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.