Where Did It All Go Right? (27 page)

Sunday, 24 July

It was pretty sunny. But it was windy. I shot down an enemy
Russian
nuclear sonic guided missile anti-tank gun plane with a supersonic anti-nuclear plane double-barrelled triple-magazined anti-plane 59 vector gun. (You believe that don’t you?) Saw
The Intelligence Men
film. Wot ’orrible writing.

Monday, 25 July

It was quite a nice day. We played on bikes and on Simon’s ‘skateboard’ (bit of wood screwed on a roller skate!!). Tonight I went up Becky’s house to give her the fudge I got from Wales. But she wasn’t there so I’m going tomorrow maybe.

Tuesday, 26 July

This morning I cycled up Becky’s house and she was there this time. I gave her the fudge.
¹⁸
I played with Carl after dinner and we made a
Rollerball
go-kart. (It’s only got a bit of wood on the front with ‘Rollerball’ written on it.)

Thursday, 28 July

Dean came down. Simon is being the most stupid git. He keeps being a bum. He is mad. He is thick. Simon smells. He is a slimy toad. He’s loony. He has the brain of a backward, demented chimpanzee.

Saturday, 30 July

We went shopping this morning. It was quite hot in the afternoon. I painted my British Infantry Support Group soldiers. They look brill. I’ve now got the set of
Dr Whos
(free in Weetabix) after a bit of swapping wiv Jonathan next door. Tonight we went up the park to see the paintings.
¹⁹
We had an ice cream. Then we popped in Nan C’s. I got
Action
wiv an ace Spinball booklet. Wow!
Action
is the brillest comic in the universal solar system. So is
Krazy
.

Friday, 5 August

I painted the Afrika Korps and German soldiers. They look ace. It rained, but it soon cleared up. Gibby, Si and I played Tiggy Off Ground but Si was a bad sport. He is an absolute idiot. He’s a bum.

Saturday, 6 August

Wowee! I sent an alien drawing to Si’s comic
2000AD
ages ago. Now it’s been printed and I’ll win £2.
²⁰
Wowee! It rained. Bum.

Tuesday, 30 August

Usual stuff. Skateboards. Si and I played Colditz. Watched
The Rise and Fall of Reginald Perrin
. I have now gone mad on crispbread.

Monday, 2 September

Started doing proper timetable. It was pretty simple. Had games. Wow! Is my scout car model looking great? You bet. I am
now
an honorary fan of the Fonz.
²¹
He is cool. Fonz is very cool.

Monday, 12 September

The bad news: loads of homework. The really good news: we went to the library. We had chips. We went to Pap’s and he had bought me the Airfix 1/32 scale Crusader III tank. Wow, it is just too fantastically brilliantly ace for words.

Thursday, 15 September

I’ve finished my model. Hardly any homework. Angus came down. I am now a member of the Airfix Modellers Club. I sent away for it. I got a certificate, badge, sticker, membership card, voucher, stamps, letter and kit price list. Wow! And just for 35p. My number is 106339.

Sunday, 25 September

We went to Uncle Pete’s and Auntie Wendy’s at Wisbech. Uncle Pete gave us some plums, a load of old model planes and a load of lollies. There I did my
Prinz Eugen
model. It’s really detailed. It looks brill though.

Sunday, 9 October

Usual stuff. Played Lego. Si and I played around the building site on the dirt heaps. Ace fun. Also saw
Flight Into Holocaust
. A mini plane smashed straight into a skyscraper and it was all about rescuing the passengers.
²²

Thursday, 13 October

Usual lessons. No homework. Before Carl mended his wooden skateboard and gave it to me, he wrote off to the company. Today, they sent him back some new wheels so he gave them to me. Now my board really goes.

Wednesday, 19 October

Played hockey. In the game I came tearing down the wing, burning up the track. I did a 20mph hot shot which burned through the air at the speed of sound and tore through the back of the net and made an eight foot crater in the grass bank. To put it in a nutshell, I didn’t play very well.
²³

Monday, 24 October

This morning I went round Watto’s and we had an ace H0/00 war game. I had another war game with Si in the afternoon. Watto gave me an unfinished Buffalo Amphibian H0/00 Airfix model. He also lent me a
Mad
Don Martin book. It is brill. Dad went to London. Uncle Brian baby-sitted while Mum went out.

