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Hay fever was the reason I failed my O-levels. I should know, I’m a doctor, well, I once owned a plastic stethoscope from a 1960s doctors and nurse kit.

The hay fever season has returned to these shores (probably from Russia); I remember back to being sixteen in 1973, sitting my O-levels and contracting, for the first time, Allergic Rhinitis – which is the correct medical term for hay fever and not the name of the cross-eyed rhino in Daktari.

My desk, inside the hot, imposing, alien school hall on Battersea Rise, looked more like a chemist’s than a work station. If I’d had a bottle of ointment to treat marsh ague, some pampers and a box of prophylactics I could have rivalled Balham Boot’s!

I’d never had hay fever before and went to every exam armed with pen; Piriton; a Penetrol inhalant – which unblocked noses with power like that of a flame thrower; paper hankies; cloth hankies – all with a big “M” on (and a diagram of an oxbow lake, which I’d sewed on the night before my Geography O-level) and lucky (or not in this case) Gonk!

I also had a slide rule which proved more useful during my music O-level – underlining the name Chopin – than it did when I sat my maths O-level!

Despite having a desk which resembled that of a fifteenth century alchemist (I could turn base metal into Kleenex) I didn’t do very well with my science exams.  Not so much not knowing my arse from my elbow, I didn’t even know my amoeba from my elements tables.

Gesundheit!

I was told, after winning a new client, that my presentation had been “entertaining”. The person telling me this hadn’t actually been at the meeting, but they had heard and asked why?

“I used several glove puppets,” I replied.

I hadn’t, but it did remind me of my (rather too many for a boy) massive collection of soft toys I’d accumulated as a kid – including many glove puppets.

I have an early picture of me, aged four, throttling Sooty. As a kid, growing up in the sixties, many of the childrens’ programmes I watched invariably had glove puppets as part of the merchandise.  I was never that interested in string-puppets (although Muffin the Mule had been legalised by the time I was ten in 1967) but my loyalty remained with things you could stick your hand into (I should have been a vet rather than choosing a career in advertising).

My favourite was Willie Wombat (still illegal in some States in the US) – Willie Wombat was to Tingha and Tucker as Knots Landing was to Dallas.

As an only child, and with a collection of glove puppets large enough to form several football teams, I would invariably re-enact big football games in my bedroom (although doing this didn’t stop me having bad eyesight!).

One evening in mid-June 1970 Willie and Wendy Wombat became Gerd Müller and Uwe Seeler and snatched three late goals for a very antipodean-looking West German team against an England XI consisting of Sooty, Sweep and Sue as the front three. No contest.

I’m still technically a member of the Tingha & Tucker Club. The newsletters have dried up due to Tingha and Tucker moving the America to work on a koala stud farm.  However, if ever I feel nervous I simply sing Auntie Jean’s Wibbly Wobbly Way.

Next week: Why Twizzle defies every aspect of modern day health & safety.

I’ve never owned a pair of blue, denim jeans.

I’m probably in that 0.01% of the world’s population where a pair has never been in my wardrobe, but I was never realistically given the option.

Rather than spend money on a pair of Levi’s or Wrangler’s, the only option to me was the Tesco Home ‘n’ Wear on Balham High Road.

As a teenager in the early 70s, I earned no money, so was reliant on my mother as my clothing benefactor. This benevolence sadly only stretched the 500-yards from our flats on Balham High Road to the non-food Tesco shop further down the road – not for me anything from Reno, Nevada or Greensboro, North Carolina!  Tesco Home ‘n’ Wear, Balham was the only choice.  A consequence of this non-option was that I never owned a pair of blue denims from a famous brand.  The only thing shrinking in my bath as a teenager might have been blue, but certainly wasn’t made out of denim.

The same fate struck me with shirts. I so wanted a Ben Sherman shirt; the option I was given was one from Trutex (might as well have been Artex – arguably more fashionable and at least I could have covered my ceiling with it).

Trutex was to Ben Sherman what Hot Hits and Top of the Pops records were to the songs’ original artists.  Similar, but the collar, designed like the hat on The Flying Nun, gave it away that it was not the real thing!

I’ve never been that fashion conscious – probably scarred by the disastrous Haute Couture forced on me as an adolescent.  To me, as a teenager, a Kaftan was a dog known for its long, shiny hair; flares were things you activated if marooned at sea and (until Eurotrash was aired on Channel 4) I thought Jean-Paul Gaultier was the best full back Paris Saint Germain ever had.

I first encountered the Tooth Fairy in 1961.

