SWITZERLAND ’74

We were watching a documentary the other day which happened to mention a small observatory perched high up on an Alp in Switzerland known as the Jungfrau and I mentioned, in that way I sometimes have - although not all that often because I’m hardly “well travelled” – that I had, indeed, “been there…!”

Well, I’d been to the mountain anyway. The observatory was something unknown to me when I was ten, but then, I suppose that there’s the distinct possibility that it hadn’t even been built back then for all I knew, although it turns out that it was completed nearly thirty years before I was born, so I was probably just being a bit ignorant.

But hey! I wasn’t even ten years old back then, and I was staying in a foreign country where I didn’t know two out of the three languages on offer, and was there without my parents for the first time in my life. Star-gazing wasn’t yet all that high up on my own list of priorities, okay?

Anyway, at 13,642 feet the Jungfrau (which translates as “Young Woman” and which leads inevitably to the oldest joke in the region “Have you been up the Jungfrau lately?” about which I was blissfully unaware at that age...) is the tallest of the three peaks overlooking Lauterbrunnen and Grindelwald valleys in Switzerland. Its sister mountains are the Eiger and the Mönch and all three stand together about 20 miles south of Interlaken, the place where we went for that school trip when I was nearly ten years old.

Anyway, this conversation caused me to dig out the tiny lime green photo album containing the thirty or so photographs that I took on that trip using my dad’s pocket instamatic which I borrowed for the duration. You may remember those cameras. Slimline and pocket sized, containing a cartridge cassette that ended up giving you tiny negatives which, if you were very lucky, converted into slightly less than completely blurry pictures of whatever you hopefully pointed it at.

My photos are almost uniformly unspectacular. The yellow-painted hotel we stayed in with an orange-ski-jacketed elbow sneaking into the edge of the frame; the Monaghan brothers and their friend Paul Something-or-other standing in front of the hotel; some indistinct mountains which look like the statutory “the view from the window” shot; those Monaghan boys again in front of a chalet and some logs near the hotel car park; and half a dozen more blurred shots of school pals whose names I can’t remember and me in a purple shirt and blue silk-effect tie.

There’s a picture of another elderly person, Brigitte Engel, the daughter of a family my mother and father befriended whilst on holiday a couple of years earlier who came to visit. She seemed so terribly old and wise and was probably about, oh, fifteen when I look at the photo. My mother, bless her, was forever finding ways of “putting herself in the picture” as it were, usually by involving people whom I barely knew, but who she did. Sometimes it got really embarrassing...

There are also some pictures of Lake Lucerne and a railway bridge I remember being barely able to cross because of vertigo, a photograph of some boats on the river near Interlaken, and a blurry old picture of Catherine Smith attempting to take a picture of the Swiss flag.

Why do I suddenly remember her name…? Very odd…

I think we crossed paths years later when, by the strange laws that govern such things, we were both on the same foundation course, but I don’t remember now whether she was particularly friendly, and after that finished, well, we never met again, and I don’t suppose we ever will.

There are pictures of a goat and a horse in a field (with, once again, an additional orange-clad arm at the edge of the frame), which probably seemed very unusual to a townie like I was, and there are the “snowball fight” shots taken during a trip up a mountain, where I genuinely recall being amazed at the amount of snow.

It’s also surprising what I didn’t take pictures of. The most vivid memories seem to be of the kind of cable cars that you simply couldn’t persuade me into these days if you tried. Perhaps I was too terrified and was gripping so tightly to the handrails that it would have been impossible to hold the camera. I also remember a broken fluorescent tube; discovering that I rather liked playing pinball; reading “Doctor Who and the Giant Robot”; endlessly (it seemed) listening to a song by “Mud” on the juke box, possibly “Dyna-Mite” but I’m not sure now; free gifts from “Swissair” on the plane; travelling to London to catch that plane; buying the “Look-In” Special edition that would help at least three of us to do music projects the next year at secondary school…

So many memories, so very long ago…

A photograph of the two schoolteachers who accompanied us is, perhaps, the most interesting, despite yet another unexpected intruder sneaking into the edge of the frame. Miss Normansell and Mrs Machin were the teachers, neither of whom I’ve really thought about in decades. I do, however, remember the diary of the trip that they wrote and printed off for each of us (I bet there’s more than a small chance that I still have it somewhere), and the trick they played on April fool’s day saying that we had to go home early. Looking back, they both seemed so terribly old and wise but yet both look far, far younger than I could ever have thought they were.

