To Put Away Childish Things #29

I've been reading Dave Gorman's latest, Dave Gorman vs The Rest of the World, in which we get to read about Dave playing games that range from Cribbage to Cluedo, Table Tennis to Poker via a whole lot of games that you have almost certainly never heard of.

I know, as subjects for a book it sounds pretty tedious. It isn't. It has his usual good-natured silliness to it and is a diverting, if slight read.

I mention it because some of the games he's played reminded me of things I haven't mentioned yet in this series of posts - the most recent one being Monopoly. I'll save Monopoly for another day though and talk about one he hasn't played (so far anyway, I'm only just past half way through) - Dungeons and Dragons.

There were five of us - my Brother and his wife, my mate and his wife and me. (That kind of "there ought to be six" lopsidedness seems a common enough feature of my life but let's not get self-pitying about it.)

We were not what you would call hard core D&D addicts. We only met to play occasionally and we didn't get dressed up as elves or dwarves or wizards or anything. That would have been silly. On reflection though probably not much sillier than my mate, a solidly built and rather tall chap, playing a regular character called "Udup the Dwarf"*.

In the list of games I have played D&D has a unique position. There are other role playing games around which are probably much the same but I haven't played them. No, among the games I've actually played D&D is the only one I know where it's massively more fun for the referee than for any other player.

The way we played it was that one of us would labour for weeks creating a scenario, making maps of an imaginary temple or city or country - sometimes really detailed maps - running through "if they do this, I'll do that" what-ifs, basically creating a whole world. Then the others would come round, preferably carrying beer. We'd clear a table, lay down whatever information the characters were supposed to know and spend an evening or more rolling multi-sided dice, discussing what to do next, working our way around this new world.

And the referee, known as the Dungeon Master, got to be God of his own little world. He could role dice in secret behind a screen, nod knowingly and then tell you that the cavern you have so blithely entered contains half a dozen goblins and a troll and what are you intending to do about it?

He had rules that he was supposed to stick to but I know that whenever I was Dungeon Master I pretty much ignored them. My notes (available to the other players in retrospect) might show that you only get eaten by a dragon if I manage to role a one on the icosahedral die but hey, if I want you to be eaten by a dragon you can be sure I'm claiming that I rolled a one.

It was a phase we went through that didn't last long because fundamentally, as gaming experiences go, it has some problems. The objectives can be rather ill-defined. Strategy is more or less non-existent as what you are doing, in effect, is participating in a collaborative effort to write a story. If your character is killed early on all you can do is wander round the house and go through the Dungeon Master's record collection while the others carry on playing. It is, as I said, much more fun to create and control the game than to inhabit it. 

In many ways it's probably debatable whether it ought to be defined as a game at all. 

So, as a gaming experience it leaves a bit to be desired but as a social experience** it was pretty good. Especially with beer.

* Udup, he explained was so-named because everybody knows that any self-respecting dwarf walks around with his hood up.

**I did once spend some time developing a playable solo version, which shows what a truly sad individual  I can be when I put my mind to it.

That alley, that street, that school.

The introduction to my book, Anyone Can Do It, includes the following passage.

We used to live in quite a large house, or more precisely in half of quite a large house. At some stage in its history it had been split into two dwellings by the simple method of building a wall down the middle. Our half of it opened onto a cul-de-sac that ran along the side of the house and led to a narrow pedestrian path that in turn led to another road. I was about four or five years old when my parents bought me a bicycle. Once I had reached the stage of bravery where I was prepared to leave the confines of my own garden I would ride the bike up to the closed end of the cul-de-sac and along the path where I would dismount and peer out into the other road. I would stay there until I saw anyone coming and then remount and ride back to my home as if the devil himself were an inch behind my wheels.

It was this area that I went for a walk around a couple of days ago and I thought you might like a couple of pictures.

So, first of all, here is that narrow pedestrian path, surprisingly unchanged from the way I remember it more than forty years ago.

And this is the street where our house once stood. Unlike the path it is very different now. The right hand side, with the tree, is similar to the way it was but the left, where the houses are visible, was once a wall topped by a fence with a gate about half way down. Behind that wall was our garden and at the far end of the garden stood our house. Very different.

And as a final bonus, I mentioned that my infant school had been demolished. The other half of the school, the junior school is still there, though who knows how long it will remain. Here is a photograph of it - Daisy Bank Junior School.

To Put Away Childish Things #28

Following on from my previous post, the autobiographical one, it occurred to me to mention this. I didn't finish my walk in the street where I used to live , I carried on round back to the school and then followed the route that I always took in the second half of my time at Daisy Bank Infants and Juniors, after we had moved to the address where I have lived for most of my life, at the time when our old house was being demolished and all those new houses built.

