Saturday 8th December 1984

I got up at 9.30 and Mrs Crawford rang to say we had won a raffle! At 11.00 I watched Saturday Superstore, then I had dinner. At 1.00 Doug came and we went to Stockton. We started to que for Ghostbusters but we couldn’t get in so at 3.30 we came back.

Mam, Doug and I then took the dogs on the field, then Doug went home. At 5.20 I watched the last Tripods, and at 5.45 I watched Late Late Breakfast show.

At 6.40 I watched The intelligence men, then at 11.00 I watched Pushing up daisies. I went to bed at 11.30.

Who ya gonna call?

Not the Classic cinema to reserve a ticket, that’s for certain. Cinemas didn’t work like that in the 1980s. The usual procedure if you wanted to see the latest American blockbuster* at your local fleapit went someting like this…

(*British cinema hadn’t been invented in the 1980s)

1. Scour the Evening Gazette late final with a magnifying glass, and – somewhere between the ‘Lost Pets’ classified adverts and the ‘Spot The Ball’ result from three weeks ago - you’d find a tiny black box with ‘CLASSIC CINEMA, Dovecot Street, Stockton’ at the top. Here, three (or – if they were showing something REALLY popular – two) screens would be dedicated to the latest flashy flicks from the States, with anything up to THREE SCREENINGS A DAY. So, on this freezing Saturday morning, I’ll have rescued Friday’s Gazette from my Dad’s pre-Saturday Superstore fire-lighting regime and torn out the corner of the page that said…

Ghosbusters 12pm 3.30pm 7pm

…before feverishly calling Doug to see if he fancied chancing his arm.

2. Turn up outside the darkened cinema two hours before the screening time and join a lengthy, shivering queue on the pavement in the pissing rain. Spent the next 1 hour and 55 minutes shuffling, stamping your feet, swearing under your breath and trying to avoid the gaze of the Thornaby headcases three places in front of you who are slicing up the Ghostbusters film poster with a Stanley knife.

3. Shuffle forward like the army of the undead as, five minutes before showtime, an elderly, sour-faced usherette in a brown pinny reluctantly opens the cinema door and deems fit to let allow of the great unwashed to actually SET FOOT INSIDE THE BUILDING. Allow yourself to become slightly excited in the knowledge that you’ll soon have a mere four minutes and thirty seconds to buy a Westlers Hot Dog and a King Cone before the first Pearl and Dean adverts emerge through a haze of wafting, pale blue Lambert and Butler cigarette smoke.

4. Forget any thoughts of a Westlers Hot Dog and a King Cone when, six feet from the open doorway, said brown pinny-wearing harridan stops the queue with an outstretched hand and says ‘That’s it love, full up from here’. Spend thirty seconds pointlessly arguing your case (‘BUT WE’VE BEEN STANDING IN THE PISSING RAIN FOR NEARLY TWO HOURS!!!!’) as she stares you down with the cold, dead eyes of a shark, before giving up the ghost (ho ho) and catching the bus home again. 

5. Repeat a week later, but this time turn up two and a half hours before screening time. In slightly heavier rain.

Which pretty much describes, without a hint of exaggeration, the afternoon that Doug and I had on the corner of Dovecot Street in Stockton-on-Tees exactly 25 years ago today. We caught the 294 bus from the wonky stop outside my house, ran straight from Stockton High Street to the Classic Cinema, and groaned with a mutual ‘Oh, for f***’s sake…’ when we rounded the corner to see at least 150 assorted punters in ski jackets, mullets and stonewashed jeans stretching around the corner of the building, picking at their moustaches with flick-knives. And that was just the girls.

Still, we gave it our all. For two hours. In the pissing rain. And, when the inevitable ‘Sorry, love…’ came our way six feet from the door, we shared a 30p bag of soggy chips (and scraps) from Barnacles, and caught the 294 bus back home again.

‘Next Saturday?’ I asked.
‘Next Saturday,’ nodded Doug. We were twelve. We had all of eternity to watch Ghosbusters at the Classic.

Couple of other bits from this day…

1. I have absolutely no idea whatsoever what that business with Mrs Crawford and the raffle ticket is about. I can only assume my Dad, during a gentle Sunday night pint at the spit-and-sawdust Cross Keys in Yarm High Street, had bought a strip of raffle tickets from said Mrs Crawford (‘We’re raising money for little Gilly, she needs a kidney dialysis machine’) and she’d scrawled down his phone number before he stuffed the tickets in his pocket. I’ve no idea what the prize was, but I assume it wasn’t life-changing. If my parents won a million pounds on this fateful Saturday 25 years ago, they’ve done a bloody good job of keeping it quiet.

2. The Intelligence Men is one of Morecambe and Wises’ 1960s films. Always a bit underrated I think, an opinion I had reinforced during on Christmas Eve 1992, when Gavin Wilkinson and I watched it under the influence of a 12-pack of Tennant’s Super, and literally howled with laughter on his parents’ front room carpet at 1.30am. I think I’ve still got a few minor burn marks on my shoulders.

Friday 7th December 1984

I went to bed at 11.30.

Blimey, a touch of Gallic flair for today’s diary entry! Un petit peu de Francais. That certain je ne sais quoi. In a nutshell – me showing off that I’d learnt… hang on… (counts on fingers) five words of French since the intrepid Miss Wilson had started to broaden our linguistic horizons three months earlier.