Funnily enough, it turned out that my grandparents had been keen visitors to Switzerland years before, and had really enjoyed Lauterbrunnen, and the painting of a mountain that hung in their various homes for years was of the Jungfrau, although I have no recollection of anyone seeming to show enough interest in my visit to actually bother to mention it to me at the time, or indeed for years afterwards.

SPARKY PEOPLE

After rummaging through the old box of comics which I found mouldering on a shelf the other week, I think that I can safely announce the the oldest comic I possess is issue 354 of the “Sparky” comic dated October 30^th 1971.

I read the “Sparky” for years and later on it would start doing rather impressive television parodies on its cover, which, as I was a bit of a budding ‘tellyphile’ at that age, probably has an awful lot to answer for. Years later, it would be ‘incorporated’ (or perhaps ‘absorbed’ is a better word…?) into another comic called “Topper” which is a thing that, rather disappointingly, happened rather a lot to the comics I used to read as a boy.

It’s rather difficult to tell from the rather lame gag on that particular cover (featuring the soon-to-be decommissioned “Barney Bulldog”) what a truly brilliant read that the “Sparky” was. Its letters page was brimming jokes and whimsy, and with the most creative notions about “Nirdles”, odd creatures that sprang from the imaginations of it’s readers. I remember a schoolfriend had his drawing of an “Illuminirdle” (based on a lightbulb) actually published on the letters page, which seemed like the height of achievement in those days…

But what set the “Sparky” apart from the other, more average, run-of-the-mill publications was the sheer genius of the subversive masterpiece and “work of art” that was its comic strip called “We Are The Sparky People”.

This was set in a (presumably) fictionalised version of the offices of the people who actually were publishing the very comic you were reading, which was so extremely “metatextual” and “post-modern” before the world had even had chance to become “modern” in the first place, that it truly beggars belief.

The weekly misadventures of Throgmorton. his mysterious typist of a non-girlfriend, Minnie the tea lady, Dick the office boy, the artist , the printer, the strange pie-eating writer and not forgetting the office cat predated the sitcom “The Office” by decades and was truly a high point of the comic, and simultaneously prepared we dear readers for our own future “office life” far before we could have even imagined such a thing…

One of the most brilliant conceits was the “heard but never seen” thundering-voiced entity known as “Sir” who existed in an inner office somewhere beyond where the real “work” was done. Only ever represented by capital letters drawn in RED CAPS, and the occasional glimpse of a hand or boot, “Sir” represented the great unseen off-screen “controlling voice” who had the power to strike fear into all of his underlings who heard his booming voice resonating around the workplace.

This led inevitably to another phenomenon of the letters page, the ongoing series of “Sir-Pics” in which various readers would send in their images of what they imagined the enigmatic and mysterious “Sir” looked like and which inspired children from all parts of the country for many, many years. Modesty forbids that I should draw your attention to the “Sir-Pics” as printed in issues 582 and 599 in 1976, by the way.

Ahem!

BADGES 02

(This opening bit is probably best imagined in a ‘Robert Webb’ voice, the sort he uses when he’s playing his particularly sarcastic and angry character…)

“I can’t wait for the Olympics…”

“…to be OVER!!!!”

