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It is Majestic Wine now, but years ago, in its place on Balham High Road, sat the Balham Odeon.

If you went there now you’d be more likely to get Burgundy rather than Butterkist and Chianti rather than Kia-Ora.

I was never a regular there for Saturday Morning Pictures. I went twice and both times they were showing “Emil and the Detectives” so I assumed, having learned the plot and most of the dialogue, it was pointless attending much after that as this was clearly the only film they showed.  My mum was quite relieved as my clothes would end up being soaked courtesy of someone above me accidentally dropping their Jubblies on me.

In 1970 my dad took me to watch George C Scott as the eponymous hero in the Oscar award-winning film “Patton: Lust for glory”. The film had a profound effect on me as, if ever, as a teenager, I even got close to speaking to a girl, I’d be so pleased, I’d run off down Balham High Road, bowling imaginary leg-breaks and whistling the main theme.

In 1963 my mum took me to the Odeon to watch “The Scarecrow of Romney Marsh”. The film, based on the books published in 1915 by Russell Thorndike (Sybil’s brother), tell of a vicar by day and smuggler in 18^th Century Kent coast by night.   In the 1963 film version Patrick McGoohan (“Dangerman” and “The Prisoner”) stars as the innocent vicar who, as evening comes and there is rum to be collected, dons a scarecrow mask.  If it had been used in the “Wizard of Oz” they’d have had to have made it X-rated.  It was scary and, to a particularly sensitive six-year-old, too much and, before I could break the film projector with my screaming, my mum took me out of the cinema.

The next time I went I didn’t last the 100% of the film. Dumbo, which my mother thought less violent, was the next thing I saw.  Well, saw up until Dumbo’s mum is trapped in the fire.  Again, before I could flood the Odeon with my tears, I was hastily removed.

I work in a business where I have to negotiate. People who know me and know of the Dumbo story realise that, if the negotiation isn’t going their way, all they have to do is say, “Run, Bambi, run.”

I assume Jubblies aren’t sixpence anymore?

Sport, living in Du Cane Court, was always restricting. With never more than ten children living in the flats, team sports were forever challenging – even if we included our imaginary friends (of which, being an only child, I had an entire family) we’d never make up a full XI.

Even with both Tooting Bec and Wandsworth commons nearby we still chose to play most of our sport around the garages which were round the back of the flats. In those days there were very few cars, a consequence was that our “playing field” was quite safe. The only traffic tended to be pedestrian in the form of the head porter, Mr Hurst, and his dog, Blackie (this was the sixties).

There were several “NO BALL GAMES ALLOWED” signs up and around the garages; Mr Hurst’s job was to manage this. Sadly, Mr Hurst, an ex-prison warder, had been bitten by a prisoner in HMP Wandsworth and consequently walked slowly and with a limp.  As did Blackie, who was the wrong side of 20 – and not in doggy years.  Despite being the human equivalent of 140, the dog was quicker than the man and would waddle into view first.  There were two ways into the garages and, as the dog entered at one end, we would gather up our sporting equipment and leg it the other way.  We were never caught and mercifully so as child-biting was still allowed in the mid-sixties.

When we did get to play and were Labrador-free, we would invent games for two or three people. The only problem was the low level of the garages.  If someone decided they were going to Wes Hall and get a ball to rear up, there was no option other than tipping it onto the rooves of the garages.  Subsequently, we became very adept at climbing walls onto the garages to retrieve our balls.  Word had it that Sherpa Tensing lived in the flats and mastered his climbing skills on the rooves of the garages in Du Cane Court.  We once found a set of clamps and, putting two and two together, made Everest.

We had to decide on a set of rules when the cars were about and it was possibly one summer to be given out caught one-handed off a Ford Cortina.

On Monday, 14th February 1971, when I was nearly 14, the UK currency system changed from the Roman Denarius system over to decimal (named after the Roman god of decorations – which is why Christmas is in December).  On the same day Belgian farmers illegally entered the EEC building in Brussels with three cows.  (Some of those cows went on to form UKIP).

It was on this day that I would have preferred to have been attacked by a mad, Flemish-speaking cow, as my mother had ordered me to teach her this new fangled method of money.

I have mentioned before in this vehicle that my mother’s education was limited given her own mother keeping her away from school for the duration of the war.  A consequence of which, although my mother could read, she was unable to write and certainly couldn’t add up (she thought that calculus was a former Roman emperor, multiplication was a song by Little Eva and division was a town in Wiltshire).  I had to teach this woman that, as from today, 240 was now 100.  I had more chance of successfully teaching my pet goldfish long division without using the aid of a sunken ship and a diver.

It was one of the most painful evenings of my life.  Given that I would go on to fail Maths O-level three times (I think it was three) it was like the blind leading the blind.  If we’d have involved my maternal great grandmother it would have been the blind leading the blind, as she was blind.

