“SAFARI SO-GOODY”

Christopher Biggins used to say that (every bloody week) on the early 1980s children’s game show “On Safari” when I was at an age when I should have known better than to watch it.

I know! Wretched isn’t it?

That game show also introduced the wider viewing public to Gillian Taylforth, so it’s got an awful lot to answer for, but it’s my own fault for daring to venture across to “The Other Side” for my televisual treats instead of sticking to good old “Auntie” like I ought to have done.

The BBC had a far more “respectable” approach to the whole topic of safaris as witnessed by this magazine I found in a box recently, a publication commemorating the “Blue Peter Royal Safari” as taken by the then Princess Anne and Valerie Singleton way, way back in 1971.

Nowadays, I’m sure that WHSmith would use some sort of ghastly bastardisation of the language and refer to it as a “Bookazine” but back then, despite the stiffness of its covers, it was still a plain old-fashioned “magazine” and would have set you back the Princ(ess)ly sum of 30 “new pence” or “six bob” in old money…

We had, after all, only just been “decimalised…”

(Some of us never really got over it…!)

So, is it worth an absolute fortune, now then…?

Sadly not.

AbeBooks have got a couple going for about four quid, so it was hardly an investment, but it was interesting to look through, especially when you get to this page towards the end when you see two young women walking along the seashore in, what might seem to the casual observer, an ever-so-slightly “raunchy” manner and you have to remind yourself just who it is that you’re looking at as they’re strolling along the sand in their swimwear looking as if they haven’t a care in the world.

I nearly “met” Princess Anne once, you know. I did “meet” one of her security officers who didn’t seem all that pleased with me, I can tell you…

I was in Bristol and was trying to get past the theatre where a crowd had gathered and blocked the pavement. Being just a tiny, weeny bit drunk at the time I decided that I wasn’t going to go around the crowd, and I wasn’t going to hang around waiting for it to go away…

No way…!

I was going to go through it…

And I decided to do it just as H.R.H. emerged from the front door of the theatre…

Oh, we can laugh about it now, but at the time it was… perfectly all right, actually…

Originally written for "MAWH - Light Under A Bushel" July 5th, 2012 but not published.

BISCUITNESSIE

A relatively long time ago (well, last September) in another place, I wrote about the rather bonkers graphics that I’d noticed on a box of Viennese biscuits which I’d been bought…

http://m-a-w-h.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/this-means-nothing-to-me.html

Well, a few weeks later on, as we moved into our brand spanking new offices, our beloved leader bought us a box of biscuits to celebrate our new lives, full of hope and fresh starts. (and look how well that turned out), and lo and behold it was another example from that very same range and those bonkers M&S designers (“These are not just designers…”) had been up to their old tricks again, only this time they were doing their “stereotyping thing” to dear old Scotland.

I mean there’s a “tartanish” pattern to the background which might be enough to fool the tourists, and there’s a ghostly thistle lurking behind the biscuit with the thistle moulded into it, but things start to get really bonkers when you’re putting tartan hats on your biscuits and pretending that Nessies humps are made up of biscuity goodness.

Come to think of it, unless I’m very much mistaken, perhaps “goodness” really isn’t the word when it comes to shortbread. “Tastiness” might be more appropriate. My clogged arteries and expanding waistline are testimony to the fact that I’m more than a little partial to the odd biscuit or twelve, but I’d never place “All Butter Shortbread”, Scottish or otherwise, at the “healthy” end of the foodstuffs range.

Still, with each biscuit “only” containing 100 calories and taking up a mere 5% of your recommended daily amount, you can eat at least twenty of them before you have to start considering that you might have, perhaps, “overdone” it, which would mean that you still had ten left for tomorrow, and, as long as you didn’t eat anything else, well only 34% of that particular day’s food intake would actually have been butter and only 8% would have been actually “fat” so… Result!

After all, it’s hardly the same as eating a deep-fried Mars bar, is it…?