I saw it as a couplet of Tweets mere moments apart but I bottled it and didn’t bother, deciding instead that there were other, less public, places I could try them out in…

“Ah yes…” I hear you mutter, “He’s just being a killjoy again…”

Although it’s not really that at all. I’m quite happy for this year’s exhibition of running, jumping and standing still to happen as long I don’t have to have anything to do with it, but I am getting heartily sick of all the advertising that’s somehow managing to tack itself on to the event, and, when I say that I’m looking forward to it all being over, it’s mostly because of that and, of course, the assumption that everyone in the country really, really wanted tickets, because we didn’t, okay…?

You can relax now… Rant over…

Whilst I am struggling to have any enthusiasm whatsoever for this year’s Olympic Games in London, I do have in my vast collection of tat, one piece of memorabilia from the 1980 games which were held in Moscow, a small black and gold enamel lapel badge.

I sometimes think that my school must have been a very odd one because, alongside the normal curriculum in the late 1970s, they also offered tuition in Russian. Now, I didn’t partake in that, of course. I was struggling enough with French and German, but one of the lads who was (in those days) friend of mine did take that course, because he had some sort of Bulgarian connection in the family, I seem to recall, and that is why, in the year leading up towards the Moscow Olympics, he went off on a school trip to Russia.

I know…! A school trip to Russia in the year following the election of the first Thatcher government…! I’m surprised the whole population of that establishment wasn’t rounded up and sent to some sort of Government “re-education centre” or Gulag. Russians, at least the ones that we saw in films and on television at least, were simply not to be trusted in those days at the tail end of the Cold War, and you’ll remember all of the “tit-for-tat” boycotting that went on, I imagine…

Anyway, my friend returned unharmed and presumably unindoctrinated, unless he is actually a “sleeper agent” and I’m currently blowing his cover. I remember that he was bubbling over with tales of trains having to have their axles swapped over in the dead of night and other exciting things like that, most of which I’ve long forgotten. It’s quite peculiar, really, that I do remember that one about the trains, now that I come to think of it. Maybe it was some kind of secret code word for some operation or other that washed my brain…

He had also managed to acquire a vast collection of Moscow Olympic Games badges that became pretty hot currency for a week or two, which is presumably how I came to acquire one. This could have been the point in my life where I lost my treasured 1966 (or was it 1968?) “Beano” Annual. (Whichever it was, it was the one with the great story about a family who lived in a huge hovercraft… Brilliant…!)

Anyway, getting back to that little badge, I’m fairly sure that there’s a distinct possibility that it’s the only one still floating around from that particular collection.

I wonder if it’s still sending regular signals to Moscow Control, and whether the poor bugger assigned to eavesdrop on my sad little life has gone mad with boredom yet…?

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.

UNCLE SCROOGE

Before we finally leave the wacky world of Walt Disney’s “Donald and Mickey” comic for the last (?) time, I just wanted to share with you this comic strip story from issue number 05, dated April 15th 1972, which was then merely the 60th anniversary of the date when the RMS “Titanic” finally sank…

It’s a short four-page story about the lives of the “Super Rich” and some of the rather “unique” issues that they have, not least in the tricky matter of where the money actually ends up when they are spending it, and it has rather stuck with me for these past forty years, and I still can remember that particular story making quite an impression upon me at the time for some unknown reason.

Maybe it was the excuses given for changing the car on the third and fourth pages…?

Somehow that sort of decadence seemed over-indulgent to me even when I was less than a decade old, but then I remember very clearly being aware of how stretched we were financially even then.

I don’t know quite what the political leanings of the writers of Walt Disney’s “Donald and Mickey” comic were, or what message it was that they were trying to get across, but I think it must have embedded itself somewhere deep in my youthful psyche when I think about how I have felt about the banks and the great big “money-go-round” down the years…

FINDING CAPTAIN NEMO - EPISODE 6

The sixth and final part of the first “The Adventures of Captain Nemo” tale from Walt Disney’s “Donald and Mickey” Comic, issue number 6, dated April 22nd 1972, still being printed in that glorious shade of blue ink (I wonder if it was cheaper? It certainly seems more prone to fading that it otherwise might have been) and still terrifically thrilling. Sadly, despite the promise of a “super new adventure” starting next week, this was where I stopped keeping my editions of “Donald and Mickey” comic and the rest (apart from a couple of stragglers) were allowed to be recycled into history, but I hope you have enjoyed these seemingly “forgotten” episodes from a story I remember devouring excitedly when I was a child, and which sparked my young imagination for things like engineering, design and story-telling, all of which still interest me today. Get them young, eh...?

