Monday 5th November 1984

BONFIRE NIGHT

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

5th November 1984

My memories of primary school

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Anyway, Bonfire Night! Yay!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sunday 4th November 1984

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Eh?’ 

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

‘Erm…’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Saturday 3rd November 1984

MAM’S BIRTHDAY

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Can I stop weeping now?

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

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

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

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

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

It’s true though, and it’s here…!

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

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

Friday 2nd November 1984

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thursday 1st November 1984

Woke up at 8.00, then at 8.30 Gazzie came. At 8.45 Doug and Burton came and we all went to school. First was Science (I got a merit), then it was Music. After that came Geog, and at 12.00 I had dinner.

When I went out me and Gazzie won the final at tennis ball football, then first lesson when we came in was DT. When that finished, it was RE, and last was History. I came home at 3.40 and got changed, then I played football outside.

At 5.00 I had tea, then at 5.25 I watched Henry’s Cat. I watched Grange Hill at 5.30, and at 7.00 I watched Tommorrow’s world. At 7.20 I watched Top of the pops, at 8.00 I watched Don’t wait up, and at 8.30 I watched Zoo 2000.

I went to bed at 9.00.

Yay! Good to see my ‘walking to school’ entourage gaining a few extra numbers. Both Gareth ’Gazzie’ Jones and Alistair ‘Burton’ Burton lived in the outlying villages, so no doubt their parents jumped at the chance to offload them from the family car at our house rather than fight their way through a gridlock of parental Vauxhall Cavaliers to Conyers School gates (although admittedly, in 1984, ’school run’ traffic was a fraction of what it is today. Most of my school contemporaries were simply thrown out of the front door at 8.45am by a mother determined not to be disturbed until the end of The Young Doctors at 3.55pm)

And, clearly, that spirit of unity clearly stood me and Gazzie Jones in good stead when it came to the World Tennis Ball Football championships at 12.20pm! (Naturally it was important to wolf down our school dinners like famished dogs at 12.01pm, to maximise racing-about-like-blue-arsed-flies time for the rest of our allotted dinner hour)

This fiercely-fought tournament took place against the side wall of the school sports hall, a gigantic brick building only slightly smaller than the average Mayan temple. In a nutshell… one hapless sap got to go in ‘goal’ (a vague portion of the wall marked only by two piles of stacked-up Puma sports bags at either side, and with a non-existant upper limit, stretching skyward to infinity) while at least 14 teams of two strapping filthy lads chased a fluffy tennis ball around a vast, swamp-like patch of grass, occasionally lamping the thing with thunderous ferocity towards the makeshift goalmouth.

Gazzie and I clearly won the game for one reason, and one reason alone… Mr Jones is, was, and surely always will be, the HARDEST KICKER OF A BALL I HAVE EVER SEEN IN MY LIFE. Including every single professional footballer I’ve ever watched on TV or in the flesh, from the GM Vauxhall Conference to the World Cup Final. His shots at goal were terrifying things when we were 11 years old, and the last time I played football with him - nearly ten years ago, when we were in our late twenties - his technique had been perfected to such an extent that I’m convinced he’s at least partly responsible for the US Defence Department’s Pan-European Missile Defence System.

Which clearly came a bit late for our poor, bewildered goalkeeper Christopher Herbert, who spent the rest of the afternoon solemnly peeling his fingers from the sports hall wall after making an unwise attempt to stop Mr Jones’ thunderous, clinching, 35-yard half-volley.

Academically, not a lot to report from this day… in science, we’d moved onto animal biology, and were looking at the differences between vertebrates (Duckbilled Platypus, Spiny Anteater) and invertebrates (Bristle Worm, Sea Cucumber); and in Geography I learnt the word ‘Conurbation’, to describe a conglomeration of towns and villages (Middlesbrough – Billingham – South Bank – Grangetown).

And then I came home by myself, and had to wait outside the back door until The Young Doctors finished at 3.55pm.