The walk took me past a small park where I sometimes played as a child. Recently, because I am about to embark on such a huge change, I have been viewing things as if my eyes are open for the first time in many years and I realised how different the park is now to how I remember it. For a start it's about half the size, a new inner fence having been built many years ago.  Part of what was the park is now just a grassy area although there is still a visible oblong of concrete where the slide used to be. There is still a slide - in the new smaller park - but it's small and spiralled so that kids playing on it can't get any speed up. That wasn't true in my day. Our slide was easily twice the height of the current one and steep and straight so that sliding down you had two choices - use your feet at the bottom to slow yourself down or go flying off the end and scrape elbows and knees on the gravel. That's another difference - no gravel now, just wood chippings and grass.

The current park has a couple of other things on it, modern play things that look to my eye like bizarre devices from Doctor Who. None of the things I played on are still there. There were the swings on which we would go as high as possible, to a higher than horizontal position which put us about twelve feet off the ground. I don't know if health and safety is responsible for their absence nowadays but I do know that our game of getting as high as we could, then - at the apex of the swing letting go and flying through the air to land yards away wasn't terribly safe.

I noticed also that there are no roundabouts there now. We had two, The first was a wooden-sided one with metal bars to hang onto dividing it into pizza-like sections, and a six inch wide running board that helped both to get up some speed and to jump on and off in reckless disregard of life and limb. The second was altogether more dangerous. It was a spiders-web-like circular frame about three feet off the ground. It was more dangerous for two reasons. First it could be made to spin a lot faster with a lot less effort and second, and more important, because you could not only fall off it you could fall through it to the ground below where it was spinning. Or you could dangle your legs through ot even hang upside down with your head inches from the ground.

The roundabouts, like the swings, have been gone for many years now. 

There is still a weird U-shaped contraption that may or may not be a modern version of a see-saw but the actual wooden see-saw that used to be there is also absent. It was never my favourite as it always seemed a bit more boring than the others - or possibly as it needed two to play and, as has been mentioned before, I was a very solitary child.

I'm sure the kids who play their now enjoy their safe good fun but it doesn't look the same to me. It doesn't look the same at all.

Changing Times

In one of my "Childish Things" posts, I talked about my old mechanical typewriter. So it was with a little nostalgic sadness that I read the story today that the last manufacturer of typewriters has ceased production.
Yes, typewriters are officially a thing of the past, consigned to the history books along with 78 rpm records (or even just records), quill pens and penny-farthing bicycles. No more will anyone have to dirty their fingers changing a ribbon, go back and paint over a mistake with correcting fluid, unjam the mechanical arms that have locked because two keys were accidentally hit at the same time. No more will anyone hear the click-clack of the keys, the ker-ching of the end-of-line bell, the whirring ratchet as the carrier is pushed back for the next line.

Apparently there are a few hundred typewriters still available in stock and then that's it. No more new ones to be had. It is a little sad, though I have to admit that I haven't used a typewriter for thirty years or more.

One slightly puzzling aspect of the story is that it says they ceased production in 2009. It seems rather a long interval between the event and the news of the event. Nevertheless another small portion of the present has now become the past.

To Put Away Childish Things: In Memoriam

The purpose of this series of posts is to talk about the things that were important in my childhood that have been forgotten for many years. 

Some of these childish things we put away, others are taken away from us. Very rarely they are given back. I am old enough to have watched Doctor Who right from the start, from the very first appearance of a black and white Tardis standing in a junkyard. I watched it through the good times and the not so good times, from Hartnell to McCoy: and then it was taken away from me because the powers in the BBC no longer wanted to make it.

Of course it came back but that wasn't what I was thinking of when I said that sometimes things are given back. It came back but it wasn't the same. I watch it now but it's bigger and flashier and it isn't the same program. I enjoy it but not for the same reasons that I enjoyed it in the past. In a way it's too adult, too clever and too slick.

But we were given the real Doctor Who, the old Doctor Who back in the form of the Sarah Jane Adventures. All fans of Doctor Who have their own ideas of which of the actors to take the role is best. Usually it's the one they grew up with. For me it wasn't, for me it was Sylvester McCoy who I always felt had some great storylines that wer sometimes let down with weak scripting.

That's by the way though. The interesting thing is that if the question of who was the greatest companion is raised, there's little doubt that it's Sarah Jane Smith. She was different to all the previous companions, more of an equal partner in the adventures, less of a simple foil for the Doctor. She lasted a long time but as is inevitable in the series eventually she wasn't there any more, though she did pop up from time to time with subsequent incarnations of the Doctor.

And then the timelord's own adventures went from our screens. Abandoned by the BBC  apart from one brief attempt to bring it back with a TV movie, it was gone for a long time. The new super-duper all-singing, all-dancing version that we eventually got is pretty good, but somehow it isn't the same.