Tuesday, 25 October

This afternoon we went to Auntie Margaret’s new big house.
²⁴
They have got a baby retriever called Jack. He is really nice. Saw
Charlie’s Angels
wiv a new Angel – Kris.

Wednesday, 2 November

Another stupid power cut. For two and a half hours. Power cuts are bum. So is Simon. He keeps playing with this loony friend of his: Paul McBride. What an idiotic pouf.

Monday, 14 November

Nothing happened today. Well obviously something happened but it’s so boring it’s not worth putting in. I mean, you would not be interested if I told you that we studied the industrial areas of France in geography or that we started to talk about Edward III in history. Or was it Edward II?

Tuesday, 15 November

I have finished making my skilful teddy in needlework. He is called Arthur.
²⁵

Saturday, 17 December

Went shopping. Angus came in the afternoon. He gave me a Christmas present: a Honda CB450 motorbike Airfix model. It is ace. He also gave me a ginger beer plant. Nan C baby-sitted again. I am mad.

Tuesday, 20 December

Wrapped up loads of presents. So did Dad. I started making my Honda model. It’s so fiddly I feel like smashing it up. But I won’t because it is too fabulous.

Saturday, 24 December
CHRISTMAS EVE

Magic. Dad took me to Binleys and got me all the skateboard padding (helmet, elbow pads and knee pads) for a Christmas pressie to go with my skateboard. Went to the park after dinner. It’s Christmas tomorrow! Magic.
²⁶

Sunday, 25 December
CHRISTMAS DAY

I got: £18.00 Newporter plastic deck skateboard, all the padding, Boeing 747 model, drawing book,
Goodies Disaster Movie
book, model knife, glue, 11 model paints, 64 Crayola
crayons
,
Krazy
annual, Gambler,
Bert Fegg’s Nasty Book, Psycho
, mini-stapler, Concorde model, Bugatti model, Lifeguard model, loads of pencils, diary, rubber, RAF refuelling set model, two monster jigsaws, Quality Streets. Magic! Magic! Magic!

Friday, 30 December
MUM’S BIRTHDAY

More skateboarding. Dad bought me two good paint brushes. Dad took me with him when he played squash. It was a brill match. Dad lost against Les Hull 3–2. Dad played magic.

1.
Nan M. and Pap R. had a home bingo set, pre-war, which would frequently come out at family gatherings and keep us all transfixed like the decent working-class people we deeply were. (We called out ‘House!’ – or ‘
Hace!
’ in Northamptonian – what further proof do you require?) The set consisted of a metal board (metal!) with all the numbers etched in by Pap himself in his old job, a cloth bag containing 100 wooden numbers, and a good thick book of paper bingo cards. It was all there. Just add a motley clutch of pens and half-pencils. The old ones are the best.

2.
That’ll be
Mike Yarwood in Persons
, the first of four series he did under that imprint for the BBC between ’77 and ’81 (plus specials). Then he crossed the floor to Thames, where, like Morecambe & Wise before him (’78), his decline began. Why do they do it? Can the money matter so much? Or is it just a comedians’ graveyard, a resting place to which all dying stars are drawn? (I don’t blame Thames, that lovable warren by the river in Teddington: the Goodies went not to Thames but to LWT the same year as Yarwood defected and the diminishing effect was the same.)

3.
Buster & Monster Fun Comic
, whose merger was as easy to swallow as its new title. I read in the paper this morning that there’s an advertising agency called Abbott Mead Vickers BBDO. If you insist.

4.
Possibly (I have no sources) a regional magazine programme. We certainly seemed to like it. (I even bothered to reproduce its logo in my diary: concentric circles.)

5.
I think we know what I’m getting at here. I learned a valuable legal lesson while coping with the evident theft of my two Parker pens (I think one must have been a propelling pencil – I wouldn’t have had two ink pens): you must never accuse anybody, not even an unnamed pen-thieving ghost. Crime investigation is entirely euphemistic: my pens have gone missing; I have lost my pens.

I also learnt a more practical lesson: to use biros and Pentels at school in future. Pens are not meant to be of sentimental value. There should be no whodunit after the loss of a pen. Not even the ‘loss’.

