroom into a scene from Moby Dick (although my Mum probably wouldn’t have minded Gregory Peck turning up in his captain’s uniform)  

Let’s make no bones about this… I was a mucky little oik. Looking back through my diary, having a bath tended to be very much a weekly affair for me – usually on a Sunday night, and all of my memories of watching ‘Thats Life’ also incorporate sitting in front of the coal fire with dripping wet hair, wearing powder blue pyjamas and stinking of Shield, ‘the soap deodorant’.

Apart from that, my daily ablutions tended to consist of a quick wash of my face and hands when I got up, and – if I could be bothered – before I went to bed. You’d think I must have REEKED, and yet I don’t recall this being especially outrageous behaviour amongst my peers. My Dad, who tended to be working on building sites every day, had a bath every weeknight at 7pm before returning downstairs in clean clothes for the evening’s TV, safe in the knowledge that he’d thankfully managed to miss Doctor Who and/or Terry and June.

But, for me, ‘bath night’ meant just that – a one-off, special arrangement. I guess I grew up in the 1970s, the age of power cuts, strikes and conserving energy, when some hapless government minister or other (who WAS it???) caused a national sensation by suggesting that the crisis could be alleviated if couples shared a bath together. For our generation, ‘putting on the immersion heater’ when not strictly necessary was a luxury comparable to pouring vintage champagne over your Sugar Puffs every morning. 

It’s amazing how much the personal grooming revolution has transformed the nation’s whiffiness since then. Perhaps Teesside was especially backward in this respect, but I never even HEARD of a man using underarm deodorant until at least the mid 1980s. My Dad certainly didn’t bother – in fact, I don’t suppose he’s ever used it in his life. A bath every few days (and the occasional splash of Blue Stratos if you were going out on the pull) seemed more than sufficient personal hygeine for most Teesside males.

Anyway, apart from brief, sub-Arctic rinsings at Thornaby Swimming Pool, this day almost certainly marked my first engagement with a ‘proper’ shower, and it had an almost instantaneous effect on my love life… yes, I was asked out on a date by a girl within a mere SEVEN YEARS of this revolutionary event taking place.

Other, weird, disparate memories from this particular day…

1. The assault course! Garden assault courses were a regular feature of my childhood, and the whole thing undoubtedly began in the summer of 1981, when – on a mind-numbingly hot day - Paul ‘Frankie’ Frank and myself constructed an insanely hilarious hotch-potch of planks, holes, paddling pools and piles of bricks to clamber over, under and around, timing our breathless circuits of the course with a digital watch as we laughed and laughed and laughed and laughed and laughed. I daresay any passing 1980s Royal Marines wouldn’t have given it much of a second glance* but to us, this was the TOUGHEST OF THE TOUGH, and it’s good to see the tradition being maintained long into the ‘Mates with Doug’ years.

*with the possible exception of Prince Edward

2. There’s no easy way of putting this, but - at the mud track – we found half a rabbit. The rear half, with the business end (ears, whiskers, cute twitching nose etc) completely missing. It was just sitting there in the short grass next to our favourite climbing tree. I felt decidedly queasy when I saw this, and couldn’t get it out of my mind for the rest of the day. I distinctly remember struggling to get through one of my Mum’s giant shepherd’s pies while watching Whiz Kids, as images of said disembodied bunny kept flashing back into my consciousness. Urgh.

3. I HAD A SHOWER!!! Have I mentioned this already? I didn’t wash my hair, though. I’d done it on the 17th June, so it was good for another fortnight yet. It’s not as if I was Prince Edward or anything.

PS If my ‘one bath a week’ regime left me somehow smelling relatively savoury, how infrequent must Christopher Herbert’s ablutions have been for him to honk like a dead polecat in the middle of a major sewage outlet?

Friday 29th June 1984

Woke up at 7.50 and got up at 8.10. At school we did maths, then started a poster for Topic. Had dinner at 12.00, and in the afternoon we did some more of the poster. At 2.00 we went out and played rounders, and at 3.15 I came home.

I went to Doug’s and we went to Yarm, and after getting a new brake cable we went to my house and took Poggy Doggy up the gate. At 5.30 Doug went home and I had tea, then I played on the front with Alan.

At 7.30 I watched Simon and Simon, and at 8.30 I watched Odd one out. Went to bed at 9.00.

