Thursday 24th May 1984
Off school again so I stayed in bed till 9.30. When I got up I got the cards out and played patientce and clock, then I went outside on the bike. When I came in I drew some pictures, and at 12.00 I had dinner.
After dinner I played patientce all afternoon, then at 3.30 I went down to Huggy’s house with Doug. We mucked about on a ramp outside, then at 5.45 I had tea straight after coming home.
When I’d done that I played on a ramp outside, then came in at 8.5 to watch Porridge. That was geedy, then at 8.35 I watched We got it made. Went to bed at 9.00 and read till 10.00.
Uuuuuurgh! Ugh! Aaaaaaaaargh! Woe is me! Oh, will this foul malady ever leave me in peace? Aaaaaargh! I’m so ill!
(And so on, and so on, all delivered in a feeble, moany voice as I half-heartedly pushed porridge around a Basil Brush cereal bowl and sneakily pressed myself against the front room radiator to get my temperature up)
This last trick was something I’d learnt from my early 1980s bible… The Whizzkid’s Handbook, by Peter Eldin. An amazing paperback treasure trove of japes, wheezes, dodges and skives passed down from generation to generation of grubby oiks like me, it must have sold forty squillion copies via school Book Clubs alone.
I assume everyone’s school had some sort of Book Club? Every month we’d be presented with a new brochure of potential titles, and could – with our parents’ consent – tick a few boxes on the order form and bring our pennies in to pay for them the following day. Within the week, an exciting-looking box of spanking new paperbacks would appear in Mrs Keasey’s cupboard, and we’d vanish into the library for the rest of the morning and pretend to read them. When in actual fact we were pushing Blu-Tack up Christopher Herbert’s nose and making disgusting pencil additions to the ‘human reproduction’ diagrams in the Children’s Encyclopaedia (before rubbing them out again with the Blu-Tack… we weren’t completely stupid)
Books that I can remember DEFINITELY buying from Levendale Book Club…
1. The Secret Passage by Nina Bawden
2. You Can Do The Cube by Patrick Bossert
3. The Whizzkid’s Handbook by Peter Eldin
4. Skool Graffiti by Peter Eldin (he must have been coining it in!)
5. The Puffin Book of Flags by JCG George
6. The Snow Kitten by Nina Warner Hooke
7. Gobbolino The Witches Cat by Ursula Moray Williams
8. Super Gran by Forrest Wilson (the wee Scunner)
9. Super Gran Rules OK! by Forrest Wilson (nice try, but you’ll never be able to match the Eldin millions)
10. The Crack-a-Joke Book
Throughout 1981, it was impossible to move more than four feet in any direction at Levendale Primary School without stumbling across a copy of The Crack-a-Joke Book. It’s basically a collection of the most fantastically groanworthy (clean) jokes in existance, collated after endless appeals on local radio stations and with a lovely, warm-hearted foreward by Tim Brooke-Taylor. And all proceeds went to early 80s charity-of-choice Oxfam, who must have raked in the gross national product of Venezuela from our class alone.
Q: What do you call an Arabian diary farmer?
A: A milk sheik.
Q: What did the mayonnaise say to the fridge?
A: Close the door, I’m dressing.
Q: What’s than raining cats and dogs?
A: Hailing taxis.
Genius! I’ll be reading this for the rest of the day now. That and the Whizzkid’s Handbook, which contains a five-page article about improving your memory skills, all centred around the reasons why elephants don’t like tomato soup (it stains their trunks, it reminds them of blood, they prefer oxtail etc). You really had to be there.
And even I cannot BELIEVE that after two days off school ‘ill’, I was allowed out at 3.30pm to arse around with Doug and Paul ‘Huggy’ Huggins, making ramps for our bikes. Mother, you are an UNBELIEVABLY soft touch. I can only assume that at 3.29pm on the dot I dragged myself away from the radiator, polished off a packet of Golden Wonder crisps (smoky bacon flavour) and a Wagon Wheel, and said ‘Actually, I’m starting to feel a bit better now…’
And my mother will have reluctantly let me go out to play rather than risk an argument in the middle of Sons and Daughters…
Only time will tell whether I would suffer an extraordinary relapse the following morning to enable me to merge my ‘illness’ seamlessly into our forthcoming half-term holiday. ‘Gosh, just when I was starting to feel well again… I probably tried to do too much last night…’ etc. When it came to emotional manipulation, my 11-year-old self was easily up there with Niccolò Machiavelli and Old Man Steptoe.
How come I could spell ‘patience’ on the 23rd May, but not on the 24th? I must have been ill or something… Uuuuuurgh! Ugh! Aaaaaaaaargh… oh, woe is me…
Wiffle Lever To Full! 
We certainly had a book club at our school – I seem to recall that it was called the Chip Book Club, and Chip was a cartoon badger. You got a free book mark if you were a member.
The only books that I can ever remember getting from it were: The Ha-Ha Bonk Book (a joke book, not a sex manual), Peter Davison’s Book of Alien Planets and an I-Spy Cars book.
I got wrong for the I-Spy Cars book, as my Mam had been led to believe that I was saving up for a Thomas the Tank Engine book to add to my collection. In a very rare act of defiance I spent the accumulated tokens on the I-Spy book instead and ended up getting told off. I wouldn’t care, but I never bothered to look at the I-Spy book ever again.
Our house had the Rubik’s Cube book pictures above too, although I think that it belonged to my Dad who was trying to master it. And never did to the best of my knowledge.