And then the Sarah Jane Adventures arrived. The Doctor himself was only an infrequent visitor to the series. Sarah Jane was the lead and she, like the Doctor before her, had her companions. It was squarely aimed at children and shown in a children's TV slot. And it was great fun. Much more than the parent program it was the heir to the spirit and style of the original. There were fast-paced episodes with great villains and stories. There were hiding-behind-the-sofa scary bits. There were entertaining companions. It was fun again in a way that Doctor Who hadn't been for a very long time. And there was Sarah Jane Smith.

Elisabeth Sladen walked back into the role as if she had never been away from it. Other actors have cropped uo from time to time reprising their roles - Nicholas Courtney as Brigadeer Lethbridge-Stewart, Katy Manning as Jo Grant for example - but the characters never seem quite the same. Elisabeth Sladen did. The Sarah Jane in the Sarah Jane Adventures was exactly the Sarah Jane we all remembered. We had been given back one of the put-away childish things.

This week Elisabeth Sladen died, aged 65 and with her Sarah Jane Smith died. She was one of the cornerstones of the Doctor Who Universe and she gave us back the old-style Doctor Who. Gave us all back a slice of our childhoods. It won't be the same Universe without her.

To Put Away Childish Things #26

Well... not really, but it's as good a title as any for the post.

Ever since I was a small child, and for reasons long forgotten, there has been a standing family joke repeated so often it's almost become a conditioned reflex. Whenever my Dad asked me what I wanted for Christmas or my Birthday or whatever, I have always replied, "Can I have a penguin?"

Yesterday my brother and his wife visited and, because I am now going to be working overseas, brought a mascot for me. 

And here he is, relaxing in his favourite room in glorious 3D. (And he's in glorious 3D to publicise the fact that my other blog, The World Through A Lens, will soon have a whole series of these 3D pictures.)

Apologies if you are one of the small number of people who can't see what are technically known as "stereoscopic free-viewing images".

Look at a point somewhere in the middle of the picture, allow your eyes to become unfocussed so that the two halves seem to slide towards each other, eventually they should merge giving you the 3D image of my new friend.

You can click on the image to get it on the screen without the rest of the post. You can (probably) adjust the size with Ctrl + and Ctrl -.

To Put Away Childish Things #25

If this entry becomes gradually more rambling and incoherent then the reason may be that a more appropriate title would be "To put away not so childish things and then pick them up again much later and drink them."

Bit of a mouthful though so I stuck with the more generic version.

See? Rambling and incoherent already and I've hardly begun.

Those of you who are following the plot will realise that I am planning to leave the country and as a preface to that it's necessary to get the house ready for sale, and as a preface to THAT it's necessary to clear out an awful lot of stuff accumulated over my lifetime. 

Part of today's task was to tackle some of the stuff in the loft. In one corner of the loft there are barrels, demijohns and all the related paraphernalia of home brewing and home wine making. That was no great surprise. I knew it was there. What was a surprise was the opposite corner where, behind some boxes, I discovered a rack with half a dozen bottles of home made wine. 

I used to be quite the dab hand at making both beer and wine. With beer I made lagers, bitters, stouts, pale ales and even had a go at a rather nice honey beer. It's wine that gets really creative though, wine that let's you stretch your imagination.

Oh I started with grapes. It seemed the right place to begin. Over the years that I was doing it I made wine from elderberries an oranges, carrots and plums, apples and dandelions, gooseberries and parsnips, pea-pods and rhubarb. It's possible to make wine, admittedly not always palatable, out of almost anything that's not actually poisonous. I even made some out of a tropical fruit juice blend sold as Um Bongo.

The thing is though that I last made any wine about thirty years ago, so the bottles I've found in the loft have been there, gathering dust for at least that long. There are a couple labelled as "carrot", a couple labelled as "orange" and a couple of mystery bottles with no labels at all.

It's to one of the unlabelled ones that I owe my gradually deteriorating faculties this evening. Having found them it seemed silly not to open one and check out if it was still drinkable. It is. Very drinkable. A very palatable dry white. Parsnip, if I'm not mistaken. I had forgotten just how potent I made my wines. It tastes more like drinking strong spirits but it's very nice for all that. I expect it will give me a headache tomorrow

And now, I shall go and pour another glass, pop on the DVD - I am watching all of the episodes of Sharpe that I bought for my father and that he never got to watch - and consider which bottle to open next.

To Put Away Childish Things #24

It occurs to me that I haven't talked much about comics.

This is odd because for many years I talked about little else. I was a collector, and like all collectors I was given to waxing lyrical on my specialist subject. At the drop of a hat I would hold forth on the latest Fish Police or League of Superheroes or DNAgents or whatever else I was reading at the time. Although I haven't collected now for a long time and have sold a lot of the comics that I once had, I still have a wardrobe full of them that I now never look at.

