BADGES 01

I seem to have accumulated over the years a number of badges that I still cling on to as, for some reason, many of them can still remind me of people, places and times that would otherwise be long forgotten. I keep them all in a small collection of tins which are scattered about the house and which are sometimes brought together and tipped out onto a tabletop or some other convenient surface whenever a memory sparks and I find that I simply must find one or other of them for no particular good reason.

So it was a few weeks ago when I simply had to find one which used to lurk upon the lapel of a particular jacket that I wore every so often, but which I knew had finally been disposed of when its styling and general “bobbly-ness” had taken if far beyond the point where even I would consider wearing it ever again.

This, however, is not the story of that badge, this is the story of another one. One which I found whilst looking for the other one and when I did find it, reminded me of someone I hadn’t even thought about for years and someone who I don’t even remember being any kind of a close friend of mine in the brutal crucible of the school structure.

In fact, this tiny yellow, red, black, white, silver and gold coloured lapel pin badge less than 1cm across commemorating the, as then, impending “World Cup” of 1982 to be held in Spain, which I somehow seem to have managed to keep through all the intervening years, may very well represent the only time we had anything to do with each other in all the time we were at school together, and therefore it’s a bit of a mystery as to how I came by it.

It was “given” to me by one of my fellow students when I was in the sixth form. In those days, we all spent much our free time in a relatively modern, eight-sided building known (rather unsurprisingly and unimaginatively I suppose) as “The Octagon”, which was built as a “sixth form common room” for those of us stupid enough and presumably also clever enough to hang around and try to get further qualifications to help us with the delayed leap from the launch pad into “adult” life, or dossing around for as many years as we could get away with as students, if you prefer to think of it that way…

Those inverted commas around the word “given” are very appropriate, by the way, as very few things in the culture of the schoolroom, even at that higher level of academic achievement of being “Post O-Level” are ever freely given, not completely. There will have been some kind of barter involved, I will have done a favour, and this will have been the price…

Probably.

Actually, the more I think about it, the less sure I am about that. My memory is now screaming at me that I was actually rather surprised at the time to be given this trinket in return for having done nothing in particular, although I’m beginning to think that I was. But then I have always been surprised when anything in life has been freely given to me, just as much as it always comes as a huge surprise to find out that someone actually genuinely likes me.

Well it is, and always has been, a thing of precious rarity, which is why, I suspect, I’ve never taken even the tiny betrayals of life all that well…

Ah well, maybe that fellow student had hundreds of the things that he could hand out like sweeties presuming, of course, that he wasn’t one of those who could unwrap a sherbert lemon from its cellophane wrapper inside a bag inside a pocket rather than have to share them around. Perhaps his Dad was some kind of bigwig in the importing of Spanish World Cup memorabilia. After all, I do believe he was from Spain, old Frederico, and handing out badges for “Espana ’82” seems an enormous coincidence otherwise.

Or is it…? Perhaps he was justly proud of his heritage and wanted everyone to know that he had a personal connection to the “World Cup” being held there that year, or the year after. These things do, after all, tend to have a significant “run up” when it comes to selling the bits and pieces associated with them.

It amazes me how little we really knew about the families of those we were at school with. Oh, we knew if they had brothers, of course, because they were usually in the same school somewhere. We occasionally knew if they had exciting sounding things like sisters. We even may have met some of their mothers, who were, of course, always delightful-seeming in comparison to our own, and yet would also somehow be “the worst parents in the world” according to their own offspring.

Even thinking about it now, it seems almost impossible to imagine that I went to school with someone who came from somewhere as interesting and exotic as Spain, as generally, we were all so very local, but there you are. The world could even have its cosmopolitan moments even then.

So there we are, then, the small and perfectly unclear tale of how I came to be the proud owner of an “Espana ’82” World Cup badge. Perhaps it’s strange that I’ve kept it, although with my inability to part with anything, perhaps it isn’t, but it’s not as if I’ve ever really shown all that much interest in football, either, so, in many ways it seems a very odd thing to have kept hold of.