It’s a shame that I can’t find my French exercise book anywhere, because I’m sure there’ll be some tremendous little nuggets of nonsense in there. For a start, back in September, Miss Wilson had given us all French alter egos… basically a list of French names that we had to adopt and use during our lessons. I was Philippe (who I always thought sounded like a soppy Mummy’s boy with a side parting and a daily pomme for his teacher), and I’m pretty sure Doug was Bruno (infinitely cooler, the kind of lad who rode motorbikes around the Loire Valley with a Gauloise cigarette hanging from his lower lip)

Any other passing 1CW members who can remember their nom-de-plumes? (that’s French for ‘name of the plum’, by the way. See, all that education wasn’t wasted in the end) 

By the end of our first lesson, Miss Wilson had taught us to introduce ourselves in our new language, and told us to go home and impress our parents with our new-found linguistic skills.  So I proudly strode through the kitchen door to find my Mum torturing a screaming fishfinger on a medieval rack, and stopped her in mid-interrogation with the entirely inaccurate declaration ’Je m’appelle Philippe’.

‘Well Bonjour Philippe, now take your bloody shoes off before you make a mess of my nice clean kitchen floor’, she replied, without a great deal of Gallic flair in evidence. I think I spent the rest of the evening proudly claiming to be multi-lingual by sticking the word ‘Le’ in front of everything. Le television. Le dog. Le Blankety Blank Supermatch Game. By the end of the night, my Dad was ready to give me le bloody good hiding with le rolled-up copy of le Evening Gazette (le Late Final) 

All of our French coursework came from a textbook called ‘Tricolore’, whose exercises in basic Franglais centred about the coastal resort of La Rochelle. I think I was well into my French GCSEs before I realised tha La Rochelle ACTUALLY EXISTED and wasn’t just a fictional town invented by the writers of the books.

We also talked a lot about a place called Vernouillet, a little town in Northern France that was (and still is) twinned with Yarm. Although I’ve just discovered that Vernouillet is also twinned with Hainburg in Germany, and no less than two Austrian towns – Trumau and Alberndorf! What a tarty little town it must be. Here in Yarm, we’re faithful souls and WE haven’t spent the last three decades fluttering our civic eyelashes at any old European urban conurbation. I think it’s high time we sat down and had a serious talk about the future of this relationship. Harumph.

At some point during our time at Conyers, the official ‘Welcome to Yarm’ sign at the top of the High Street had a ‘Twinned with Vernouillet’ plaque screwed to the stone plinth beneath it, a move that sent myself and Chris Byers into one of our classic Statler and Waldorf routines. ‘Twinned with Vernouillet! What a bleedin’ liberty! I bet Vernouillet hasn’t put a Twinned with Yarm sign on the front of their bloody Maison de Ville!!!!’.

I bet they haven’t either, les buggeres miserables. Or, if they have, it’ll be in small print under Trumau and Alberndorf.

We were also starting to dabble with the occasional bit of ‘French Oral’ (cue titters from the lads on the back row), and Miss Wilson would produce from the Language Dept cupboard the kind of gigantic, wooden boxed, reel-to-reel tape recorder that Joe Meek made most of his early 1960s hit singles with. The kind of tape recorder that’s always whirring in the background during interviews with NASA personnel from the height of the 50s Space Race.

Et maintenent, nous arrivons a la gare.

Numero deux (beeeeeeeeeeep)

All clearly acted out by A-Level French teachers who’ve starred in ‘Whoops, Where’s My Trousers?’ at their local amateur dramatics society and now fancy themselves as budding Alain Delons. And all backed by the ‘Busy Railway Station’ track from the BBC Sound Effects LP Volume 471.

Regardez, ecoutez et repetez!

Thursday 6th December 1984

GHOSTBUSTERS

Still playing with the format! Here’s my actual diary entry, as carefully scrawled into my now slightly-battered imitation leather journal with a red felt-tip pen exactly 25 years ago tonight…

Not a bad crack at the Top of the Pops logo, I suppose! And Ghostbusters as well… ah, 12 years old and with a mind already completely overwhelmed by the power of corporate branding. I’m surprised I didn’t try to design my own whizzy, multi-purpose logo for Yarm Library as well… a disapproving middle-aged woman peering over the top of a Jilly Cooper paperback, that kind of thing. With ‘YARM LIBRARY’ picked out in jagged letters across the top of her horn-rimmed glasses.

This hasn’t happened very often so far, but I remember the music lesson we had on this day with incredibly evocative vividness. For some reason Doug and I had moved seats from our usual ‘LOOK AT US! LOOK AT US!!!’ position at the front of the class to slap-bang in the centre of the rabble. And the lovely, wild-haired, hippy-dippy Miss Stainsby was playing us extracts from Sergei Prokofiev’s 1933 film soundtrack Lieutenant Kije, continually pressing ‘PLAY’ and ‘STOP’ on the ancient, 1970s ‘Music System’ stacked up in the cupboard next to a pile of Grade 1 Recorder textbooks.  

Including this gorgeous little number…

Yep, ‘Sleigh Ride’, or ‘Troika’ (as Miss Stainsby called it, making us write it down especially in our  notebooks with a violent wiggle of her gargantuan hair). A piece of music I’d heard hundreds of times throughout my childhood, on every TV Christmas special going – from Val Doonican to Blankety Blank to Daffy Duck. Yet, somehow, hearing it in our classroom on a freezing December morning surrounded by my bestest friends, made it sound more Christmassy than it had ever sounded before. 

