Month: January 2019

Dogging is not just for Christmas

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I never encountered Janet & John when I began to read at my south London school in the early sixties. My class was given Mac and Tosh (do you see what they did there?  I assume the authors also ran a chain of raincoat shops?)

I missed out on Here we go (Janet & John become football hooligans); Off to play (Janet and John discover the joys of truancy) and I know a story (where Janet & John learn the art of pathological lying).

No, I had two Scottie dogs helping me improve my four-and-a-half-year-old reading skills.

The early books were Mac and Tosh learn to read and Mac and Tosh learn to write.  I moved on from this series quite quickly and assumed the next editions covered: Mac and Tosh learn elementary computer programming and Mac and Tosh secure world peace.

Because I progressed away from books with lines like here is the dog; we like the dog; John likes dogging, it wasn’t until I was in my mid-twenties that I learned that dogs can neither read nor write.  I blame this on Dr Doolittle and watching too many episodes of Mr Ed.

Finger lickin’

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My walk to school in the late 60s would, every day, take me past a stamp shop.  The shop, near Tooting Bec Station, was next to a baker’s, where the smell emitting from the bakery was so foul I was drawn ever nearer to the stamp shop next door for comfort and often considered collecting stamps.

My dilemma was not knowing the difference between a Penny Black stamp and a Green Shield one (although I look back and think, if I’d owned a Penny Black, I wouldn’t have needed to lick as many Green Shield stamps as I did to collect the required amount for a flannelette sheet).

I would, most Saturdays, journey to the stamp shop, with a peg on my nose to avoid the acrid smell emanating from the next-door bakery, to buy some stamps.

I bought an album, a set of hinges and an implement which you dipped the hinges in, so you didn’t die of thirst with too much licking (I nearly bought one using Green Shield stamps but had dehydrated by the time I got to the shop in Clapham Common).

I quickly realised that my half a crown pocket money was never going to buy a Penny Black (or even a perforation off one) so my plan B was to buy stamps with modes of transport on.  Most people would collect stamps from specific countries (or Penny Blacks), but I was content with stamps with Concorde on or the occasional hovercraft.   My album consequently had no value, but I believed it could float on water or travel at super-sonic speeds.

It was only when I was older that I discovered the official word for collecting stamps was fellatio; more of that next week when I talk about my rare Blue Mauritius!

River deep, Streatham High (Road)

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In the 60s, my mum took me twice to the Streatham Odeon: once to see Mary Poppins and once to see The Supremes.

I saw them both in quick succession and wondered, halfway through Love Child, why Julie Andrews wasn’t in the line-up?  And why they ended the concert singing Baby Love and not A spoonful of sugar?

When I saw The Supremes, Diana Ross had left the group to commence a career starting World Cup Finals and I thought I was well within my rights to expect the expert nanny, together with her magical umbrella to be on the stage singing You can’t hurry love. (This song was originally written for the 1937 Cockney musical, Me and My Girl and the version was to have been called, You can’t hurry, love.)

I’m thrilled, however, that the Streatham Odeon is still functioning as a cinema; the Balham Odeon is now a Majestic Wine House – not so much Kia Ora more a fine Beaujolais and the Mayfair Tooting is now a bank (via, in the 70s, an upmarket snooker hall – which, of course, in Tooting, is oxymoronic) and will probably end up being a pub – as most old banks do.

I suppose there is a link, as the grocer where Mary Poppins bought her sugar was called Nathan Jones.

Three Amoebas

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In September 1968, after a series of exams and interviews, and having gained a place at my Tooting grammar school, I was amazed that the first set of homework was to cover our text books.

I was anticipating, in my first week to have gone home to split the atom; remembered the dates of the reigns of all the Anglo-Saxon monarchs or knowing that in binary 01000101 is 69 (which, when you’re 11, is just another number).

Over the next few days we would all come back to our school rooms with our books adorned in whatever material our parents had left lying around our houses.

Most had used brown paper, one or two had gone down the wallpaper remnant route, with one boy coming in with his books covered with red, flock wallpaper which looked suspiciously like the same wallpaper which decorated the Granada Tooting; I never went to tea at this boy’s house but I’d have bet his carpet would have had the word GRANADA inscribed into the weaving.

Another lad came in with his books bedecked in Thunderbirds wallpaper; sadly, for him, in the teachers’ eyes, Thunderbirds were not “GO” and he consequently got a detention – even Virgil Tracy couldn’t rescue him from that!

The homework did get harder: the toughest assignment being charged with looking after the class amoeba (this was a grammar school, so no run-of-the-mill hamster) for an entire weekend, making sure it didn’t die or get impregnated by other organisms.