I don't really want to talk about those comics now though, I want to talk about an entirely different comic. I want to talk about a comic that first appeared in 1963 - just after I ha started school - and lasted until 1971: Treasure.

I could already read when I started school (in the UK that was at the age of five) because my parents had always given me comics and helped me with books for young children but when Treasure came along it became the original source for my lifelong love of literature. It introduced me to The Borrowers, The Wind In The Willows, Robin Hood and of course Alice In Wonderland. 

Of course it was a very long time ago so I can't remember much about it but the very fact that I remember it at all tells you how important it was to my early development. As well as literature it had history and geography and even science, all written for and aimed at children of infant school age. 

Some stories and articles were presented as traditional panel stories; others - notably the ones reprinting classic stories - were presented as text with illustrations. My reading developed at an astonishing rate as my mother went through every issue with me until it fell apart. My reading age constantly ran several years ahead of my chronological age. If it had a detrimental effect at all, it probably accounts for my lifelong love of children's literature and my peculiar obsession with Alice In Wonderland.

Treasure disappeared in 1971 absorbed into World of Wonder and later into Look and Learn. About those, I know little or nothing but I hope that they continued the fine tradition that launched me into my love of literature and language and I hope that there are equivalent publications out there for today's kids.

 I have just spent a very pleasant hour looking at some of the illustrations from treasure to be found on the Look and Learn website.

And I may go back and look at some more later.

To Put Away Childish Things #23

Funny how the sense of smell can suddenly evoke forgotten memories.

I was walking down to the garage to get my car, which had been in for some minor repairs, when I suddenly got a whiff of an odour that in an instant transported me back forty years and brought to mind a toy that I had completely forgotten.

It was the smell of burning polystyrene.

It reminded me of something I used to have. It was a U-shaped piece of red plastic with a thin wire stretched across the open end of the U and a battery inserted in the other end. Pressing a button caused the battery to heat the wire slightly. The toy came with some pieces of polystyrene with pictures printed on them. By heating the wire it could be manoeuvred carefully around the pattern, melting polystyrene as it went so that the shape could be cut out. They could then be painted with water colours that, memory fails me, may or may not have been included in the set. 

I gather that similar toys are still available but, until I got that sudden momentary smell of polystyrene, they had vanished as completely from my memory as if they had never existed at all. Even now I find I can't recall what I actually made with them or what I did with things that I made or even how old I was at the time. 

I do however remember owning it, and for now that will have to do.

To Put Away Childish Things #22

Of course we had Lego as children. Didn't everybody? Brightly-coloured, interlocking plastic bricks that could be formed into any kind of toy imaginable. Lego, possibly Denmark's most famous product.

But before we* had Lego we had Betta Bilda, a very similar product made by Airfix. The bricks were smaller, all white and didn't lock together as well as Lego - though they were made of very sturdy plastic. To build a roof for a house there were small green tiles that were incredibly awkward to put together. There were door frames and window frames with little pieces of transparent plastic that had to be fitted into the window frames and little plastic doors that fit into the door frames. In short you built a house in the same way that you might build a real one.

Of course, in those days, when you bought a box of bricks, of whichever type, you got rather a lot of them. Nowadays when I glance on the toy shop windows I see that if you buy Lego you buy enough to make one specific model - often a model that has been licensed from a film - and that's all you buy. I daresay you can still buy general sets but I haven't seen them around.

And I haven't seen Betta Bilda for years. I don't know if it even exists any more. Lego was probably the superior product but nostalgia isn't about what was best, it's about what you remember best and I remember that Betta Bilda set with pieces small enough to choke a child that were fiddly enough to be next to impossible for uncoordinated childish fingers. 

Sometimes I wonder where all the these things that I get misty-eyed over went. They must have been lost or given away or thrown away as we grew up but I don't recall anything ever having been thrown away. I suppose that they were abandoned and forgotten and then quietly disposed of by parents who wanted a home less cluttered by things no longer used. It's a pity really that our pasts are so disposable.

(*That is to say, specifically, before my brother and I had Lego. I don't know which was actually the earlier product. I suspect it was probably Lego.)

To put away childish things #21

There was this incident.

It's a long time ago and I suppose one shouldn't bear a grudge but, nevertheless, there was this incident.  I was in my late teens and on the bus on the way home from school. My friend Pete was with me. As was my habit at the time I was sucking on a glacier mint. We had boarded the stop, as usual, at the end of Cumberland Road. Two stops later, at Bilston Clinic, Pete's nephew got on the bus. When he saw me eating he asked me for a sweet. Of course, given our local dialect what he actually said was probably, "giza suck" - something that could well be misconstrued nowadays but an innocent enough remark round here meaning nothing more than "please give me a sweet" (That's "please give me candy" if you are American).