I think my festive gene truly kicked into gear at this point, and from that moment onwards, Christmas 1984 had STARTED. Just like Snoopy’s kennel becomes his trusty Sopwith Camel, mine and Doug’s desk became a huge, present-laden sleigh, plummeting headlong through towering piles of feathery snow down towards the rustling pines of some mythical, winty forest. With – no doubt – a boxed-up and pristine ZX Spectrum at the bottom of the hill. As the music played, I remember looking out of the classroom window at the frosty school square beneath a slate-grey sky, and swearing I could see the first few flakes of snow dancing their way gently into the gutter outside the DT department.

Thankfully, some genuine 1984 school oikery was swiftly at hand to rescue me from my ambling daydreams. I can’t pinpoint the day exactly, but it was certainly in the run-up to Christmas 1984 that the entire first year at Conyers school were asked to partake in a charming little charity project.

The school, laudably, had linked up with Dr Barnados to raise a few quid for orphaned children, and each of us had been personally presented with a booklet entitled ‘Sunny Smiles’. Just a pocket-sized pad of 30 square tickets, each featuring the photograph of an ultra-cute Barnados kid with a beaming, irresistable grin. The idea being that we sell each ‘Sunny Smile’ to our friends and relatives for 10p each, thus raising a nifty £3 per pupil for charity.

However, one member of class 1CW decided that ’Sunny Smiles’ weren’t really this thing, and that his booklet needed spicing up a bit. Inspired by his pre-pubescent love of horror films and zombie flicks, he grabbed a black felt-tip pen and gleefully rebranded his booklet as the somewhat less savoury ‘SUNNY DEATHS’… with each innocent childish face now featuring blacked-out eyes, bolts through the neck, axe wounds across the forehead (complete with Frankenstein-style stitches) and blood and maggots oozing from every orifice. 

For a couple of days it was the subject of much hilarity amongst the boys of 1cw, and was passed around during form classes to a mounting chorus of stifled giggles as a baffled Miss Wilson read our names from the register. Eventually, however, it fell into the hands of a right-minded female member of the class… who was so appalled that she grassed us all up.

I know, because I saw it happen! ‘Miss, have you seen the Sunny Smiles that XXXXXXX XXXXX is passing round?’ she gasped, breathlessly, in a secluded corner of our form rom. ’It’s absolutely disgusting, he’s blacked out all the kids’ eyes and drawn maggots on them and everything…’

Needless to say, said booklet was swiftly confiscated and examined at close quarters by a crack Conyers School Ethical Committee (Miss Wilson, with Mr Fyfe from the German department peering over her shoulder) before the culprit was told, in no uncertain terms, that he was AN ABSOLUTE DISGRACE, AND THAT IT WAS A SAD REFLECTION ON HIS MORAL STANDARDS THAT SUCH A LAUDABLE ATTEMPT TO RAISE MONEY FOR A VERY WORTHWHILE CHARITY HAD BEEN DEFILED IN THIS WAY.

I’ve been in two minds whether to name the guilty party or not, but I think the quality of the artwork involved has swayed me, and I’ll proudly say that if Stephen Mason isn’t currently making a damn good living illustrating bloodthirsty American graphic novels for 21st century teenage boys, then it’s a terrible waste of a sensational talent.

Wednesday 5th December 1984

I went to bed at 9.30 after having POGGY DOGGY sat on me.

Definitely still trying to liven up my daily diary entries, wasn’t I? And, with less than three weeks to go, it’s no surprise that the actual page itself has a bit of an olde-worlde Christmas feel to it…

I particularly like the decorated ‘A’ at the start of ‘At 5.25 I watched The good life’. I clearly saw myself as a medieval scribe, hunched upstairs in my filthy habit (stop it) and scribbling away like a poor, impoverished monk… cut off from the outside world in my cell, lost in a world of silence and chastity. Although if you chuck in a ZX Spectrum 128K and a few Terry Brooks novels, this actually sounds more like my mid-teenage years.  

(Genuine medieval monks would, obviously, never have watched The Good Life either. They were all, to a man, devoted Ever Decreasing Circles fans)

In history, Mrs Ansbro was still guiding us gently through the golden age of exploration, and I seemed to spend the lesson drawing a nice picture of the stone ‘padrao’ that Portuguese explorer Bartholomew Diaz left on the shore of the Eastern Cape of South Africa in 1488…

The late, great Mrs Ansbro was a marvellously kind and dotty old dear with a genuine passion for ancient history, some of which she seemed to be relaying as her own personal experience. She’d certainly been part of Conyers School for as long as any of the other teachers could remember, and – with the benefit of hindsight – I’m not sure that she wasn’t some kind of Time Lady. Certainly the normal passage of the hours seemed to cease whenever we entered her musty, first-floor classroom, and we’d be transported to a strange realm of perpetual Autumn, where motes of chalk dust hung in the air and a pale sun was always setting, casting murky, lengthening shadows through the windows. A spell only momentarily broken whenever Stephen Mason inserted a compass point into Jo Spayne’s lower lumbar region. 

But Mrs Ansbro brought this stuff alive for me, and I’m still intrigued and fascinated by the idea of Bartholomew Diaz and his fellow15th century explorers braving the very real prospects (to them) of dragons and sailing off the end of the Earth to open up new trade routes to the East. Basically a bunch of blokes from Madrid who set off from home not knowing whether the bits of the world they wanted to get to even existed. Speaking as someone who gets a nosebleed every time I travel south of Northallerton, I’m full of admiration for them.