Another blisteringly hot day, and as such – I think – we ‘took the tables outside’ again to work on our poster, with the added spice of being divebombed by wasps and getting hideously sunburnt. Nobody gave a toss about exposure to ultra-violet rays in 1984, and pale-skinned children like me were frequently ordered by parents and teachers alike to ‘go outside and get some sun on your face’, especially on days when the playing fields of Yarm resembled the plains of the Serengeti.

I never wore suncream as a kid, and frequently returned home with my neck and arms the colour of raspberry yoghurt. At which point, my Mum would roll her eyes and ‘get some After-Sun on that, and it’ll go brown’. And cancerous, no doubt, in the fullness of time. Although I don’t think sun-related skin cancer was invented until about 1989, so I might have escaped unscathed.

Ironically, the poster that Doug and I worked on for our Topic Group was all about the dangers of woodland fires, and handily advised our otherwise unsuspecting peer group not to light naked flames in tinderbox-dry forests on hot summer days. Or, indeed, within the thirty-yard exclusion zone surrounding Christopher Herbert, who scientists now estimate was responsible for at least 14.7% of the UK’s mid-1980s methane production.

And Alan! Blimey, I’d forgotten about Alan. Don’t worry, we’re not adding an imaginary friend to my spiralling catalogue of pre-pubescent mental health issues. I never had an imaginary friend as a kid… the closest I ever got was a vague, nagging hope that - one day - the TARDIS would materialise on top of our coal bunker, and that Peter Davison’s Doctor would whisk me away to galactic adventures.

I did, at one stage in 1984, have in my head a full 24-episode series based around our ensuing antics, but the only one I can remember is the story in which the Doctor transported me forward in time to 1991, and I met a white-faced Poggy Doggy and a chiselled, muscular, fabulously wealthy 18-year-old version of myself. This might have sown the seeds of the crushing depression I suffered in the ACTUAL 1991, when my 18-year-old self turned out to be a scrawny, acne-ridden geek with terrible dandruff and a bizarre fascination for Carter The Unstoppable Sex Machine. Although, in my defence, Poggy Doggy was still alive and he did have a white face.

But no! Alan was the grandson of Mr and Mrs Cogan, our elderly next-door neighbours. His parents had moved to Northern Ireland when Alan was very small, and only seemed to return once or twice a year, but when they did we were usually happy to knock a football around the garden for a few hours, while his older sister Debbie watched us with a wry smile on her face. Alan was my age, and - as a result of his upbringing – had the strongest Northern Irish accent I’d ever heard outside of the Belfast editions of ‘Why Don’t You’.

(I’m sure that, after every Belfast Why Don’t You, Barry Took on Points of View would be inundated with letters from Mrs Bagshott-Rowe of Tunbridge Wells, sniffily protesting about the ‘decline of the English language on BBC Television’ and so on. All I can really remember about Why Don’t You is a) the theme tune and b) its early use of video diaries, usually made by slightly weird-looking 14-year-old boys who lived in the Cotswalds and had intimate relationships with ponies)

Anyway, two things that I remember about my encounter with Alan on this day…

1) When he first popped his head around the garden gate, I was busy fixing the new brake cable to my (guffaw) Chopper. My bike was still looking – or so I thought – pretty swanky after its recent respray, and I was pretty damn proud of my refurbishments. Until Alan piped up with the soul-destroying opening gambit – ‘Bloody hell, IS THAT YOUR BIKE?!?? How do you ride THAT? I’ve just got a new Diamond Back’. I’d never felt so crushed since Adric died at the end of Episode Four of ‘Earthshock’.

2) On the front garden, we played with his ‘Impossiball’. This quintessentially mid-1980s gizmo had been advertised relentlessly in the breaks during TV-AM all summer, its manufacturers clearly determined to retire to the Bahamas before the end of the six-week holiday. Bascially a light, plastic football with all kinds of strange weights and things inside it… so that, whatever you did with it, it would wobble and ping and bounce at all kind of insane angles. If you threw it through the air, it would veer away at a 90 degree angle, hit a tree, bounce vertically upwards, richochet around the branches, then hit the lawn at a dead stop and rest for a few seconds before someone bent down to pick it up, at which point it would suddenly restart and shoot off across the garden.

I think it was powered by hamsters. Or black magic. Or some strange combination of the two.