Pete instantly chimed in with "he can't, he only ever carries one in case he gets mugged".

It was so unfair, and so untrue. In the first place I always started the day with two - one for going to school and one for going home. And apart from that the reason that I carried so few was that I liked them and if I'd carried six I'd have eaten six. If I carried six whole bags I'd have eaten them all too.

I've never forgiven him for such a calculatedly offensive remark.

I haven't eaten a glacier mint for years now but I think I may buy a bag on the way home. At two a day they should last me a month or so of journeys too and from work and that's quite enough nostalgia for anyone.

To Put Away Childish Things #20

A "to put away childish things" special.

I've been cleaning out the loft.

Among the other junk was that old box of 78rpm records that I mentioned. So that you get an idea of the soundtrack to my childhood, here, with a few links to the ones I particularly remember, is the full list of the records in the box. It should be noted that sometimes the song that I remember was the B-side.

Yellow Rose of Texas (Michael Holliday)
Shifting Whispering Sands (Billy Vaughan and his Orchestra)
My Fair Lady Piano Pops (Russ Conway)
Kisses Sweeter Than Wine (Jimmie Rogers)
Charlie Kunz Piano Medley D80
Charlie Kunz Piano Medley D84
Charlie Kunz Piano Medley D96
All Star Hit Parade (Max Bygraves, Tommy Steel and others)
Open Up The Doghouse (Dean Martin/Nat King Cole)
With A Song In My Heart (Andre Kostelanetz and his Orchestra)
Piano Pops #6 (Russ Conway)
Cinderella Medley (Gracie Fields)
The Poor People of Paris (Winifred Atwell)
No Matter How You Pray (Billy Cotton and his Orchestra)
Love Letters In The Sand (Pat Boone)
If I Had A Talking Picture Of You (Rodman Lewis)
Whatever Will Be Will Be (Doris Day)
Love Is A Song (RAOC Blue Rockets Dance Club)
A Strawberry Moon (Bob And Alf Pearson)
Suddenly There's A Valley (Jo Stafford)
Beautiful Dreamer (Al Jolson)
That's Amore (Dean Martin)
Come Back To Sorento (Gracie Miller)
Love Letters (Nat King Cole)
Would You (Gracie Fields)
Flirtations Walz (Winifred Atwell)
Don't Cry Joe (Charlie Spivak and his Orchestra)
Alone (Petula Clark)
Girl Of My Dreams (Bing Crosby)
Three Little Sisters (Geraldo and His Orchestra)
The World Outside (Russ Conway)
There's A Lovely Lake In London (Primo Scala and His Banjo & Accordion Band)
Shiralee (Tommy Steele)
Honey Babe (Cyril Stapleton and His Orchestra)
If (Allan Jones)
Memories Are Made Of This (Dave King)
Rogue River Valley (Chuck Miller) (Not the same version as on record. This link is Hoagy Carmichael)
Stupid Cupid (Connie Francis)
Last Train To San Francisco (Johnny Duncan)
Wandering Eyes (Charlie Gracie)
Baubles Bangles And Beads (The Dick Hyman Trio)
The Deadwood Stage (Doris Day)
Mary's Boy Child (Bob Dale)
It's The Irish In Me (Ruby Murray)
Stick It On The Wall Mrs Riley (Billy Cotton)
Careless Love (Slim Whitman)
Alexander's Ragtime Band/The Spaniard That Blighted My Life (Bing Crosby and AL Jolson)
Three Galleons (Robert Earl)
Lords Prayer/Bless This House (Gracie Fields)
Bless Your Beautiful Hide (Howard Keel)
My Son My Son (Vera Lynn and Frank Weir)
Real Love (Rubt Murray)
Beloved Be Faithful (Teddy Johnson)


And people wonder how I turned out as normal as I did!

To Put Away Childish Things #19

I was involved in judging a writing competition recently.

One of the things that surprised me was the number of entries that came in that had clearly been done on old-fashioned mechanical typewriters. I didn't think anyone used them any more and kudos to those who managed to submit some quite long entries that way. 

I used to have a mechanical typewriter and it isn't easy to write anything of any length on them because of the rigmarole you have to go through when you make a mistake. Type a letter wrong and spot it straight away and you have a chance - you can use a dab of correction fluid and type over it, but if, on proofreading a whole page, you find you missed out a word in line two you are buggered. You have to do the whole thing again.