Nice to see special diary treatment reserved for The Box of Delights as well, which clearly meant I liked it A LOT. This was Episode 3, which – as I recall – featured rather a lot of the fine old British character actor Bill Wallis as a skulking, simpering rat hiding out in the sewers and nibbling on fetid bits of green cheese. Not quite as repulsive as my school contemporary Christopher Herbert, but pretty damn close. I’ve always liked Bill Wallis ever since, and still see him popping up on TV every now and again (he’s also Ploppy the Jailor in Blackadder II. ‘We live in an age where disease and disfigurement are commonplace, and yet you are still one of THE most repulsive individuals…’ etc)

I can’t watch that title sequence often enough, as it never fails to evoke the spirit of my 12-year-old self. I was still vaguely convinced that the woods, hills and forests around my house were filled with weirdness, magic and evil spirits, and that – when our long, beige front room curtains were drawn on the pitch blackness at 5pm – all hell broke loose outside. The Box of Delights seemed to provide a glorious, mysterious portal into that strange netherworld, and I loved – and love – it to bits.  

And yes, our resident rough collie Poggy Doggy was indeed given to climbing on the knee of anyone crazy enough to have their attention diverted by the TV for any length of time. There was nothing subtle about his approach, either… he’d just leap headlong into your lap before rolling over onto his back and hanging his head over the arm of your chair, with his tongue lolling out. I watched many an episode of Points of View through a ruffled haze of auburn dog hair.

Tuesday 4th December 1984

Next were maths and HE, and at 3.40 I came home. At 5.00 I had tea, at 5.10 I watched Star Trek, then I played outside. At 7.30 I watched Give us a clue, at 8.00 I watched Benny Hill, at 9.00 I went to bed.

Are you sitting comfortably? No? I’m not surprised with that posture. Go and get yourself a proper cushion for that chair, or you’ll be storing up all kinds of back problems for later life. Anyway, time to press on with Part 2 of ‘The Legend’, the strange, seafaring story I wrote for Mrs McDonald’s English class around this time. Remember, in Part One… actually don’t remember at all, just go and check yesterday’s entry. What do you think this is, Jackanory?

THE LEGEND – PART 2

I looked around. Everything was normal. But in my mind I could clearly see a castle, tall and grand, on a desolate hillside.

I got a rare Mrs McDonald merit for that! I’ve just been trying to work out if Kelnor’s chants are an adaptation of something filthy, but – amazingly – I can’t derive even the slightest bit of smut from them. They actually look reasonably authentically Latin, although I must have made them up. Anyway, when I’m a millionaire, I’m going to hire Bernard Cribbins to read that back to me from the comfy armchair in the front room.

(I absolutely LOVE the completely unnecessary funky little fill 13 seconds into the above clip – musicians just can’t bloody well help themselves can they? I bet the bassist pulled his best Bootsy Collins face as he did that. Then lit up a jazz cigarette and started telling stories about when he worked with Jeff Beck, maaan)

Meanwhile, in RE, Mrs Mainwaring-Taylor was still hammering a few obscure gods into our befuddled craniums… (and I’m sure you can get at least three Led Zeppelin song titles out of the previous sentence)

4th December 1984 – Gods of everyday life

In many societies there were a large number of gods, each with its own function in life. There were gods of rain, fire, wind, thunder etc. There were some gods who were reponsible for the skills of mankind such as the Mayan god ITZAMNA who invented writing and their goddess IXCHEL who looked after weaving and cooking.  This belief in many gods is called POLYTHEISM.

No mention, sadly, of the main Teesside god – AULDGADGE, the God of Believing That No Good Whatsoever Will Ever Come Of Following Middlesbrough Football Club, and ‘They’ll Only Let You Down, Son’. His disciples meet in a council allotment every matchday, in the drizzle, and repeat the sacred incantation ‘They don’t come to see me when I’m bad… they don’t come to see me when I’m bad…’ while repeatedly hitting themselves in the face with a length of timber.

Monday 3rd December 1984

I got up at 8.00, and at 8.30 Doug and Gaz came. We went to school, and at 9.25 we were meant to have rugby but Mr Anderson had skived so it was Gym. After that It was Maths, then History, and at 12.00 I had dinner.

When we came in I swopped seats and had French, then it was English, geog and maths. At 3.40 I came home and I started writing a ‘Sea’ Fighting Fantasy. At 7.00 I watched Harty, then Max Boyce.

At 8.00 I saw Rising damp, then I did homework, and at 9.00 I watched Laugh??? I nearly paid my licence fee. I went to bed at 9.30.

Am I really trying to feign a touch of bitterness and resentment that Mr Anderson had ’skived’ from our rugby lesson? As soon as it became apparent that I wouldn’t be spending an hour being physically abused in the freezing mud and murk of a dark, rainswept Monday morning, I’ll have been punching the air and doing my Happy Snoopy Dance. Instead, while poor Mr Anderson coughed and sniffled at home, we spent an hour in the warm, cosy enclave of the school gym, arsing around aimlessly on the ‘apparatus’.

Oddly, I have a vague feeling that our stand-in drill instructor on this occasion was one of the school’s female PE teachers, which was a strange and terrifying prospect. Female PE teachers are, as everyone knows, THE SCARIEST TEACHERS IN THE WORLD, far moreso than their male equivalents, who are – let’s face it – just blokes who like playing football and blowing whistles. Female PE teachers always look as though they’re just a successful interview away from being sadistic Bond villains* with secret lairs hidden beneath the Sports Hall, and sliding trapdoors to the Shark Pits ready to open beneath any hapless oiks who wear ‘Outdoor Shoes Beyond This Point’. 