Henry’s Cat, though! Fantastic. I’d forgotten all about this, but I’ve just checked and I can still do the impression that I perfected in late 1985 if anyone sees me in the street and would like to request it…

And ‘Don’t Wait Up’! An opening title sequence that I haven’t seen for over 20 years, but I’ve just been immediately transported back to any number of bleak, dark pubescent nights prodding at my  Geography homework on the coffee table while my Mum’s knitting needles click-clacked on the settee and my Dad slipped into his muddy, grey dog-walking jacket…

Meanwhile, I’m guessing Zoo 2000 was a typically plummy BBC1 documentary attempting to guess what the country’s most famous zoos would be like 26 years into the future, at the turn of the space-age millenium? (And, presumably, failing miserably to predict the correct answer, which was – of course - ’exactly the same as they are in 1984′)

Wednesday 31st October 1984

Then we went to Doug’s music teacher, and back to my house via the estate. We had got £2.26 so we kept £1.13 each, and at 9.15 Doug went home. I went to bed at 9.30.

Halloween! The streets of Yarm were alive with all manner of hideous, crawling creatures from the darkest corners of the netherworld… all carrying turnips with wonky candles and mumbling ‘der sky is blue, der grass is green’ into their shoes in the hope of earning 20p from some hapless, grumbling grown-up desperate to watch ’No Place Like Home’ without being disturbed.

My mate Shack is adamant that Halloween is an American invention that meant nothing in the UK before a generation of grotty herberts saw ET over the Christmas holidays in 1982. But I definitely remember covering the festival at school in the late 1970s… mainly because I was ABSOLUTELY TERRIFIED of the prospect. In front of a cowering assembly, our teacher Mrs Parker had shone a torch under her chin and strutted around the school hall gloomily recounting tales of ‘Ghosts roaming the streets, and the dead rising up from their graves to get you…’ 

This would have been (I think) Halloween 1979, and I arrived home on the Worsall bus shaking, and visibly traumatised.

‘What’s the matter?’ asked my Mum, doing something unpleasant to a packet of fishfingers in the kitchen. ’Has Christopher Herbert poured Tizer into your satchel again?’

‘N-n-n-n-n-o,’ I stammered… ’Mrs Parker said the dead are rising from their graves tonight…’

‘Oh, what rubbish,’ she snorted. ‘If that was the case, my Dad would be knocking at the door already, and I’m pretty sure he hasn’t been, has he?’

I spent the rest of the night huddled in the armchair in the front room, trembling gently into a cushion and awaiting the inevitable rap-rap-rap of my dead Grandad’s bony fingers on the kitchen door. At one my point my Dad went outside to walk the dogs around the field, and I genuinely feared for his safety. I remember peeking nervously through a tiny gap in the front room curtains, fully expecting to see a riot of ghosts, witches, golems and other assorted nasties causing havoc in the darkness of the garden.

By 1980, amazingly, I’d completely lost all of this fear, and myself and Lisa Wheeldon (from the house round the corner) watched the Crackerjack Halloween Special at my Gran’s house (it was a Friday night) before plastering our faces in blood-red lipstick, sticking the obligatory wonky candle into a hollowed-out turnip, and traipsing around the streets of Acklam making ‘Wooo-ooooo-ooooo’ noises in front of giggling householders, our cheeks burnt orange by the flickering streetlights.

We made £1.45 each and invested the lot in the burgeoning Sherbert Dib-Dab market.

I’d been ‘Halloweening’ every year since, although 1984 was the first time Doug and I had teamed up for this shameless profiteering exercise. Naturally we considered dressing up to be a bit beneath us, but I spent half an hour hollowing out a turnip* with a kitchen spoon in front of Dangermouse and then singing my fingers on a candle from my Mum’s ‘Emergency Power Cut’ cupboard (largely untouched since 1979)

(*NOT a pumpkin, you’ll note. Nothing saddens me more than seeing today’s generation of teeny Teesside money-grubbers saying ‘Trick or treeeeeet’ in a whiny cod-American accent while holding up a shiny, smooth, hollowed-up orange pumpkin from Tesco. Pumpkins are NOT scary. They look like items of gym equipment. Turnips are nasty, knobbly, twisted, godforsaken monstrosities with odd clumps of hair sticking out at vicious angles. The vegetable equivalent of Dean Windass. They RULE, and I fear for the future of our youth without their malevolent influence every October)