I went up into the loft to look for my old typewriter but it isn't there. I expect it was long ago thrown away. The red box that it used to be in is there but it's full of 78 rpm records (and the fact that anyone under thirty has no idea what I am talking about tells you how long it is since I used a typewriter!). I remember it clearly though. My mother returned from Bilston market with it one day. It was a bulky cast iron red and black thing. It had the normal kind of typewriter mechanism where angled levers carry the letters up to strike the ribbon and print the ink onto the page but it could hardly be described as a delicate instrument. The muscular strength required to hit the keys hard enough to make an impression was quite considerable, for children's fingers anyway. I recall having a typing speed that was measured in letters, rather than words, per minute and sometimes in single digits at that. Now, as I sit here writing this, making on the fly adjustments as I think of a marginally better turn of phrase, popping off to find a picture of a typewriter to illustrate with, having the word  processor tell me when (it thinks) I have made a spelling mistake, I can't help thinking how easy we have it nowadays. And how impressed I am by people still using equipment that most of us now only see in museums.

Anyway. Must dash for now. I have a box of 78 rpm records to look through.

To Put Away Childish Things #18

I found myself the other day getting all nostalgic about the most unlikely thing - school dinners. Back in my day we had no Jamie Oliver to get all righteous about nutrition and vocal about the evil turkey twizzlers, so we were spared the sight of overweight mums feeding salt and sugar laden snacks through the railings to their equally overweight children. As another plus we were also spared the endless bleating on about UK obesity rates by the Daily Mail.

We didn't have a cafeteria style system where we could choose from a wide variety of healthy, nutritious, balanced foods. We couldn't opt for any one of a dozen different meals and snacks. We had what was cooked and we ate it. Never mind that it was often unidentified, and unidentifiable,  brown goo or green goo accompanying a piece of something that might or might not have been meat. Never mind that the dining room always smelled of sprouts - whether they were on the menu or not. Never mind that the gravy for the main course and the custard for the dessert* were served in metal water jugs and were largely indistinguishable except by colour. Never mind any of those things. We queued up with trays and plates and the kitchen staff dolloped it onto the plates and we sat down at tables of eight and ate it. Or possibly left it. That was what passed for a choice back then. 

Ah, how fondly I remember the spotted dick - a suet and currents concoction that made everyone glad that swimming lessons were before lunch. After lunch, with that sitting like so much ballast in the stomach could have proven fatal. 

And who could ever forget the mashed potato with its wallpaper paste consistency - and a taste to match or the peas that came in two varieties - pellets resembling green lead shot or a processed paste of a neon shade unknown in nature.

It was probably passably nutritious - after all we all ate it with no long-lasting ill effects - but by no stretch of the imagination could it ever have been called appetising. And by and large I feel a warm glow of pride that somehow I managed to go through seven years of school dinners without ever once being sick.

What prompted this particular recollection was watch an episode of M*A*S*H where the medics of the 4077 regularly queue up in a very similar fashion to eat what appears to be very similar food. The difference is only in the quality of the scornful sarcasm they heap upon it. And the fact that they are eating it in a battlefield, though, now I come to think of it, school wasn't that unlike a war zone.

Today's kids, with their plethora of healthy options and their tasty wholesome menus don't know they're born. I wonder if anyone has ever thought of appealing to the nostalgia market and opening a restaurant that serves the kind of food my generation grew up on. Probably not. And probably just as well. Nostalgia would be unlikely to survive the reality.

Another view of nostalgia

From my friend Andrew's blog.

To Put Away Childish Things #17

I went to the cinema this week.

The choice of films in Harrow was quite restricted and it came down to a straightforward toss-up between The A-Team and Inception. As the A-Team was just about to begin when I got there that's what I chose.

It was Big Dumb Fun. With a capital DUMB. It was loud, brash, utterly preposterous and I enjoyed every minute of it. It's also absolutely chock full of obscure references that most people won't notice, that some people will notice and won't get and that fans of the original will quietly smile at. (Director of the movie showing when Murdoch escapes? Reginald Barclay. If you don't get it, then you can find out for your homework. Professor Google will help you.)

Anyway it reminded me that it's about time I did another nostalgia post because I get very nostalgic about the kind of program The A-Team represented. Daft adventure or cop series that had exactly the same plot every week, completely ridiculous premises, special effects ripped on license from low budget cinema releases so that the stories had to be written to fit the available footage.

Ah those were the days. The A-Team was the sublime tip of the iceberg. I have a couple of series on DVD and terrific they are too. But what about The Incredible Hulk? By the numbers episodes down to the last detail. You can set your watch by how long it will be before poor old David "Don't Make Me Angry" Banner is going to go all green and muscle-bound. And let's not forget The Six Million Dollar Man and its better spin-off The Bionic Woman. Let's also give a nod towards the Invaders, a series I never saw the last season of and must buy on DVD some time. Over on the police end of things there were dozens of quirky detectives from scruffy Columbo (apparently on a never ending cycle of afternoon repeats) to fat Cannon, moustachioed cowboy  McCloud and the partnership of Starsky and Hutch.

