Saturday 22nd August 1984
Woke up at 9.15 and got up at 9.20. At 9.25 I watched Charlie Brown, then I lazed around till 11.45, when I started to map Caverns of the Snow Witch. At 12.15 I had dinner, then I sorted out some of the sideboard and finished mapping COTSW.
After that, Dad and I went and picked some brambles, and when we got back we had tea. At 5.15 I watched Whose Baby, then I played football till 7.00, when Dad and I walked the dogs around the field. When we came back at 7.45 I had a shower and at 8.10 I watched Tommorow’s World at Large.
Went to bed at 9.00.
I loved and still love those old 1960s and 70s Charlie Brown cartoons. The delicious air of melancholy, the simple and gorgeous animation, and Vince Guaraldi’s amazingly wistful jazz piano soundtracks. Although I’ve never been a big jumper-wearer and I have more hair than I know what to do with, I’ve always seen a bit of myself in Charlie Brown…
Just like Charlie, I’m easily discouraged, hopeless at sport, awkward with women and own a dog that’s considerably more popular and self-assured than I am.
I was probably all set for another afternoon racing around with Doug… until I watched Charlie Brown, and a (security) blanket of introspective depression settled over me for the rest of the day. Instead, I decided to help my Mum sort out the sideboard, which was always an interesting task.
The sideboard had been (I think) a wedding present for my parents back in 1966, and was an enormous, limousine-sized mahogany block that occupied an entire wall of our dining room. As far as I can remember it consisted of three main bits…
1. Three small drawers on the left hand side. The top one contained nice, practical stuff in little compartments… pens, pencils, Pritt Stick, scissors, wraps of heroin, drawing pins and Blu-Tack. One of the above items is a fib, so use your still and judgement to spot the cheeky interloper… (Correct! My Dad wouldn’t have Blu-Tack in the house). The middle one was full of household paperwork – bills, bills, bills, bills in red writing, and more bills. And the bottom one contained the family photo collection, all ‘sent off for’ and housed in nifty paper wallets that looked like this…
2. A huge middle section, fronted by two creaky wooden doors, and containing two shelves upon which was stuffed all of my mother’s knitting gear (including enough unfinished Arran sweaters to keep the entire Hebridean fishing community going all winter) and a collection of Woman’s Own magazines dating from 1978 onwards.
(Are these magazines still going? I remember Woman’s Own, Woman, and the delightfully tweedy Woman’s Weekly, which was considerably more old-fashioned than the others and seemed to contain endless needlepoint patterns and recipes for mouth-watering apricot crumble. Have they all been washed away by the Heat Magazine revolution, or are a few of them still clinging onto the celebrity wreckage?)
3. A cupboard on the right containing my parent’s booze collection. At any one time, this would undoubtedly play host to…
a) A bottle of Teacher’s whiskey (or possibly Glenfiddich, if you were fortunate enough to look within three weeks of one of my parents’ birthdays)
b) A bottle of Gordon’s gin (with some Schweppes Slimline Tonic somewhere nearby)
c) A bottle of QC Cream, untouched since December 28th the previous year, and likely to remain equally untroubled until around 4.30pm the following Christmas Eve.
d) A bottle of Blue Nun that had been given to my Mum by her workmates on her 30th birthday in 1971, and remained unsullied ever since.
e) At least seven bottles of my Dad’s home-made wine, which came in two distinctive varieties – Haemophiliac Red or Chronic Anemia White. Both of these were purchased in carboard boxes from a backstreet shop in Stockton, mixed with a bloody big stick in a black plastic vat in the kitchen (a vat that is now stuck in my loft, filled with an infinitely nicer-tasting collection of old NMEs) and then left to fester in the airing cupboard with a dirty tea-towel over the top for anything up to six months, by which time the resulting fumes had cleared a vat-sized hole in the Earth’s Exosphere, approximately 400 km above my parents’ bedroom cupboard.
‘Bloody gorgeous, that…’ my Dad would say, gingerly sipping the stuff with a face-crumpling grimace that made him look like a gruesome cross between Les Dawson and Barry Stuart-Hargreaves from Hi-De-Hi. ‘I don’t know why people bother going to pubs when you can make stuff like this for next to nothing in the kitchen…’
Three hours later, he’d invariably be propping up the bar of the Cross Keys in Yarm High Street, taking hearty glugs on a pint of John Smiths’ Best Bitter while intermittantly scrubbing his tongue with carbolic. Incidentally, in writing all of the above, I can actually distinctly bring to mind the beautiful waft that used to emanate from our sideboard… a gorgeous, evocative haze of beeswax, furniture polish, wood and Gordon’s gin. It must be ten years since I even saw that bloody sideboard, but its distinctive aroma still lingers on in a secluded corner of my brain. Smells are definitely the most evocative of the senses.
Caverns of the Snow Witch was another Fighting Fantasy book, this time pitching me headlong into the Crystal Caves of the Icefinger Mountains, where the titular witch herself was indulging in some vaguely nasty faffing around with Hill Trolls, Goblins and Ice Giants. Good to knock off a bit of intrepid evil-foiling before heading out to…
BRAMBLE PICKING!!!
Fantastic. This was a major family tradition, and an experience tinged with both joy and sadness. Joy because I LOVED it. Me, my Mum, my Dad and whichever dogs we had would ALWAYS troop out into the fields and woods around our house and fill up countless Presto carrier bags with piles and piles and piles of ripe, gorgeous blackberries. We walked for miles, and picked thousands of them… our arms would be covered in scratches, our fingers stained purple with the juice, and the sun would hammer down on the backs of our necks as we laughed, joked and said ‘OOYAZ!’ in glorious, family harmony. And then, for weeks afterwards, my Mum would bake the most amazing bramble pies, which we’d drown in Carnation evaporated milk before letting the whole, gorgeous concoction explode upon our gasping taste buds.
And sadness because I knew, just KNEW that if bramble-picking season had arrived, then undoubtedly the summer was reaching its’ latter stages. The sun still shone during the day, but the nights were darker and just a fraction chillier, the crops had all been gathered and the fields were standing lifeless and dry, and the rustling spectres of autumn were gathering in the woodland. The transition from summer to autumn is such a gloriously melancholy time of year… the Charlie Brown and Snoopy of nature’s drifting cycle.
Still, there was always Tomorrow’s World at Large, although I’m not altogether certain how this differed from our regular Tomorrow’s World instalments. Was it a Radio 1-style roadshow, with Judith Hann and Kieren Prendeville kicking inflatable football-sized representations of molecular structure into a roaring, half-pissed crowd on the beach at Lytham St Annes?
Wiffle Lever To Full! 
Woman, Woman’s Own, and Woman’s Weekly are all still around, and there are several other similar magazines which seem to have mostly the same format and content and to be aimed at an identical market. After a quick bit of research, here’s some of the titles.
There’s Bella, Best, The People’s Friend, Look, Now, Love It!, My Weekly, That’s Life!, New!, Real People, Take A Break, Pick Me Up, Full House and Reveal.
They’re possibly a little less middle class and reserved looking than the cover reproduced above, and are all similarly glossy, with the standard mix of real life stories, fiction, interviews, fashion, make up, and celebrity gossip. To that extent, there might have been some influence from the likes of Heat there. Some have subsidiary titles, like Woman’s Weekly Fiction, Take A Break’s Fiction Feast, and Take A Break’s Fate And Fortune, which seems to be about astrology, readings and the like. The People’s Friend was always supposed to be the staid one, wasn’t it? I think that might mainly be fiction.