Anyway, yes… we spent our evening knocking gingerly on doors within a half-mile radius of our houses, doing the old ‘Sky is blue, grass is green’ routine with a vaguely sarcastic air, and stopping every thirty yards to relight the candle inside our leering Jack O’Lantern. ‘The Grove’ sounds like it should be a tangled forest of grasping trees and unfettered spirits, but is - in fact – a little cul-de-sac of bungalows about a hundred yards from Doug’s house. I remember we knocked gingerly on a lit-up door at the bottom of the close, and a rather well-to-do looking elderly lady with a striking purple rinse emerged, looking decidedly unimpressed at the interruption to her evening’s viewing. The conversation went as follows…

Us: ’Der sky is blue, der grass is green, can you spare a penny for-’

Her: ‘I’m sorry, but what on EARTH are you doing?’

Me: ‘Erm… we’re… Trick or Treating…’

Her: ’What?!?’

Doug: ‘It’s Halloween. We’re Trick Or Treating’

Her: ’I have NO idea what you’re talking about. Do you actually WANT something? It’s far too cold to be standing here with the door open all night…’

Me (turning puce): ’Well… it’s like… we sing the song… and you… give us… some… money… erm……….’

Her: ‘You have GOT to be joking. Get away with the pair of you, I’ve never heard anything so ridiculous in all my given years’ (DOOR SLAMS)

Doug: ‘OH PISS OFF THEN, YOU MISERABLE OLD COW!!!’

We contemplated putting a small packet of flaming dogshit through her letterbox, but couldn’t find any that looked remotely flammable. On the corner of Hawthorne Grove, just across the main road, a grinning middle-aged wag emerged from his front door, told me to hold out my hand, and sprayed a curling dollop of shaving foam into my quivering palm. Thankfully, the welcome we received from Doug’s music teacher, in a blackened, crumbling mansion set back from the main road amidst a tangle of trees and rhododendron bushes, was warmer.

‘Hello Douglas!’ she beamed, peering through a crack in the door after twenty minutes of systematic unlocking, unlatching and unbolting that sounded like the opening titles to Porridge. ‘How lovely to see you. Come in! And who’s your friend?’

She was absolutely ancient, and dressed like Queen Victoria. And the house was a riot of faded Edwardian glory, filled with musty books and maps and with a classic upright piano in a corner of the drawing room.

‘Now then, what can I do for you both, hmmm?’

We sang our song. She smiled and clapped, and gave us 50p each, without any idea – we suspected – of what was really going on. On the way out, Doug told me that her husband had died, and she’d never really recovered… and hadn’t spoken a word to anyone for six months after his death.

1984 was a strange, marvellously macabre place to be a youngster.

We tramped around the ‘Kebble Estate’ with no great degree of enthusiasm, breathing wisps of filth into the freezing night air and kicking leaves into neatly-cut gardens. All the other kids on Halloweening duty seemed to be at least three or four years younger than us, and we started to feel vaguely embarrassed. At one point, a gang of elder, teenage boys on the corner of the street gave a violent roar of fury and raced along the Larun Beat towards is. Convinced we were in for a kicking, we dived into a garden and hid beneath the shelter of a drooping, rustling willow tree.

They ran straight past us, flashing puzzled looks at the tree on the way. Even the local loonies weren’t bothered. We divvied up the money, made one last crack about being ‘grabbed by the ghoulies’ and shuffled off to our respective beds.

I never went Halloweening again after that.

Tuesday 30th October 1984

Got up at 8.00, and at 8.30 Doug came and we went to school. First was English, then an RE test. Then it was ‘to the library’, and after that we had Drama (I was a designer on a spaceship)

At 12.00 I had dinner, then it was French and Maths. Last was HE and I made some cakes and got 8.5. At 3.40 I came home and at 4.30 Doug came and we did maths. At 5.00 he went and I had tea, and at 5.10 I watched Star Trek.

At 6.30 Doug came and we went to youth club and played Basketball. I came home at 9.00 and at 10.00 I went to bed.