I never actually met her (or him) (and assumed they lived in my Balham block of flats as you wouldn’t have wanted to walk down the High Street in the middle of the night) but was told that he/she or it carried sixpences to replace missing teeth. I worked out, in a JP Morgan-type of way, that I could stand (or lie, as I was invariably in bed when the Tooth Fairy visited) to eventually gain ten-bob, as I had twenty baby teeth.

This was my first experience of profit and loss as my gain of sixpence per tooth was quickly negated by my mother charging me a shilling to protect me the night the Tooth Fairy was coming from the Bogey Man. By the time I started the juniors in primary school I was heavily in debt to my mother.

Sixpence is worth £1.14 these days. If you haven’t got a note for your child/grandchild then there is the danger of leaving sufficient coins under their Flopsy Bunny pillow to potentially cause copper, nickel and zinc poisoning.  Might this be something the Bogey Man could protect you from?

I was destitute aged seven as Christmas was also heavily taxed: the sledges needed to be hired (there was great demand at Christmas, so the prices artificially inflated); reindeers aren’t cheap to keep and I was told there was a congestion charge for sledges (even though this wasn’t enforced in London until 2003); plus, half a sprout and mince pie crumbs cost several guineas in 1961.

Obviously, approaching 61, I realise neither the Tooth Fairy or Santa exists (I discovered this aged fourteen – as if adolescence wasn’t tough enough) but today, if there isn’t a huge amount of chocolate for me, I shall be a very unhappy Easter Bunny.

1966 is fondly remembered in England mainly for winning the World Cup. For me it was the year I was forced to watch The Sound of Music without my glasses.

I’d been wearing glasses since I was five and now, at nine, whilst I didn’t need them all the time, I did require them for watching TV and any film involving both Julie Andrews and Christopher Plummer.

In the summer of 1966 I visited for the first (and last) time, the Isle of Wight. I stayed at the Ocean View Hotel which was a lie on two fronts: there was no view of any ocean (you could barely see the Solent) and it was more boarding house/prison than hotel.  Nearby Parkhurst was probably modelled on the routine there.

One evening’s entertainment was a trip from the “hotel” in Shanklin to the Odeon at Ventnor. We drove the 3.7 miles there and had bought tickets for the blockbuster musical from the previous year.  It was, after we collected our tickets, when I discovered I’d left my glasses back at the hotel.  3.7 miles was deemed too far to return to fetch them and my mother insisted I watch the film and suggested I squint (another reason she never made it as an ophthalmologist) through the entire 174-minutes.  In Germany they had a shortened version for their own cinema-going public which lasted only 138-minutes – I can only assume the scenes involving the Nazis were left out?

Watching the film with very indistinct vision meant I didn’t think the goatherd was all that lonely – I could see three of them; Maria didn’t have a few favourite things, she appeared to have bloody hundreds and in the scene where they sing: “So long, farewell, auf wiedersehen, adieu” I wondered, with ostensibly fifty or more children (several of whom were sixteen going on seventeen) on the staircase, how on earth it didn’t collapse?

Climb every mountain? Which one, I can see a couple?

In 1969 I was destined to be the next Eric Bristow as I won the darts tournament at my local youth club.

Sadly, the promise of being the successor to the Crafty Cockney (I didn’t attend elocution lessons, so was halfway there) was never to be; although my 14.3% O-level pass rate suggests that a misspent youth was evident.

My auntie Vera trained me, from an early age, to regularly hit double top – she’d tried to teach me piano on her Blüthner piano, but realised early on I’d be less Liberace, more Lazarenko. I was a dart prodigy; what Mozart was to symphonies, I was to 160 check-outs.

The youth club met in the hall of my old primary school in Balham. It did seem odd, as a twelve-year-old, a. going back there not singing Hill of the North, rejoice (which we seemed to sing every week during assembly) b. no sight of a recorder or Glockenspiel and c. it was dark outside.

We were fed copious amounts of orange squash in the days when people didn’t realise the dangers of E-numbers – it’s a curious sight, watching a group of pumped-up teenagers trying to play table-tennis as if killing a large rodent.

We’d also play snooker – well, I say snooker – the tables were the size if Fred and Joe Davis had been three-foot midgets, with less felt on the table than a very tiny piece of Fuzzy Felt.  However, it was an escape from parents, homework and Glockenspiels.

The evening of the darts final arrived – which I’d breezed through to, beating several eleven-year-old girls in the process. I’d been practising trickier check-outs with my aunt the previous night only for the other finalist to have succumbed to Scarlet Fever (not brought on (as we all believed) from watching too may episodes of Captain Scarlet).  So, by default, I won.

Although, to this day, I still think oche is something played at posh schools.