It was enormously entertaining for about five minutes before you realised it had no practical use whatsoever and seemed to be inextricably drawn to the busy main road on the other side of the conifers. You’ll notice I stuck it out for an hour before coming inside to have raspberry yoghurt rubbed on my sunburn while watching Paul Daniels on the telly.

Thursday 28th June 1984

Went to bed at 9.00.

I think – amazingly – this might be a 1984 day on which I watched virtually NO TELEVISION ALL!!!

There was probably a bit of TVAM chuntering away in the morning as I got ready, and then we’ll have eaten our fishcakes and mashed potato accompanied by the BBC Evening News and Look North (with the legendary Mike Neville), but in terms of me actually sitting down and deliberately watching something that interested me… blimey! I didn’t!

It’s been pointed out by several people over the last few months that I seemed to spend a staggering amount of my childhood watching TV – either the genre sci-fi and fantasy stuff (Doctor Who, Robin of Sherwood, even – yikes – Manimal) that was turning into a lifelong passion, hit sitcoms (Only Fools and Horses, The Young Ones, etc) that made me laugh uproariously as I sprawled across the front room armchair (’Can’t you just sit in the bloody thing properly?’ my Dad used to regularly ask) and odd little bits of contemporary ephemera… That’s Life, Blankety Blank, 3-2-1 and all the other shows that, when I see them back now, give a far more evocative impression of 1984 than almost anything else from the era.

Looking back, I wonder if we Eighties kids were the peak generation for watching (and being influenced by) TV. It seems ironic that, since the explosion of multi-channel TV, its grip on the younger generation’s imagination seems to have considerably lessened.  And yet, back in 1984, those four simple channels – often broadcasting nothing more than a test card for most of the night and even some of the afternoons – seemed, in part, to make us the people that we are.

I don’t get that so much from kids today. I guess young people will always gravitate towards the buzziest, flashiest technology of the day. Back in 1984, that was TV, and there wasn’t much in the way of competition… home computers were little more than basic (and often very unreliable) games machines, and the phone was something that stayed on a little table in the corner of the hallway and allowed your Mum to yabber away about fishcakes and Mike Neville to elderly relatives a couple of times a week.

Nowadays, poor old TV is a bit of a poor relation to everything else that kids love, and I still (genuinely) can’t decided whether that’s a good thing or not.

Anyway, another relatively quiet day… clearly my Gran was still recovering from her hip operation in Middlesbrough General Hospital, and I took advantage of the light nights to further perfect my ‘Bruce Grobbelaar’ routines in the front garden with my Dad.

I’ll take advantage of a quiet-ish day, then, by showing off this nonsense… I’ve mentioned a few times in the Blog that, in my last few years at Levendale Primary School, I was an enthusiastic cartoonist, and - on long, rainy afternoons - myself, Mark ‘Fozzie’ Foster, Andrew ‘Sug’ Sugden (below) and a handful of equally grotty Whizzer and Chips obsessives would hole up in a quiet corner of the school and produce our strange, slightly surreal comic ‘Frosty’. 

Huge thanks and belated applause goes to all of our teachers at Levendale Primary School, who – brilliantly – positively encouraged these little outbursts of creativity, and were happy for us to push the latest maths textbook to one side if it meant that the latest of ‘Frosty’ was pinned to the middle room wall for the rest of our year to peruse.

We tried to get out at least three issues a year – Easter, Summer and a bumper Christmas edition, and I suppose it gave us all a little brush with celebrity. I’d long since assumed that they’d all been chucked into the school bins as soon as they were considered past their sell-by date, but - to my utter delight – I managed to find an entire edition in the loft last week!

Click on THIS LINK to see a bigger version! I think this is the Easter 1983 edition, and it’s all complete - it’s been stapled together to resemble a proper comic, but you can see pin-prick holes where, in a previous life, it was stapled to the classroom wall in a long, continuous line of A4 paper… like the Bayeaux Tapestry, but filled with Loonymen and cartoon dogs and Doctor Who.

This is undoubtedly one of my cartoons, and I remember Sug laughing like a drain at Targ the Loonymen with his dark glasses and goofy teeth…

(Again, CLICK HERE for a larger version)

And then, predictably…

(CLICK HERE for the bigger version – and yes, it’s the presence of the Black Guardian that makes me suspect this is from Spring 1983!)