Wonder why I put ‘to the library’ in dramatic quotation marks like that? It wasn’t an exciting one-off event, we went ‘to the library’ for our second English lesson of the morning EVERY Tuesday. I can only assume it had become a strange, surreal catchphrase for our form class as we tramped through the upstairs corridors of Block 1, past the History classrooms with a diagram of Mr Richardson’s North-West Passage on the door. ‘To the library!’ we cried, ’TO THE LIBRARY!!!’

Or maybe I was just having a crap-at-grammar day and slipping them in willy-nilly. Who can say? Or, indeed, ‘who can say?’

Anyway, by this point in the school year I was reading The White Mountains, the first book of John Christopher’s brilliant Tripods trilogy. Our library lessons were very much reserved for ‘quiet reading’, and we had 35 minutes to gently peruse the childrens’ fiction sections while discreetly prodding each other with protractors.

I remember Ian ’Griff’ Griffiths sitting next to me during one of these lessons and casting doubt upon my reading abilities. ‘No WAY are you reading that book as quickly as that…’ he grinned, as I turned over my second page in the space of 60 seconds. ‘I am so,’ I hissed. ’I can read a full paperback in less than an hour’.

I was, of course, lying through my teeth… I was just flicking ahead to see if one of the dead exciting bits I remembered from the Tripods  TV series was coming up in the next few pages. Yep, for all my literary pretensions, ALL of this was inspired by contemporay Saturday evening telly, with BBC1’s ripping adaptation of The Tripods still going strong on dark, Autumnal tea-times. Once I’d finished the book (an hour later), I scoured the library shelves in vain for a hardback copy of John Masefield’s ‘Late Late Breakfast Show Chronicles’…

My stint on the drama spaceship was an on-running saga, with Mr Harrison running a weekly Star Trek-inspired improv workshop (how VERY mid-1980s! Was it Alexei Sayle that said nobody should be allowed to use the word ‘workshop’ unless they’re wearing dirty overalls and carrying an oily toolbox?) in which the entire Class of 1CW were manning an expedition to the farthest reaches of the galaxy.

My character was Mr A Weirdo (cringe) and I was the ship’s onboard designer, responsible for creating revolutionary new hyperdrive propulsion systems and advanced versions of Jet Set Willy for the ship’s hyper-intelligent ZX Spectrum emulator. Bizarrely, one of our lessons during this time revolved around a pan-galactic dance sequence to one of Mr Harrison’s favourite tracks… ‘Violence’ by Mott The Hoople…

He wanted us to CREATE OUR OWN DANCE ROUTINES to a track called ‘VIOLENCE’??? With STEPHEN MASON in the class???!! Was he mad? I think the Accident and Emergency Department of North Tees Hospital were still ringing around for extra staff at the end of Home Economics.

(The cakes were the classic school rock cakes, by the way… filled with mouldy raisins and with a density rivalling that of the planet Mercury. In fact, as I removed the largest of my concoctions from our clanking gas oven, it drew three of Alexandra Bennett’s fairy cakes into permanent geo-stationary orbit around it. My parents ate them through gritted teeth as we watched the end of Star Trek. Well, what teeth they had left by the time they’d finished…)

And did I really go to Youth Club to play BASKETBALL? I couldn’t stand playing basketball in our official PE lessons, so it’s hard to imagine why I’d devote my own spare time to such fripperies when I could have been dancing like a lemon to Frankie Goes To Hollywood and flicking Space Dust over Debbie Jarvis’ highlights.

Unless, of course, Debbie Jarvis was playing as well…

Monday 29th October 1984

At 3.40 I came home and read 2 Eagles and a Buster till tea at 5.00. At 5.30 I watched Gloria, then I did rooms 5 and 6 of the RPG. At 8.00 I watched To the Manor Born, at 8.30 I watched Fairly secret army, at 9.00 I watched Laugh??? I nearly paid my licence fee! and at 9.30 I went to bed.

Maths! Maths on a twinkly, frosty morning, with ice-coated puddles crunching underfoot as I took my place – for the first time – in the ‘Top Set’, under the withering gaze of the scary, authoritarian (yet strangely sexy) Mrs Clark Without The ‘E’. Here’s what I wrote in my maths exercise book 25 years ago this morning…

Factors

If an integer divides exactly into another integer (without leaving a remainder) the first number is called a factor of the second. If an integer divides exactly into another integer, the second number is called a multiple of the first. A prime number has only two factors, and a prime factor is a factor which is a prime number. Every integer great than 1 can be written as a product of its prime factors in only one way.

