Extracts from Bob’s 1984 Diary… Volume 57

February 26, 2009 at 12:55 am · Filed under Bob's Bits And Bobs

Sunday 26th February 1984

Woke up at 9.15 and got up at 10.15. I started to do some more of the Doctor Who program but Doug rang and I went to his house. We touched up K9 and painted the antennae then I came home and Doug caught up with me.

At my house we did some of the Doctor Who program, then we had a few games and after that we went upstairs and mucked about. When we came downstairs we took Poggy Doggy for a walk past the woods and down Private Lane. Then we came back at about 5.20 and went inside until 5.30 When Doug went home.

At 5.45 I had tea and after tea I wrote some of the Doctor Who program but it all crashed so I switched it off for a while. At 7.15 I watched One by One, at 8.5 I wrote my diary and at 8.35 I watched Ever decreasing circles. At 9.05 I had a bath, at 9.20 I watched That’s life and at 10.10 I went to bed.

K9 needed a lot of touching up, didn’t he? There must have been streaks of grey paint all over the walls in Doug’s house.

Going ‘down Private Lane’, although it sounds like a depraved euphemism, was all above board. Well, sort of. Walking down the main road, past my house and away in the opposite direction from Doug’s house and Yarm High Street, we entered a rural idyll. My garden backed onto a huge expanse of farmers’ fields (belonging to Mr Smith, our next-door neighbour’s burly, bearded Geoff Capes-lookalike son) and amongst those were dotted sproadic clumps of woodland.

Private Lane snaked from the main road into one of these copses. A handful of houses were dotted around its edge, but they didn’t interest us. We just wanted to be in the woods, which held two main attractions for us. Firstly, a regular selection of torn-up pages from Razzle magazine, and secondly THE MOST SENSATIONAL COLLECTION OF CONKER TREES IN THE WORLD.

Obviously February’s not an ideal time to be conkering, so clearly we’d taken Poggy Doggy with us to snuffle out some prime examples of mid-1980s smut from under the bushes. Although there were probably the mouldering remains of last year’s harvest still dotted around the woodland floor. I’m talking about both smut and conkers now, by the way.

As the year progressed, we spent increasing number of afternoons clambering around these woods, building dens and tarzies and trying to ride up the trees on our bikes.  A dense, thick area of North Yorkshire woodland is still my favourite lump of natural environment, with only the upland Arctic tundra coming a rather distant second.

I’m also quite proud of the fact that my generation of 11-year-olds were able to program computers. Not just drag a few windows around the screen, but actually start from scratch and CODE. After fourteen months of ZX81 ownership I was becoming rather a dab hand at programming, and although I was by no means the best in the world (that was Jason Robson in the year below me) I was definitely up for making a few Daleks roam around the portable TV screen, even if they did look like this…

O—o
M
[O}—
[OO]
xxxx 

Are you watching, Jason Robson? Are you? ARE YOU???

No surprise that ‘it all crashed’ though. When it came to solid, dependable reliability, the ZX81 was up there with the Large Hadron Collider and Pete Doherty. And a ZX81 crash was far more permanent than your average 2009 PC wobbly. As ‘saving’ any of my work in progress generally required faffing around with a portable tape recorder (covered in streaks of grey paint) for anything up to 40 minutes, I tended not to bother. 

Amidst such early Eighties adversity were great scientific temperaments cultivated. Not mine, I hasten to add, I’ve got all the cool, collected patience of a seventh birthday party. But it wouldn’t surprise me at all if, at the centre of the world’s largest high-energy particle accelerator 175 metres beneath the streets of Geneva, is a little black computer with plastic keys and a 16K rampack.

And Pete Doherty.

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