Monday 20th February 1984
Woke up at 9.15 but went to sleep, and woke up again at 10.25. At 10.30 I got up and Doug rang, then I got some K9 mags and went down to Doug’s. We put the panel on K9’s side, then I made some lettering and Doug cut it out, then when we had stuck it onto K9 We came back to my house and had dinner.
After dinner we went back to Doug’s and finished the panel. Then I came back for a hand drill but it was in the car, so I went back to Doug’s. We made some antennae out of wire, Then put them on the head and finished the panels. Then made a screen.
At 3.45 I came home and had tea, then I looked at the Blackpool brochure. After that I wrote some of the Jewel and I played on the videopac when I got sick of writing. 9.30 Went in the bath and went to bed.
What better way to spend our half term holiday than polishing off our home-made full-size wooden replica of K9? Except he didn’t need polishing, he just needed a lick of paint. Yes, at this stage our K9 was still made of bare, unadorned wood – every panel being a different shade and texture because he was constructed entirely from left-over bits of timber from Doug’s Dad’s rabbit-hutch building business.
Still, let’s have a look at what we were working towards…
So, the ‘lettering’ was the ‘K-9’ on his side, which I drew with a blunt pencil onto a tatty square of Balsa wood before handing it over to Doug to ‘cut it out’, giving him sole responsibility for the Stanley knife beacause otherwise I was likely to remove a) one of my fingers b) one of Doug’s fingers, or c) most importantly, a crucial part of K9’s lettering.
The antenna are on the top of his head, and we made them out of wire mesh half-inched from a semi-completed rabbit hutch, and a chunk of cardboard cut from an old Tudor Crisps box at the back of the garage. Obviously back in 1977, the original Doctor Who producers would have given their right arms to be blessed with this kind of budget.
The ‘screen’ that we made is on the other side of K9… it’s just an extra piece of square panelling that resembles a portable Grundig TV screen stuck on the poor dog’s flank, presumably so that the Doctor – while out and about battling Daleks in the dusty wastelands of Skaro – never needs to miss Pebble Mill At One or Crown Court.
I love the fact that, in the midst of a full day working in Doug’s garage, we ‘came back to my house and had dinner’. I’m assuming from this that Doug’s parents were out of the house, and so to avoid the unimaginable horrors of (gasp!) ACTUALLY PREPARING FOOD FOR OURSELVES, we walked half a mile back to my house and whined at my poor mother until she relented and made us one of three potential dinners…
Dinner No 1: Beans-on-toast (two slices of blindingly white Mother’s Pride bread, toasted under an industrial-sized grill, covered in lashings of Stork SB and coated in half a tin of luridly orange Heinz Beans)
Dinner No 2: Cheese-on-toast (two slices of blindingly white Mother’s Pride bread, toasted under an industrial-sized grill then covered in thick lunks of luridly orange cheddar cheese from Fine Fare, and re-grilled to the temperature of volcanic magmata before being sliced in half, to serve)
Dinner No 3: Bacon sandwich (two slices two slices of blindingly white Mother’s Pride bread covered in lashings of Stork SB and filled with four rashers of streaky bacon from Newbould’s the Butcher before being quartered and coated in luridly red Heinz tomato ketchup).
Any of these options would then be followed by two of what my parents still refer to as ‘pikelets’, however what they’re actually talking about are these…
Crumpets. CRUMPETS. Staple of 457 Carry On jokes (source: Gov’t ‘Crumpet Misuse in British Comedy’ White Paper 1979) and a delicious comestible that – thanks to Fischer family tradition – I utterly misnamed until the age of 27. Pikelets do exist of course, but they look like this…
I’ve never eaten one of these in my life. Case dismissed, M’Lud. (Cue ‘Distant Hills’ theme closing theme, and the interminable wait until Children’s ITV starterd…)
You’ll note that in 1984 I was still using traditional Northern mealtime references. ‘Dinner’ was a modest meal taken between 12-1pm, and is what the rest of the civilised Western world refers to as ‘lunch’. And ‘Tea’ was the main meal of the day, the traditional ‘meat and two veg’ taken between 5-6pm, and this is what the rest of the civilised Western world refers to as ‘dinner”.
At some point in my life, despite never having lived outside Teesside for any length of time, I revised my policies and fell meekly in line with the 1986 United Nations Agreement On Proper Names For Mealtimes, Like. I’m not sure when this happened, but I can offer two potential explanations…
a) I am a ruthless social climber who thinks nothing of adopting middle-class affectations in order to further his career prospects.
b) My live-in girlfriend is from the South-West, and I just fall in with what she says for the sake of a quiet life.
It’s one or the other. You be the judge (Sorcha, you’re forbidden from commenting on this)
Just in case you were worried about the continuing safety of our fingers, the ‘hand drill’ we were hunting for wasn’t one of these…
It was one of these…
And blimey, another bath only eight days after my previous soaking! My Dad must have been working some serious overtime to permit such wanton abuse of the immersion heater.
Wiffle Lever To Full! 
Bob, I’m staggered that a fellow northerner has fallen into the trap of naming “dinner” and “tea” as “lunch” and “dinner”, although understand the reason as to how policy “b)” was decided upon! If you are quizzed on the subject again, point out that you didn’t have “Lunch Ladies” force-feeding you boiled cabbage when you were at school!
Actually, I don’t think that the dinner/tea meal-naming convention is particularly a northern foible. As you suggest, I suspect that it is more class-based.