I scribbled all of this down with a horrible cold sweat pouring from my forehead, and – growing within me - a burning desire to do some finger painting. And maybe make some Christmas decorations out of tissue paper and glue. And then watch The Flumps and have a little afternoon nap.

NB I got demoted from the Top Set of Maths at the end of the academic year.

In English, meanwhile, Mrs McDonald was also hammering a few rules into us, probably with a mallet while (here’s to you) Mrs Robinson held us down…

Our first half-term at Conyers had all about creativity and trendy, progressive teaching – we’d drawn pictures, written stories, acted out little playlets and so on – so this ‘back to basics’ academic approach felt like a bit of a culture shock, as though our teachers had suddenly emerged from the Lambert & Butler fug in the staff room chewing matchsticks and saying ‘Alright wise guys… no more playin’ games, huh…?’

Still, the prospect of a new stash of comics will have been enough to get me through the day. My comic-collecting mania was very much in its final throes by now… although at one point, circa 1982, the roll call of my weekly collection was as follows…

Whizzer and Chips
Whoopee!
Buster
Cheeky Weekly
The Eagle
Nutty
The Beano
The Dandy
Star Wars Weekly

And, on a montly basis, hardy old Doctor Who Magazine. They were very much a feature of my weekends at my Gran’s house in Acklam – all reserved for me at Mr Murray’s newsagents round the corner, so Saturday afternoons became a delirious laugh-riot, stuffing custard slices from Shipman’s Bakery down my face and giggling at Bananaman and Sid’s Snake in front of the wrestling on World Of Sport.

Throughout 1984, though, I’d started to whittle them down, and I saw – in my Mum’s eyes – a little bit of sadness for the passing of my childhood when I wistfully mumbled that ‘I don’t think I need to get Whizzer and Chips any more…’. I was still getting Buster at this stage because I loved the artwork of J Edward Oliver (with his ‘Abolish Tuesdays’ campaign and little boxes with handles) and The Eagle was still ‘old’ enough for me to get some enjoyment from the features and scary photo-stories (Doomlord… brrrrr….)

By early 1985, though, I think I was down to just Star Wars Weekly and Doctor Who Monthly, and I’d stopped buying both of those long before the start of the summer holidays. I still - however – have every single comic I ever bought stacked up in cardboard boxes in the loft. Thousands of them. I’d never sell them, but one day I’m going to get them all down and read them in front of the World Of Sport DVD Box Set.

(Anyone know if there’s a World Of Sport DVD Box Set available?)  

And hey, straight from my comics to the telly. What a glorious multi-media experience. ‘Gloria’ was an American comedy, a spin-off from ‘All In The Family’ (the legendary US Archie Bunker sitcom) with Sally Struthers in the title role. And – fantastically – one of my favourite actors Burgess ‘Cut me, Mickey’ Meredith as her veterinary surgery boss…

Needless to say, I’ve no recollection of any of this whatsoever.

Thankfully, I DO remember Fairly Secret Army, as it was bloody brilliant… slap-bang in the middle of Channel 4’s TV comedy golden age, it starred the mighty Geoffrey Palmer as the insane Major Harry Truscott, training a raggle-taggle paramilitary group in a secret rural hideaway in preperation for ‘the balloon going up’…

Written by David ‘Reggie Perrin’ Nobbs, and with Sir Geoffrey essentially reprising his role as Reggie’s brother-in-law Jimmy, it was comedy gold dust, and the absence of a DVD release to date should be filed alongside the Tunguska explosion and the popularity of the Commodore 64 as one of our generation’s great unexplained mysteries.