FINDING CAPTAIN NEMO - EPISODE 5

Part five of “The Adventures of Captain Nemo” from Walt Disney’s “Donald and Mickey” Comic, issue number 5, dated April 15th 1972 (and with these two pages still being printed in a glorious shade of blue ink) and things seem to be getting tense as we head towards the next and final instalment...

FINDING CAPTAIN NEMO - EPISODE 4

Part four of “The Adventures of Captain Nemo” from Walt Disney’s “Donald and Mickey” Comic, issue number 4, dated April 8th 1972 and with these two pages still being printed in a glorious shade of blue ink which seems to have got darker this week (unless it was just the story that did...?)

FINDING CAPTAIN NEMO - EPISODE 3

Part three of “The Adventures of Captain Nemo” from Walt Disney’s “Donald and Mickey” Comic, issue number 3, dated April 1st 1972 and with these two pages still being printed in a glorious shade of blue ink...

FINDING CAPTAIN NEMO - EPISODE 2

Part two of “The Adventures of Captain Nemo” from Walt Disney’s “Donald and Mickey” Comic, issue number 2, undated, but published sometime in late March 1972 and with these two pages now printed in a glorious shade of blue ink...

FINDING CAPTAIN NEMO - EPISODE 1

A few months ago, over in Lesser Blogfordshire ( at m-a-w-h.blogspot.com go on, pay a visit, there’s lots of stuff in the archive for you to read) I wrote a piece about submarine movies, a topic which has fascinated me since I don’t know when.

Or rather I do. When I was about 8 years old, with an issue dated March 4th 1972, a comic started being published called “Walt Disney’s Donald and Mickey” and inside its pages was a two page comic strip called “The Adventures of Captain Nemo” based loosely upon a film which, at 8, I’d not ever seen, and featuring a captain who seems far less angry than might be expected if you’d only ever met him in the book. This was the Walt Disney adaptation of  Jules Verne’s “20,000 Leagues Under the Sea” and the drawings featured the most amazing submarine that I had never seen, their design for the “Nautilus”.

Now in order to illustrate that article, I hunted down an image of the fictional “Nautilus” submarine online and pasted it into my blog and that was when I remembered the comic strip, but all of my searches came up with nothing. I could not find any record of it. The internet cupboard was bare and, as we all are aware these days, if it doesn’t exist on the internet, then it probably never existed at all. It was almost as if I’d imagined the whole thing and the comic strip which I thought I remembered had simply never been...

Happily, on a more recent occasion, and because I had finally found a moment to do so, I was going through some boxes of stuff I’ve got at home and, because I rarely throw anything away, I found the first six issues of that comic in one of them, albeit  brutally fastened together in a way that would make collectors shudder, and which had also been partially scribbled upon (in a way designed not to preserve them in a pristine condition for all eternity) by my more vandalism-inclined younger self.

Even better, within their colourful pages was to be found the two page “Adventures of Captain Nemo” printed in black (in issue one but in later editions in various glorious shades of blue) ink on the kind of pinkish-hued newsprint paper usually reserved for the financial papers.

Anyway, in a vague effort to demonstrate that my memory isn’t always completely wrong, here are the first two pages of that first adventure, from “Donald and Mickey” issue number 1, which I can still remember reading as if it only happened yesterday, and I hope that you’ll be as excited by the drawings of that magnificent submarine as I once was, even though I’m sure that you’ll now be far more familiar with it than I was back then.

Enjoy!