(*insert your own ’stroking a white pussy’ joke here)  

We’ll also have done this impromptu gym lesson in our outdoor rugby kits, which will have upset my burgeoning adolescent Obsessive Compulsive Disorder no end. It’s JUST… NOT… RIGHT… (slaps forehead repeatedly and rocks back and forth)

I also feel I owe an apology to regular blog contributor (and my former 1CW classmate) Chris Byers, who it seems - oh, the shame – I deserted exactly 25 years ago today. For the first three months of my Conyers school career, I shared a desk with Chris on the right hand side of our form room, directly behind the rabble-rousing tag-team that was Alistair ‘Burton’ Burton and Marc ‘Thompson’ Thompson. We’d had a great laugh, and got on really well, but – I fear - I’d spent a lot of my time casting sideways glances to my traditional partner-in-crime Doug, marooned two desks to my left, at the very front of the classroom.

Clearly, on this day, an opportunity arose for me to shift over to Doug’s desk, and I seized it. Hence ‘I swopped seats and had French’. I’ve no idea how this came about, but Chris – I’m sorry. I’m so shamelessly fickle. Any idea what happened? Why was the seat next to Doug suddenly vacant? And did anybody move next to you, to take my place? I hope you weren’t stuck with anyone nasty (not that there was ANYONE nasty in 1cW, oh no. Sterling, upstanding ladies and gentlemen all. The kind you’d want in the trenches with you. Unless it was the trench outside Alistair Burton’s farmhouse chicken sheds, which I fell into in March 1991 aged eighteen and wearing my best suit. I wouldn’t wish that on anyone…)

And great to see me racing home to start writing the opening paragraphs of yet ANOTHER Fighting Fantasy book! None of this ’sea’ adventure seems to survive, but I did recently find another project that I worked on for Mrs McDonald’s English class, and it’s got SUCH a Fighting Fantasy feel that I can’t help but wonder if I shamelessly adapted one into the other. It has ‘1CW’ on the front, so it’s definitely from around this time, and it’s in a seperate folder containing lots of different scribblings, all with a definite maritime theme…

THE LEGEND 

13 hundred hours, July 14 2003, 605.3 miles East of Bermuda. The warm Atlantic was calm and my submarine was running smoothly. However, the peaceful atmosphere was soon shattered.

A blaring alarm cut through the air. Lights blinked and men struggled furiously to bring the submarine under control. Their attempts, though, were in vain. The room seemed to lurch sideways and I saw the floor rush towards my face. What happened next, I never knew.

I opened my eyes. I was still in the submarine but all the instruments were dead and the bodies of men were strewn around the room. I did not know whether they were dead or not.

My mind in a daze, I strumbled to my periscope and peered into it. I could see the sky, deep blue with wisps of cloud. We must be on the surface of the Atlantic. I looked again. Yes, I could see the ocean but there was something else – a wide, grey blur on the horizon. As my sight returned to normal, the blur turned into a high range of mountains fringed by miles of forest. This type of land should definitely not be in the centre of the Atlantic Ocean.

Somehow, I managed to steer the submarine single-handedly to the rocky shore. As I emerged onto the beach a sudden wave of heat hit me. Wherever I was, I was certainly very near the Equator.

I took food and water from the submarine and decided to journey over the mountains in search of civilisation. I travelled for three days over the mountain range, eating and drinking only when I was desperate. Soon I was out of water and I slowed down terribly.

On my fourth day I looked to the East and my heart leaped. On the horizon was a huge red and black castle, brightly coloured flags flying from the turrets. Guarding a large portcullis were two men with spears. They were dressed in the uniform of ancient Greek soldiers…

END OF PART ONE

You can have Part Two tomorrow, if you’re all good. The mention of the word ‘Equator’ made me laugh out loud in the middle of transcribing this rubbish, purely because it reminded me of an occasion in Mr Hirst’s class, back at Levendale Primary School, when one of my erstwhile classmates wrote proudly in her exercise book that ‘the Equator is an imaginary Lion that runs right around the middle of the Earth’. As ever, names will be withheld to protect the not-so-innocent… 

The homework that I did, meanwhile, seems to have been a suspiciously-impressive looking pencil rendition of ‘Prince Henry’s Caravel’ (lovely with a cup of coffee)

This is far, far, far too detailed a drawing to be a Fischer original, so I MUST have nicked it from somewhere. Probably traced through the page from an illustration in my Big Boy’s Encyclopaedia of Everything (Pages 38-39, ‘Human Reproduction’, looking suspiciously well-thumbed). I guess half an hour of Max Boyce had got my creative juices flowing.

Incidentally, I’ve just remembered that Max Boyce was something of a favourite of my mate Gareth ‘Gazzie’ Jones, who – despite his name, his love of rugby and this startling new piece of evidence – still maintains to this day that he was no Welsh blood in him whatsoever.

The last time I saw him was about three weeks ago, when I popped round one Sunday afternoon and he gave me some fresh leeks from the vegetable plot in his back garden. True, that. There’s lovely.

Sunday 2nd December 1984

I got up at 10.00 and I sorted my whole bedroom out. At 11.00 I had breakfast, and at 12.30 I had dinner, then I played out on the tarzie till 2.25, when I watched the snooker.

At 5.00 I had tea, then I went upstairs and recorded some of the charts. At 7.15 I watched Ever Decreasing Circles, at 7.45 I watched Big deal, at 8.35 I watched The Snooker, and at 9.10 I went to bed.