Meanwhile, ‘Laugh??? I Nearly Paid My Licence Fee’ was one of the rash of vaguely ‘alternative’ sketch shows beginning to dominate the TV schedules around this time… starring Robbie Coltrane and John Sessions, and I think this might have been the first episode of the only series. All I can really remember are Coltrane’s bloodthirsty criminologist (who might have been called Edgar Lustgarden?) delivering hilariously gruesome monologues from his study, and the permanently-angry Orangeman, Mason Boyne…

Oooh… was there a ‘Film Buff Of The Year’ spoof as well, with all the questions being about mucky films? Or is that from Naked Video? So vague… so very vague…

Sunday 28th October 1984

At 5.00 I came home with Ozzie’s Now III, and I played that till tea at 5.30. Then I mucked on till Ever decreasing circles at 7.15, and at 7.45 I had a shower, and had my hair washed and cut. I watched Just good friends at 8.30, and at 9.00 I went to bed.

Ah, the last day of the half-term holidays… never tinged with quite as much melancholy and trepidation as the end of the summer or Christmas break, but still usually a bleak, listless affair. Good to see me attempting to transcend that with possibly THE geekiest mid-1980s day imaginable – throwing myself into Role Playing Game construction, with lashings of ZX Spectrum-related madness to follow. Yay!

For those of you that have missed out (where have you BEEN?) I’d spent the previous few days writing my own Dungeons and Dragons-style RPG for a competition in Warlock, the official Fighting Fantasy magazine. It was called The Moonstone Dungeon, and I’ve still got it! Here’s Room 4…

And for the benefit of those of you without super-human powers of vision (you FEEBLE EARTHLINGS!!!)…

This is a round room crammed with artefacts from every corner of Allansia. On shelves, in cabinets and on tables are items such as Minotaur horns, Unicorn hair, Werewolf fangs, a magnificent golden winged helmet, a sword of skill and a disc-blade which is a deadly weapon manufactured and used by the Brigands of Scorpion swamp.

When you enter he looks up and smiles. ‘Hello travellars.’ he says. ‘Please excuse my strange behaviour. It’s just that I’m not very good at casting spells yet.’

Eat your heart out, JK Rowling. And then ask nicely for a bespoke heart-renewal spell to be cast by Erotharn, my apprentice wizard, learning his trade from the legendary Grand Wizard of Yore.

‘Emove ey meti won’ is, of course, a vaguely backwards corruption of ‘Move ye item now’, and the deadly disc-blade – I’ve just remembered – was based lock, stock and dwarf-built barrel on a ‘Space Spinner’ frisbee that was given away in 1982 with Issue 1 of the relaunched Eagle comic. I’d recently rediscovered it lying around in my bedroom, and – on gloomy afternoons in the garden – was living out my fantasy-based, erm, fantasies by mentally converting it into a Ninja weapon and taking out the evil hobgoblins lurking in the flower beds next to my Dad’s beloved Peony Roses.

Funny how these things come back to me when I start writing this rubbish!

And then, yep – over to Ian ‘Ozzie’ Oswald’s house in the pretty little village of Maltby. Ozzie’s dad was (I think) a maths lecturer at Teesside Polytechnic, and as such his house was filled  with all manner of exciting computers, and the front room looked like Mission Control for the Stokesley branch of NASA. Within nanoseconds of stepping through the front door, I’d been whisked into Ozzie’s bedroom, and the classic ‘Boooo-bip boooo-biddybiddlyboddly’ of the ZX Spectrum loading sequence was in full swing. 

My ’main’ Christmas present was always agreed well in advance, and it was now open knowledge that, in eight weeks time, I’d be the proud owner of my own Sinclair ZX Spectrum 48K. I literally couldn’t stop thinking about it, had been counting down the ’sleeps’ for months (only 57 left!) and – if made some kind of ultra-geeky Faustian offer by the Prince of Darkness himself (the Devil, not Simon Bates) - I’d have happily sold my mortal soul for the chance to spend the rest of eternity playing Jet Set Willy and Manic Miner.

Two random memories from this day…

1. We listened to ‘Now That’s What I Call Music 3′ while we were playing on the Spectrum, and – as we were getting stuck into a strange, aquatic game called ‘Scuba Dive’, the Howard Jones song ‘Pearl In The Shell’ suddenly parped out of Ozzie’s bedroom stereo. Which made us both laugh a little bit too long to be entirely comfortable.