In Summer 1983, Fozzie – who was a year older than us - was swept into the terrifying educational wildnerness of Conyers comprehensive, and I don’t think we really made any more comics after this. He was, in every possibly respect, the Spiritual Leader of the Loonymen. Our Kim Jong-Il. Making these strange, half-crazed efforts was a huge part of my childhood though, and I’m so thrilled that at least one of them has survived.

If I can find any others, then I’ll scan a few pages again.. I’d be particularly delighted if the classic 1981 Christmas Special turns up, as I remember us working against a staggeringly tight deadline to get this finished, and then gleefully stapling it to the classroom wall ourselves (occasionally pinging a rogue staple at a passing Christopher Herbert) while attempting to simultaneously sing ‘T’was the Night Before Christmas’ (Mr Millward’s famous ‘chanted’ version, to be performed en masse at the school’s festive production) and The Human League’s ‘Don’t You Want Me’.

Happy days. 

Wednesday 27th June 1984

Woke up at 7.50 and got up at 8.10. At school I did Topic all morning and at 12.00 I had dinner. In the afternoon it was maths groups, so I did maths, then at 2.30 we read. Came home at 3.15 and played out till tea.

After tea I went out for a ride on Levendale but there wasn’t anyone about so I had a quick muck on in the green, then came back home and played out. Then I came in, went upstairs and listened to some tapes and things.

Then had a quick kickabout outside before I had a bath and went to bed at 9.00.

Congratulations everyone, we’ve reached the most boring day of 1984 so far!!!

Erm… not a lot to go on here, is there? Although June 1984 was the height of my conviction that I was blessed with STRANGE PSYCHIC POWERS, so it’s possible that I thought I could get away with not actually WRITING much in my diary… that I’d be able to BURN the words in later with THE POWER OF MY MIND. Or something. 

In a nutshell… during a gentle game of cricket with my Dad in the back garden a few weeks earlier, I’d become convinced that I was using the POWER OF MY MIND to influence his bowling… and that if I screwed my face up really tight (like a kind of ultra-constipated Jedi) I could project my thoughts into his head and make him lob the ball exactly where I wanted it. Bear in mind that I’d been watching a LOT of Robin of Sherwood at this stage.

Since then, I’d been trying out my telekinetic abilities on all kind of other odds and sods. I remember sitting in Doug’s garage attempting to convince him that the gentle swinging back and forth of his garden gate was the result of my increasingly focused special powers, and not the blustery Teesside wind that was already scattering plastic plant pots haphazardly around the patio.

By this stage, I was even combining the screwed-up face with an outstretched hand, the fingers splayed with rigid intensity, a move I’d undoubtedly nicked wholesale from The Emperor in Return of the Jedi. If I’d been able to find a black, hooded cowl in the Middlesbrough branch of British Home Stores then doubtless I’d have been dressing up in that as well.

The natural extension to this nonsense was my ability to read minds, and this might have been the day on which I decided to bring my powers to a wider audience. We were definitely working on our maths at the time.

‘Why are you looking at me like that?’ asked Ian ’Ozzie’ Oswald, knocking off a page of quantum physics with one hand tied casually behind his back. 

‘I haven’t told anyone this before,’ I muttered, mysteriously. ‘But… I… CAN… READ… YOUR… MIND…’ 

‘Oh if you say so,’ he sighed. ’Go on then, what am I thinking now?’

‘You’re thinking about Conyers. About the scary transition from this school to our next one. About the loneliness we might find there, and the difficulty in adjusting to a new way of life. You’re thinking about the teachers, and the exams, and the terrifying legend of Foggy Bashing Day’. 

‘Wrong,’ he tutted. ‘I was thinking what a dick you are’.

There was a brief and playful flurry of punches, interrupted by Mrs Keasey clearing her throat in the most impressively theatrical manner.

‘Robert Fischer,’ she warned, ‘If you don’t finish that Maths today, you won’t go out for rounders this week…’ 

I looked up at her with a vacant expression.

‘Why are are you looking so shocked? You know it has to be done by Friday…’

‘I’m not looking shocked,’ I replied, ’I just haven’t got any eyebrows, remember?’

I got my maths finished quick smart, and I don’t think I bothered trying to channel and cultivate my psychic powers any further. Shame really, if I’d worked on them I’d probably be able to finish this blog entry from afar rather than leaving it abandoned in the middle of a…