What imagery comes to mind when I think of Christmas 1984? The ZX Spectrum 48K computer? Of course. ‘Do They Know It’s Christmas?’ Certainly. The Box of Delights? Oh yes. However, in amongst all of this glorious ephemera, this lovely, long-ago festive period is also completely summed up by…

HUGE, FUZZY WRITING IN BRIGHT RED FELT TIP PIN!

Yep, I’ve no idea why, but from this day until the end of the year, every single one of my diary entries is scribbled in this lurid, crimson handwriting. I think I just reckoned it looked nicely festive. And genuinely… looking at those pages now brings the whole period flooding back in an incredibly evocative wave of nostalgia. It’s like the whole ’script’ of Christmas 1984 - the excitement, the TV, the frantic present-buying and the marzipan-laden cake-baking - was written in that chunky red hand.

I went to bed every night with bright crimson fingertips. I think my Mother thought I’d been dabbling in Satanic worship and virgin sacrifice in my bedroom every night. Ha! The very thought. Where would you find a virgin in mid-1980s Yarm?

(In the middle of a Christmas carol, of course, where the line ’round yon virgin’ in the middle of ‘Silent Night’ was the cause of many a tittering outbreak in our last few Christmas singalongs at Levendale Primary School. Mrs Mulhern would roll her eyes, and carry on regardless as Slack, Sugden, Fischer, Mason et al creased up into laughter…)   

Anyway, huge thanks to my Mum for pointing out a huge flaw in yesterday’s blog entry (Yeah, HUGE thanks for that!). I was, of course, moaning about modern kids having their 2009 advent calendars filled chunky lumps of chocolate, whereas all we got in the 1980s were cartoon drawings of Der Ickle Baby Jesus.

However, she has – quite rightly – dropped me a line today to point out that I most certainly DID have chocolate advent calendars in the 1980s, because one year (wait for it)… OUR CAT ATE ALL THE CHOCOLATES!

Throughout almost all of my childhood, our house (mainly the fireside rug) played host to Sooty (pictured above). He was quite the most bone idle, truculent, self-centred, food-0bsessed egomaniac I’ve ever met in my life, which is quite some achievement considering I’ve worked in BBC local radio for the last 11 years. And yes… one early December during the 1980s we wandered in from the kitchen to find the advent calendar that had been happily hanging on the front room wall in tatters on the carpet, covered in frantic clawmarks and entirely devoid of chocolate!

And, nearby, a bloated and rather queasy-looking cat…

Unusually for me, I can’t remember which year this was at all, although Sooty’s last Christmas with us was in 1990, and I’m pretty sure it was a few years before that. I got a new calendar, and the cat got booted up the arse and shoved out in the cold for the night. I think he developed a taste for the harder stuff after that, and was on twenty Maltesers a day by the end of 1989. It was the beginning of the end…

 
The snooker on this day was the final of the British Championships, broadcast live from Preston all day on BBC2. Steve ’Interesting’ Davis vs Alex ‘Hurricane’ Higgins, with Steve winning by 16 frames to 8. I have two strange, fragmented memories of Steve Davis from around this time…

1. Steve and Alex Higgins being asked to pose holding the trophy between them, BEFORE the match took place. Alex obliged with his usual cheesy grin, but Steve – superstitiously – refused to touch the trophy, and just stood rather awkwardly nearby. Would that have been for this match? I can’t fnd another Davis vs Higgins final from around this time.

2. The Daily Mirror, the day after a major final, printing a rather cruel full front page picture of Steve Davis crying backstage during a break in the match. ‘THE DAY THE ROMFORD ROBOT CRACKED’, that kind of thing. Was that the day after this, or another tournament entirely?

If Len Ganley is passing by, feel free to give us your thoughts…

And I really DO remember, very vividly, recording the charts in my bedroom on this particular frosty evening! I had an ancient, tinny, black plastic transistor radio (whose battery cover had been chewed into a strange, gnarled shape by – I think – Poggy Doggy’s mother Jenny, when she was a puppy), and I pushed my little grey cassette recorder up against it, desperately trying to time the ’Pause’ button to remove any trace of poor Richard Skinner from my recordings.

I got Murray Head’s ‘One Night In Bangkok’, Nik Kershaw’s ‘The Riddle’ and Madonna’s ‘Like A Virgin’ during this session, all sounding as though they’d been recorded on a wax cylinder during an Arctic blizzard. The latter of these, though, instantly provided Ian ‘Ozzie’ Oswald and I with the opportunity to write a spoof Madoona lyric based around our beloved Fighting Fantasy books.

‘We made it through the Forest of Doom… somehow we made it throuughhh… didn’t know how much stamina we had until we killed the trollll…’

Oh to be young, free and utterly bloody stupid. 

Saturday 1st December 1984

At 11.00 I watched Pushing up daisies, and at 11.30 I settled down.

The first day of December!!! This meant, of course, that it was OFFICIALLY NEARLY CHRISTMAS, and – as such – one cry would now resound repeatedly around the house until my parents finally buckled under the sheer mental torture…

‘MAM! DAD! MAM! DAD! CAN WE PUT THE CHRISTMAS DECORATIONS UP TODAY???!?!? COME ON!!! PLEEEEEEASE!!!!! IT’S DECEMBER NOW AND IAN OSWALD PUT HIS UP AAAAAGES AGO!!!!!’