2. In the middle of our Jet Set Willy marathon, Ozzie’s little sister Joan – who was still at Levendale Primary School – popped in to see what all the noise was about, and clearly thought we were the geekiest, saddest individuals she’d ever encountered. It’s the only time I’ve ever seen a five-year-old girl actually roll her eyes in despair. But, hey – we were about to perform a Quirkafleeg!!!

And yes, I borrowed Now 3 and brought it home. On cassette, naturally, so while my Mum was cutting my hair (on a dining room chair in front of Antiques Roadshow) we listened to Smalltown Boy, It’s Raining Men and Free Nelson Mandela. I had no idea who Nelson Mandela was or why he’d spent ‘25 years in captivit-eee’, but if his release had been sanctioned by the compilers of Now That’s What I Call Music 3, then I was prepared to fight for it all the way.  

I was still pondering on the intricacies of this delicate political situation when my Dad said ‘Turn that bloody rubbish off, Just Good Friends is starting soon’, thus putting off South African reform for a further 35 minutes. And I still think of Just Good Friends as one of the ultimate ‘Sunday night before school’ programmes, because it always had one last joke AFTER the end of the final credits… the VERY LAST second of fun that it was possible to squeeze out of the weekend’s activities.

Saturday 27th October 1984

Got up at 9.30 and at 10.30 I went to Doug’s. Then we came back to my house, got my trunks, and at 11.30 Doug’s mam came and took us to the baths. When we came out of the baths we got some sweets, then at 2.00 I came home and had dinner.

At 2.45 I went to Doug’s and we took the stone out of the van, then went to the mud track. Doug got a flat tyre so we went to Yarm cycles and pumped it up. At 5.45 I came home and watched the Late Late Breakfast show, and at 7.00 I watched Cannon and Ball.

At 7.45 I watched Punchlines, at 8.15 I watched 3-2-1, and at 8.45 I watched Wogan interview Kevin Turvey/Rik/Rik Mayall.

After that I typed the RPG, and at 11.25 I went to bed but turned the clocks back so really I went to bed at 10.25. But then again, you’re not supposed to turn them forward till 2.00am tomorrow. But who’d be awake then? Not me for a start!!!!

Yay! The ideal cure for an upset stomach… erm, an hour’s worth of swimming in Thornaby baths and a bloody big bag of sweets on the way home. I remember Doug’s mother, a flame-haired thirtysomething Australian woman, being slightly taken aback when my Mum revealed that I’d ‘been sick’ before bedtime the previous night.

‘What, you mean actually VOMITED?!?!’ she asked, in a broad Australian twang* ’Are you SURE you should be going swimming?’ But I was made of sterner stuff, and it would take more than a dicky tummy to deter me from arsing around down the deep end with my best mate. Although I came close to a repeat performance when I emerged from the depths with a second-hand piece of elastoplast (complete with vague yellow blotch in the middle) stuck to my forehead.

*She must have been the only Australian in the world who wouldn’t have used the word ‘chundered’ in this situation. That’s what living in Yarm does to people. Booooo!

And then home with a bag of aniseed balls, bought for pennies in the very old-fashioned sweet shop across the main road from Thornaby baths. The smiley old dear behind the counter had clearly been running this deliciously gloomy enclave for several centuries, and still got a delightful thrill from scooping ‘a quarter of Black Jacks’ from a gigantic glass jar into a crumpled white paper bag, handing it over to the 65.3% of her kiddie customers that sported spiky wet hair, soggy towels under their arms and a lingering, overwhelming stench of stale chlorine.

The ’stone out of the van’ was a little favour to Doug’s dad, who - as I cycled up the driveway – was parking his Ford Transit in front of the living room window and  preparing to unload (I think) a huge quantity of stone cladding, intended for the back of the house. ‘That was well timed,’ he beamed, as Doug came pottering around from the back*. Good job I’d had a bag of aniseed balls, I spent the next 20 minutes fired up by the usual post-Thornaby sugar rush, and only hit the comedown when we got to the mud track.

*Doug’s house, it’s just struck me, was one of those strange residences where the front door - y’know, the most accessible one that faces the road – was NEVER used. The first time I went to Doug’s house, on his 11th birthday in October 1983, he was with me, and he explained that the entire family came and went via the kitchen door round the back, and so – on future visits – that was the one to aim for. Looking back, I’m not even sure if the front door was real, or if it was just painted on the front of the stone cladding to keep up appearances.