They are also mostly wheatflour, which (I presume) means that they’ve got wheat in them and, well, wheat’s pretty healthy stuff, isn’t it? All those breakfast cereals seem to think so, and wheat also grows in the ground which means that it’s “natural” and, if you squint your eyes shut, you might even mistake it for vegetable matter and be able to count it towards your “5 a day…”

So anyway, back in September, after the biscuits had all been munched, I slid the empty box into my desk drawer and promptly forgot all about it until last week when I was sorting through my things in preparation for our imminent “great return” to the fun palace, and I found it there, so I brought it home to show you in these little “show and tell” pieces I seem to be doing at the moment.

Okay, you might think it takes a particular brand of lunacy to hang on to the packaging for a box of biscuits we ate at work for all these months but I remember thinking at the time we received our little gift that the packaging seemed to have a familiar hand behind it, and the story of their ongoing madnesses just needed to be told.

Time for a biccy, I think.

I’ll just put the kettle on…

Originally written for "MAWH - Light Under A Bushel" July 8th, 2012 but not published.

QWERTY or not QWERTY?

The first typewriter that was ever officially “mine” was a rather beautifully designed and styled one, a genuine “thing of beauty” which used to belong to a friend of my father, an elderly blind lady called Miss Frieda (or possibly Freda) LePlait (or possibly Le Plat) who used to run “The Kindness Club”. This was a club for children who liked animals and from which we used to get regular newsletters when I was very young, although the club itself was probably so small and obscure that it now seems to have been erased from history.

I presume that at some point she got herself a new typewriter and was throwing this old Remington away, but, for whatever reason, at about the age of eight I acquired a second hand typewriter to type my bits and pieces on, and, maybe, surreptitiously be taught to write and learn to spell rather better at the same time, although judging by Word’s insistence on putting red zig-zags under my words, perhaps that didn’t work out too well after all.

I’ve always liked typewriters and still have a fondness for their old-fashioned lo-tech (and battery-free) mechanical action even in this modern age, even though it’s probably years since I actually sat down and used one. I think that there’s something rather comforting about that systematic “clack-clacking” as the keys hit the paper. Perhaps it’s because it takes me back to hearing my father writing his sermons when I was very young, or maybe it’s because I really am some kind of retrograde when it comes to embracing new technology, but, whatever it is, they remain rather fascinating machines to me.

I still have three of them. Miss LePlait’s Remington, my father’s last Silver-Reed, and another which predates them both and belonged to my grandfather but which I was unable to extricate from the loft recently as it had got itself seemingly inextricably lodged behind something, but this one has always remained a favourite, even though I seem to have “vandalised” it by etching my name onto it at some point.

That’ll have been my dad, again, letting me loose with one of those pens with a metal nib that would let you mark things by scratching into the surface in one of those strange theories of theft prevention that we all sometimes go through.

If you look at the picture carefully, you’ll notice something “odd” about the keyboard because it’s not a standard QWERTY but some other, more arbitrary layout. I was once told that this was because it was meant for use by blind people and so all of the more “useful” keys (in the best Holmesian “Adventure of the Dancing Men” tradition) were put on the bottom row for easier access. I don’t know whether that’s true or not, but it might explain why I got it rather than the office typing pool, as it might have been pretty much useless to anyone who was a trained touch typist.

It’s interesting to me that, despite having used a QWERTY keyboard pretty much every day for over two decades I still struggle to think where each key is. I mean, obviously I know where they are, otherwise these pieces would be a heck of a lot shorter, but, if I have to think about it, well, I can obviously give you QWERTY and I’m pretty sure I could point out the OPASNM, but the rest just remain a little vague, even though I don’t have to think about it all that much when I’m rattling out these single-digit monstrosities for you to read.

Still, it’s interesting how QWERTY has become the “standard” international keyboard layout of choice (well, for English and most of the European languages anyway…) when there were so many others about. Apparently we have to thank Christopher Latham Sholes of Milwaukee, Wisconsin for the QWERTY layout which was designed, despite myths to the contrary, to speed up typing by preventing jams as the letter bars of the early typewriters used to get tangled up with each other.

There are others, of course; the Dvorak, the Colemak and the Neo to name but three, but it is the QWERTY that seems most likely to prevail and, as for Miss LePlait’s much loved keyboard, well it still seems to be rather unique and might be part of the reason that I never learned to type properly…

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.

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!