I lasted until about 10am before throwing myself into this gruesome routine on Saturday 1st December 1984. ‘Oh, it’s too early, yet…’ said my Mum, scraping the barnacles from a bag of Newbould’s sausages.  ’Ask me again when it’s Christmas…’ 

‘Christmas is cancelled this year, anyway…’ said my Dad, attempting to light the coal fire in the front room with a billy can filled with kerosene.  ’I read about it in the paper. Bob Geldof says we all have to give our money to the starving of Ethiopia. You’ll have to wait till they’ve had their dinner before you get your ZX Spectrum…’

I slinked off mumbling to the mud track with Doug, and we spent an hour rocking idly on the swings, throwing pebbles at the posh greenhouse over the fence and talking about how we should set up a hippy commune, where ALL US DISENFRANCHISED KIDS could leave together in peace and harmony and listen to Frankie Goes To Hollywood for 16 hours a day and put our Christmas decorations up in the middle of October. Both of us sounding a little bit too much like Rik from The Young Ones for comfort.

And then I went home and moaned so much through the snooker (the semi-final of the UK Championships live from Preston, with Alex ‘Hurricane’ Higgins playing Cliff ‘The Grinder’ Thorburn) that my Mum finally relented and we walked back into Yarm to ‘have a look’ at some new decorations. I’m sure Yarm’s sprawling, budget-price superstore Boyes was open by the this time… if not, it was a similar shop in the same location. Can any passing Yarm-ites help?

Whatever the case, we’ll have come back with a few stringy bits of tinsel, a box of shiny baubles, and ABSOLUTELY THOUSANDS of those strips of coloured paper, where you lick the sticky tip (stop it) and loop them around the next bit of paper to form giant, multi-coloured chains. Every single Christmas, I’d get so carried away making these that – by December 23rd – the ceilings in our house looked like they’d been taken over by a giant, psychedelic spider.

I definitely remember frantically making these in front of the TV one night (possible on this very day) and standing up after a couple of hours to discover that the resulting pile of rustling, pastel-shaded paper chains actually came up to my knees. Going to the kitchen to get an almond slice was like walking through a scene from Yellow Submarine.

Oh, and I’ll have had an advent calendar as well! Although 1984 advent calendars were slightly different from the modern brands, in that…

a) They tended to be manufactured by stationary companies rather than chocolate firms. The advent calendars I grew up with had little windows that opened out to reveal nothing more than a slightly faded cartoon rendition of Father Christmas, some mystified-looking shepherds, or Der Ickle Baby Jesus. No little plastic containers filled with slightly musty-tasting chocolate for us.

2. They only went up to Christmas Eve. Because advent – durrr - is 24 days long. The last modern advent calendar I saw had a brightly-coloured Santa brandishing a Yorkie bar on the front, and boasted 32 windows, to tide yer modern kids firmly over to New Year’s Day. I’m now fully expecting next year’s crop to be five feet square, and to press on through to Good Friday, with a bar of Fruit & Nut behind every cardboard trapdoor.

Friday 30th November 1984

I got up at 8.00, then me and Gaz went to school. First was a run down to Yarm clinic and back, which I did in 18 mins, and after that was French and geog.

At 12.00 I had dinner, then it was Maths, music and science. At 3.40 I came home and I hung around till 5.10 when I watched Crackerjack. At 6.00 I did homework, then I went out till 7.00, when I watched Survival.

At 8.00 I watched Play your cards right, then I went out till ‘Tell the Truth’ at 9.00. At 11.30 I went to bed.

Aaaaarghhhh! The dreaded cross country run! The first one we ever did, with Mr Neilson and Mr Anderson joining dastardly forces to send their entire 60-man squad of pale, flabby, 12-year-old oiks through the Conyers school gates, over the frosty tarmac streets of the Kebble housing estate and down the terrifyingly steep hill that plunged past the ‘posh knob’s school’ towards the High Street. It must have looked like a scene from Zulu, albeit with all of Kamalandela’s hardy warriors sporting white PE vests from Rawcliffe’s and coughing up bits of Wham Bar into the beck.

The ‘clinic’ was (and is) Yarm Medical Centre, the doctors’ surgery at the bottom of the road. It’s probably a round trip of less than two miles, so 18 minutes is pretty poor form, really. My main memory is of beginning the return journey back to school, only to discover poor Gavin Wilkinson leaning against a traffic light and clutching his side with a look of pained anguish on his face. 

‘Whatsamarrerwiyou?’ I gasped, with all due concern. ‘Gorrastitchorsummat?

He pulled up his vest to reveal what was quite clearly a vivid, fresh scar from a recent appendix operation. I think I fainted momentarily into the beck and was only revived five minutes later when the cloud of aromatic herbs and spices that permanently surrounded Christopher Herbert wafted past me. So 13 minutes really, then… yay!

Oddly enough, I’m also sure that our cross country runs out of the school were pretty much unsupervised… I don’t remember either of our PE teachers coming along for the jog, or even driving down to Yarm Medical Centre to ensure we reached our turning-back-point safely. I think we got a bit of pep talk beforehand (‘No jumping on the bus, you little buggers’), a bit of a pep talk afterwards (‘Get in the showers, you horrible lot’), and I assume they spent the intervening 20 minutes Mr Nielson’s office, smoking cigars and laughing like Robert De Niro in Cape Fear.

Does this still happen these days? I can’t imagine for a second that any school in 2009 would allow sixty 12-year-olds to jog around the streets during a PE lesson without chaining them together, monitoring their every laboured, wheezing footstep with CCTV cameras, and sending an accompanying Health & Safety SWAT team to complete rolling, on-the-road Risk Assessments. While smoking cigars and laughing like Robert De Niro in Cape Fear.