6.
Our maiden brush with the painted whore of television. Swaporama, the town-hopping roadshow part of
Swap Shop
, always looked enjoyably chaotic on TV, with battered toys being passed across the crowd for barter – but it was only when Simon went down to Abington Park the week the circus came to Northampton that we discovered just how unenjoyably chaotic it was. I remember the call-out at the start of
Swap Shop
that morning: Keith Chegwin up the familiar, nay iconic climbing frame shaped like a space rocket. At that delicious moment I tasted the thrill of seeing a piece of playground apparatus
I’d
ascended,
on telly, with Cheggers up it
. The Swaporama may have been local that Saturday – less than a mile from where I was sitting – but for me, at home, the experience remained remote: clean and annexed. For Simon it was mud-caked and humiliating, and when he got back and related his woes, the screen came down: the real Wizard of Oz was revealed.

7.
New arrivals in Winsford Way: the popular Mills family, from the West Midlands. Mel (bald and gregarious), Margaret, elder son Martin (went to agricultural college where, one hopes, he was able to properly cultivate that bum-fluff moustache) and daughter Sarah (had a lot of problems with her legs or was it her back?). We liked them so much, when they moved away to Crowborough in East Sussex, we went to visit them. I fell in a river, possibly the Ouse, and Mel entertained us with a road sign he’d spotted locally bearing the place-names
BALLS GREEN
and
BLACOMBE
(which doesn’t exist, so perhaps he’d misread
BALCOMBE
, or tweaked it for comic effect).

8.
First sighting of ‘onset teenage ennui’.

9.
I have by now seen
Jaws
(18 March with Dad, Simon and Angus). Though an ‘A’ certificate, it is by far the most frightening film of my 12 years on earth, and thus, I am now obsessed with it.

10.
Some of these names are just that: B Jnr, Ally, Westy, Argy, Chris, Gibs. Who were these abbreviated souls? I can identify the following: Dash is definitely Chris Dashfield (who also had a Soda Stream); Kate possibly Katy Prout (but I wouldn’t put money it); Taf and Gibby the aforementioned Givelin brothers; Roobarb – Paul Roberts; and Hirsty – David Hirst. And that’s ignoring ‘etc. etc. etc.’ whoever in God’s nickname
they
were.

11.
The epithet ‘maddo’ is
so
me and Simon. I don’t think anyone else has ever said it.

12.
Self-styled nickname for John Lewis, tenuously derived from the fact that John is ‘Johan’ is Dutch. I never understood it either, but I idolised the long-haired Lewis so much at this stage I would have called him anything he’d asked me to. Daddy, Sir, anything.

13.
Another incomprehensible nickname, this time for Stephen Tite, tall blond kid with bee-sting lips. (Often shortened to Dobs.) He and Lewis had come from the same ecosystem at another lower school where these bizarre names had originated. At least Dave Watson was just Watto.

14.
Another disappointing but inevitable slide into proto-adolescence. Dad kept his frankly tame soft porn mags –
Mayfair
and
Penthouse
, none of your tat – in the garage. Mum wouldn’t have them in the house, but she seemed to know he kept them, which is interesting. (For instance I didn’t have to smuggle the
Penthouse
he bought in Bournemouth into the house inside my
Mad
Super Special.) Poring over these soft-focus, undressed but mostly knees-together ‘rude ladies’ – as we called them – was certainly a necessary voyage of anatomical discovery, but I was more interested in
Mayfair
’s monthly comic strip ‘Carrie’, in which the heroine would lose her clothes in a variety of inventive ways. These gave me my first ‘confused’ feelings.

15.
I’m looking at a photo taken on Jubilee Bank Holiday, 7 June. We seem to be in the spirit of this great royal occasion: Mum, Simon and I are wearing identical red, white and blue ‘Jeans’ T-shirts with Union Jacks on the sleeves, and Jubilee-styled party hats (Simon has fixed an Action Man Union Jack to his and it is hanging down over his eyes, the wag). Melissa is waving a flag. Not a trace of irony here, but it’s difficult to convey to people how royal the nation was in 1977. Winsford Way’s ‘street party’ took place not in the street (it was a through road) but in a large tent in Jean and Geoff’s back garden. I have decorated my diary by writing each letter in alternate red and blue Tempo. As I write it is the Queen’s Golden Jubilee year and I feel I am in good company not giving a fuck.