And yes, Doug’s bike tyre! As my mother would no doubt say, ‘flat as a fart’ (a phrase that gets applied equally in our household to tyres, singing voices and tonic water). By the time we reached the mud track it was flopping around like a soggy pancake, so we wheeled his BMX along West Street to Yarm Cycles, where the kindly owner rolled his eyes and lent us a grubby, ancient bicycle pump as a temporary measure.

What I don’t mention in my diary is that we’d already made a more drastic attempt at re-inflation at the old petrol station at the top of Yarm High Street. Doug was actually fixing the nozzle of the air machine to his bike wheel when a red-faced man in grubby overalls came charging out of the cabin and shouted a word I’d only ever seen before in comic strips… ‘S-T-O-O-O-O-O-P-P-P-P!!!!!’

‘Eh?’ said Doug, who’d clearly done this a thousand times before.

‘You can’t blow up bike tyres with one of those!’ said Garagey Man, tearing the nozzle from Doug’s hand and hooking the tube back to its holster on the side of the machine. ’It’ll go up like a bloody balloon in your face. Have you ever seen anyone who’s been caught in the face by an exploding bike tyre? I have, and believe you me, it’s not a pretty sight…’  

‘Have you shite,’ muttered Doug under his breath as we slinked away. ‘I bet it’s a prettier sight than him,’ I mumbled, sympathetically. These were the days, of course, when petrol stations (or ‘garages’ as everyone just called them back then) WEREN’T generally owned by the petrol companies themselves. Nowadays, your average filling station is a slick mini-supermarket owned by BP or Shell, teeming with middle-management f**kwits who leave their Range Rovers parked idly at Pump 6 before embarking on their entire weekly shop while an angry queue of traffic mounts up behind their stationary knobmobile.

In 1984, most petrol stations were owned by 45-year-old blokes who liked messing about with cars. The forecourts usually had a couple of clapped out Ford Cortinas dotted around their outskirts (with the gearboxes on the floor nearby), and the petrol pumps themselves were archaic, off-white 1960s machines with painted white digits on a rolling black wheel, a far cry from the slick, self-service, computerised machines of today.

You’d park up and wait for the owner to emerge from his grotty hut. ‘How much?’ he’d grunt, wiping oil from his hands with the back page of last night’s Evening Gazette Late Final. ‘Ten pounds, please,’ you’d reply, and he’d unhinge the nozzle and FILL YOUR CAR UP HIMSELF, because clearly petrol pumps were complex, specialist bits of machinery not suitable for use by the general public. He’d then pump £10.02 of petrol into your car, swear softly under his breath as though he didn’t mean it, and lure you back into the cabin to WRITE OUT A CHEQUE (from a chequebook no doubt encased in a musty leather wallet). You might, if were lucky, be able to buy an oil-stained packet of Polos or some boiled sweets. No other food, though. No fizzy drinks. No newspapers or magazines. No cigarettes, Rizla papers and Monster Munch. If you wanted that sort of thing, you could go to bloody Presto like everybody else, couldn’t you?

(The last time I saw a non-self-service petrol station was in Dorset in 1996, when I pulled up, got out of the car, and was slightly taken aback when a very old man in a flat cap emerged to ‘fill her up’ for me. Brilliant, though. I wonder if there are any left at all, anywhere?)

And then back home for tea and telly, although I’m surprised that I didn’t race back to catch The Tripods. Still, not to worry – my hero Rik Mayall was on Wogan! In this strange, mid-80s period, Michael Parkinson’s traditional Saturday night BBC1 chat show had been take over by Uncle Terry, but the format was pretty much the same. Rik was, of course, my favourite character in The Young Ones, and was shrouded in mystique because I’d never actually seen him out of character. So this was something of a revelation for me…

(Pesky Youtube won’t let me embed these films in the blog, so just go to the ‘Watch On Youtube’ option)

His in-character stand-up is tremendous, isnt it? And what a great, revelatory interview. Really inspiring stuff for the 11-year-old me, and I think the funny little diatribe at the end of my diary entry is a little homage to his Young Ones character. Bloody heck, eh kids?