In the ‘60s, growing up, one obsession I had was collecting silver foil to send off to Blue Peter to help provide guide dogs.
I was an avid viewer of the programme and keen to do my bit.
I had two sources of silver foil (aside from nicking my mum’s Bacofoil so we didn’t eat a roast for several months): the tops of milk bottles and the insides of some cigarette packets.
Within our Balham flats there was a grocer on site. I was insistent my family visited every day to “drink a pint a milk”. I’m sure there will have been dairy farms serving the SW17 area on high alert to produce more milk because of my calcium-intake keenness.
(As the only child and grandchild I was always treated to the “top of the milk” to put on my tinned fruit cocktail).
My dad smoked Senior Service. Once unwrapped and the top of the packet opened, covering the fags was a strip of silver foil. During the Blue Peter campaign, I’d got my dad smoking sixty-a-day.
While I never understood, how they turned my offerings of silver foil into Labradors and Golden Retrievers, I innocently assumed John Noakes must have been an alchemist?
Get down, Shep.