Anyway, a bit of Geography to assist in the post-race comedown…

Yes, Noise Pollution 1984-style. Note not a single mention of car alarms and Thunderous Twatty Music, the two twin bugbears of my 2009 existance. And sometimes it’s difficult to tell them apart. I love the fact that ‘Neighbours’ Kitchen Gadgets’ are quite high on the list, though. ‘BLOODY HELL, IS THAT NEXT DOOR’S TOASTER AGAIN? TURN IT DOWN WOMAN, I’M TRYING TO WATCH WINNER TAKES ALL!!!!!!’

And, in Mr Warren’s science class, we were beginning a brand new topic, fiddling about inexpertly with dangerous-looking bits of electrical equipment…

All of this was, of course, meat and drink to me, as I’d spent much of the previous year tinkering with bits of exposed wire, mains adaptors and half-built wooden robots in Doug’s garage. There was NOTHING I didn’t know about electrical work, apart from all the bits that ensured you didn’t die in a blackened heap on the cold, stone floor. I wasn’t bothered about those, they were DEAD BORING.

Ironic that I spent much of the evening watching ‘Survival’.

Thursday 29th November 1984

I GOT UP AT 8.00 and at 8.30 DOUG AND BURTON CAME. FIRST AT SCHOOL WAS A SCIENCE TEST, AND THEN MUSIC AND GEOG. AT 12.00 I HAD DINNER THEN IT WAS DT, RE and HISTORY.

AT 3.40 I CAME HOME AND LOOKED FOR SOME PHOTOS THEN I HAD TEA. AFTER THAT I DID HOMEWORK AND AT 7.30 I WATCHED TOP OF THE POPS –

FRANKIE GOES TO HOLLYWOOD –

NUMBER 3 – POWER OF LOVE

AT 8.00 I MADE A POGGY’S LIB POSTER AND AT 8.30 I WATCHED ZOO 2000 . AT 9.00 I WENT TO BED.

I really was getting a bit bored with writing a diary wasn’t I? At one point during 1984 I was certain that I would be a life-long diary writer, and I even remember Doug trying to convince me that I should never, ever give up the habit. ‘You have to keep that going for the rest of your life…’ he nodded, sagely, as we climbed the stairs to our Geography lesson (only to have Mr Flynn point us silently back down again, as we’d contravened the Block 2 one-way system for the umpteenth week in a row, and had to go all the way round to the back stairs)

By the end of November, though, the novelty was clearly wearing thin and I was resorting to all manner of desperate ’playing with the format’ measures to make it (yawn) more (yawn) interesting for my(yawn)self. Hence the capital letters. What next, I wonder? I’ll probably be writing in blood before Christmas. In capital letters. BIG BLOOD-SOAKED CAPITAL LETTERS IN ITALICS, ALL UNDERLINED.

(Sits down to catch breath and allow wave of giddy excitement to pass)

Anyway, the ’science test’ marked the end of our month-experimentation with protozoa and worms (probably the best 80s synth-pop duo never to have hit the charts), and – in the rest of my lessons – I seem to have decided to tinker with even more established formats by expressing all of the day’s schoolwork in cartoon form…

This is from my Geography lesson. I’m sure that, somewhere along the line, I had a serious point to make about air pollution, but naturally it could go on the (filthy, carbon-heavy) back burner while I spent the entire lesson drawing the ‘KLEENIT LAUNDRY’ van spouting ‘lead hydrocarbons’ all over a thinly veiled self-portrait of me and my (titter!) prized Chopper. And, in RE, Mrs Mainwaring-Taylor was talking us gently through the private life of the Egyptian sun god, Ra…

I was pretty interested in the night-time adventures (stop it) of Ra, as it seemed to involved him travelling through something called the ‘Underworld’, which I knew full well was a late 1970s Doctor Who adventure. Although oddly enough, sun worship never really caught on in Teesside. Can’t imagine why.

(Mind you, Squelch, the God of Drizzle, goes a bundle up here)

Great to see me still getting excited about the continuing chart success of my favourite band, Frankie Goes To Hollywood. And I’ve just discovered that this evening’s edition of Top of the Pops was preceded by a special screening of the freshly-recorded Band Aid single, introduced by a fabulous-looking David Bowie…

TV in the 1980s was so rigid and staid and fussy that it always sent a tiny frisson of excitement through me when the schedules were interrupted for a little nugget like this.  Anyway, here’s the full Top of the Pops rundown, as presented by uber-perky 80s tag team Janice Long and Peter Powell…

• Alvin Stardust – I Won’t Run Away [Performance]
• Black Lace – Agadoo (&Credits) [Performance]
• Eurythmics – Sexcrime (Nineteen Eighty Four) [Promo Video]
• Frankie Goes To Hollywood – The Power Of Love [Promo Video]
• Jim Diamond – I Should Have Known Better [Performance]
• Kool & The Gang – Fresh [Performance]
• Madonna – Like A Virgin [Promo Video]
• Nik Kershaw – The Riddle [Performance]
• Slade – All Join Hands [Repeat Performance]
• Tina Turner – Private Dancer [Promo Video]

It’s the Frankie Goes To Hollywood Nativity Play! I loved, and love, this song… it has a purity and a sincerity that I’ve always found touching, and if I’m allowed to be even soppier… it just reminds me of Doug and me. Best mates in the world, wrapped up in our parkas against the freezing Teesside winter of 1984, and impervious to the rest of the world. 

Although admittedly the line ’I'll protect you from the Hooded Claw’ never fails to make me think of Penelope Pitstop’s mortal enemy, the dreaded alter-ego of her sinister guardian Sylvester Sneekly. No idea whether that’s deliberate or not…