Occasionally these programs slipped in a bit of social relevance or an episode with a slightly harder edge but mostly they were the very definition of formulaic entertainment. Nowadays everything has to have morals and points and ongoing storylines but back then things could just be the big dumb fun that they were.

Which brings us back to the A-Team.

If you think the following exchange of dialogue is wonderfully, gloriously, insanely ludicrous go to see the movie.

"Are they trying to shoot down the other drone?"

"No, they're trying to fly the tank."

Priceless.

28 Years Later... (A "To Put Away Childish Things" Special Edition)

Somewhere in a parallel Universe, it's 2010 and Jameson Raid have just played their farewell tour after thirty-five years as the most successful Heavy Metal band in the world. They have finished on a triumphant seven-night, sell-out run at the O2 in London. Rock magazines have produced detailed tribute issues. The twenty CD boxed set retrospective of their work has gone straight to the top of the charts.The Mojo cover disc has a lot of bands no one ever heard of doing their versions of Jameson Raid songs in inappropriate styles. The Classic Rock cover disc is "Bands influenced by Jameson Raid". Terry Dark has denied reports that he is the new judge on Britain's Got Talent.

But that's in the Universe next door.

Back here in this Universe it's 1982. Jameson Raid have just split up after a couple of years of struggling on with line up changes. They leave behind two EPs and a single track on a compilation album. Other tracks were recorded but never released. Their small but loyal following are disappointed that they will never make the big time.

Fast forward to our 2010 and after 28 years Jameson Raid are back. The missing recordings have been released on a CD, the classic line up are together on stage for the first time since they split up. They are playing three gigs, two in England and one in Germany. The Robin, venue for the first gig, is packed. Who would have thought that a band almost no one has ever heard of could fill the place? The band look old. We all look old. It's been a long time.

Then the music starts and they are as good as they ever were. They thunder through the tracks on the CD and more. Surprisingly I remember all of these songs from the first time round, so long ago. The audience love them. They are note perfect and harder and heavier than I remember them. They have even dug out the old costumes, Ian Smith in his waistcoat, John Ace in his military gear, Terry Dark more conventional in jeans and T-shirt. For two hours we have slipped over into that parallel Universe where they are the stars they should have been. 

And then it's all over. I can't get to the other gigs but I surely would if I could.

I'd thought the gig might have to fly powered solely by nostalgia. I was wrong. In their day these guys produced some of my favourite songs and performed some of my favourite gigs , gigs I recall vividly to this day, and older or not they can still do it. 

A glimpse of the greatness that might have been.

To Put Away Childish Things #16

It's a commonplace enough piece of nostalgia. Lots of people have it. You definitely DIDN'T read it here first, but I am old enough to remember when crisps came in only one flavour* and had a twist of blue paper containing salt that you could add or not add according to your taste.

The plethora of World Cup themed flavours is a far cry from those times. As I sat on a stool in a corner drinking Vimto and eating my crisps (with the salt added) I never dreamed that one day there would be American Cheesburger flavour, Australian BBQ Kangaroo flavour or Italian Spaghetti Bolognese flavour. I never even dreamed of Roast Chicken or Prawn Cocktail flavours. Not even Cheese and Onion or Salt and Vinegar crossed my mind.

It occurs to me that those among my, admittedly limited, readership who call crisps, "chips" might never have had the pleasure of untwisting the blue packet of salt and tipping it into the bag; holding the top tight and shaking to distribute the condiment evenly. I have no idea if such a thing ever existed outside the UK. 

Of course someone from a nation raised on root beer and Coke might also not know what Vimto is.

I'm sure someone will be able to enlighten me.

(*potato flavour, that is.)

To Put Away Childish Things #15

I was never what you might call a very practical child. You may be wondering what kind of child I was, given that we have already established that I was never very sporty either. Well, to tell the truth, I was the spotty bespectacled swotty kind who would rather sit in the library and do his homework than hang around in the schoolyard.

Be that as it may, I wasn't practical. There were lots of other things I couldn't do very well either. One of the choices we had to make was between art, music and woodwork. The music teacher didn't want me as I couldn't carry a tune and had never shown any inclination towards learning an instrument. The art teacher didn't want me, presumably because he had seen how badly I drew. (I couldn't draw anything but I was worst at feet. If I had to draw a figure it was always standing behind a rock or a box so that I didn't have to attempt them.) So I ended up in the woodwork class where I was predictably useless. In my time there we made two things. There was a footstool with mortise and tenon joints. Mine fell apart in about a month. It would have been quicker had it not been precariously held together by the raffia-work top. The other project was the subject of a mystery. It was a clock with a wooden case with dovetail joints and when we turned up for the lesson one day mine was missing. I have always suspected that the teacher thought it was so bad that he threw it away.

As you can see, not a practical child at all.

So it's all the more mysterious that I miss making Airfix models. You can still buy them, of course, and I suppose I could if I wanted to but I was just as useless at them as everything else. I think every kid has made them at some time or another, plastic kits that could, with time, patience, glue and paint be assembled into aeroplanes, tanks, battleships, cars and so on. My family used to buy them for me as birthday presents and I would dutifully build them although there would always be bits left over that didn't correspond to the bits that were missing. Moving parts, wheels for example, never moved, and my painting was especially sloppy so that the ones that were supposed to be in camouflage colours would only be adequately hidden if they crashed into an exploding paint factory.

Quite late on I discovered, however, a series of models that even I could handle. The Airfix range of historical figures. There were various kings and queens, famous soldiers and sailors and so on. These had the advantage that there were less of the fiddly little pieces to work with so they could be managed even by someone of my ineptitude.

   

I had about a dozen of them, though the only ones I can remember now are Henry VIII, Richard I and Oliver Cromwell. I even managed to paint them reasonably well*  and for years they stood on top of the cupboard in our living room. 

Sadly, like much else that I have been nostalgic about, I have no idea what happened to them, no idea if they were thrown away, given away or put away. It would be nice to find them again. I was especially fond of the Richard I which had a removable helmet and sword which I managed NOT to glue permanently in place.

As a brief aside, in the interests of full disclosure, I should point out that I am no more practical now. I expect that given an Airfix model and some glue I would still end up with pieces of it glued to the table and several of my fingers stuck together. Some things never change.

(*reasonably well by my standards of course, which is pretty poor by anyone else's)

To Put Away Childish Things #14

For anyone who knows anything at all about me the next sentence will be quite startling.

In World Cup spirit, let's get nostalgic about football.

OK, I'm sorry, I'm misleading you. In my whole life the only thing I've disliked more than watching football is playing football but it is playing - or rather not playing - football that I want to remember right now. Somewhere else in this blog there is a set of three poems about games lessons at school. They accurately reflect my experience of the horror.

Back in my school days I went to Bilston Boys' Grammar School - an establishment that disappeared at around the time I was leaving to be replaced with a Comprehensive School. I was a decent enough student academically but when it came to sports I was about as useless as it's possible to be without  being dead. Put a javelin in my hand and I was as likely to kill someone accidentally as I was to throw it where it was supposed to go. Similarly with the discus, the direction was unpredictable although your safety was more or less guaranteed if you stood more than about ten feet away. I don't think I ever managed to clear the bar in the high jump even if it was lying on the ground. On the long jump I could, when pressed, very nearly reach the start of the sand pit with a massive leap of almost a foot. On cross country runs I was one a select group who jogged the dozen or so yards that got us out of sight of the school then strolled up to sit among the trees until it was time to go back. At a pinch I could play a reasonable game of badminton, but that was the limit of my athletic prowess.

Where I really failed to excel though was in football (for US readers this is of course soccer that I am talking about). We had three football pitches. On the first, and largest, of them the players who were in the school team played against the players who stood a pretty good chance of getting into the school team. On the middle pitch the players who had less skill but great dollops of enthusiasm played.

I played on the little pitch, a corner tucked away at the far end of the playing fields, where those of us who had neither skill nor enthusiasm were sent to while away the games periods. We would stand around, occasionally making a desultory attempt to kick the ball but otherwise not even trying to look as if we were playing. The north end had a grassy bank where sometimes we sunbathed. Once, when we did try, I recall Bhogul, whose athletic skills were every bit the equal of mine, being in goal. He attempted to drop kick the ball, missed it and back-heeled it into his own goal. Not being at the end with a bank, it rolled away rather than bouncing back and none of us had the inclination to fetch it back.

The only times this blissfully incompetent idyll was ever disturbed were the times when someone was send down from the second pitch to join us, which could happen if everybody was present and fit for the lesson. Then, they would inevitably try, unsuccessfully, to whip up some effort but the result was always that whichever team they were on would win about ninety-nil.

All of this may go some way towards explaining away my apathy, make that antipathy, towards the game. Yesterday, at work, I was roundly criticised because I refused to take part in their World Cup sweepstake. I neither know nor care who is in it or who wins it. I can say that it only started yesterday but even before a ball was kicked I was heartily sick of it. It's just about impossible to find anything on television at the moment that isn't either football or connected in some way with football. And, so I am told, it lasts for a month. 

Oh, joy.

I expect that I'm going to be making a dent in the very large pile of unwatched DVDs I have accumulated. Of course when it's all over you can expect me to be expressing similar joy at the prospect of Wimbledon. Or do they overlap? I do hope so. It would at least reduce the duration of the pain.