Sadly, she’d “gone to meet the angels” when I was six.  I always assumed the Angels were a family she knew who owned an Old Peoples Home for blind people and my great grandmother had gone to stay there.

I was never going to get my mother to get her head round the fact that half-a-crown was going to be twelve-and-a-half new pence.

“Halfpence,” she questioned, “will they be cutting the coins in two?”  So, adding up abilities poor, but she could do simple division.

The only good thing, in mum’s eyes, was that £500 was still a monkey.

However, this potential problem was averted as my mother, not yet forty and certainly not looking it, was tall, stunningly good looking with blonde hair and blue eyes.  She might not have been able to add up, but she managed to get a lot of things from various shopkeepers the length of Balham High Road for free.  Well, when I say free…

She couldn’t spell, but, from the carpet seller on Balham High Road, she would never go short of a new shag-pile carpet.  Quite apposite, really!.

For nearly sixty years I’ve listened intently to the weather forecast and have built up a vocabulary second only to my mother’s prolific and prodigious swearing repertoire.  Today I have leaned a new one: Thunder snow.  Ok, two words.  This what arrived in London today.  Should I get Virgil Tracy to get his snow-shovelling mole out of a Thunderbird 2 pod and save us all?   I’d suggest a Thundercat saving us too, but all their names were unimaginative, especially Sabre-Tooth Tiger-o.  Although I did like Elaine Paige in the stage show.

It will be talked of as an Arctic Blast.  “Bet you look good on the dance floor” being my favourite hit of theirs.

Aside from pigeons, my other fear is thunder.  I rarely pull rank at work, but my one instance is that, if it is thundering, someone stays in the office.  If there is no one there I have an inanimate green frog who protects me.

My holiday hell would be chasing thunder storms across the US.  If I inadvertently went on such a holiday I’d probably choose to lie (with aforementioned green frog) in the glove compartment.  They tend to be quite large in American cars.

The British are ill-equipped for any Arctic blast: they only have one shovel in Yorkshire, the only snow plough in the Home Counties has been made my Matchbox and Southern Rail are saying their guards shouldn’t be allowed to deal with snow from a foreign land.

People on the continent will be laughing at us.  People who voted Leave now realise the error of their ways.  Tomorrow Liam Dutton will be King and Susanne Charlton his Queen.

The post-Christmas season historically offer us a plethora of travel ads.  It’s cold and wet in the UK, so travel advertisers are encouraging you to seek warmer climes.

Having been on the receiving end of much moaning from my mother, my father succumbed and booked us on our first foreign trip: we were heading for Majorca.  It was the summer of 1968.  If Frankie Valli had had number dyslexia he’d have sung a song about it.

My mother had previously been to Bognor, Brighton and Bournemouth.  Because she’d had little education through not going to school during the Blitz, she’d only really mastered the letter “B”, so her vacation destinations were alphabetically limited.

We set off from Luton Airport to Palma.  It was only when we stepped onto the tarmac that we realised my mother had a fear of flying.

Earlier we’d been delayed several hours; we’d all been given vouchers to the value of 2/6 (12 and a half pence in today’s post-decimalisation days).  Mother took mine and got herself more alcohol.  We had to walk from the departure lounge (less lounge, more outside toilet) across the tarmac onto a plane which wouldn’t have looked out of place during the Berlin Airlift.

Whilst my father was carrying copious bags of Duty Free, my task was to get my mother onto the plane.  In 1968, when I was 11, I was very slight and so weak I couldn’t even pick up a discus during school athletics, let alone throw it the required distance to avoid getting detention.  So getting a five-foot seven, thirty-five- year-old adult on the plane was an incredible feat.  Not blessed with the persuasive powers of the Brothers Saatchi I simply dragged her like a caveman brining a sabre-tooth tiger back for tea.

Several weeks before the trip we were encouraged, lest you caught Spanish Tummy, to take tablets with the snappy name of Entero-Viaform.  The packet did what it said on the tin as there was a cartoon man gripping his stomach featured on the packet.

Even with the preventable medicine, my mother still got ill. This had followed on very quickly with her contracting cow pox, having one too many of her “heads” and now she had Balearic Belly.  My father vowed never to take her abroad again.  He didn’t.  It was back to Bognor next summer, there was less chance of getting Bognor Belly there.

The Queen has made her first appearance since going down with some lurgy, which is possibly this bronchial virus which has been going round.  Having missed two major church services I assume she’ll excommunicate herself?

It seems that many people have been affected by this illness which hangs about for three-weeks and makes you sound like Jane Austen and Frederic Chopin before being carted off to a sanatorium in Eastbourne; I’ve already started saving up for a blanket and bath-chair.  I knew those Green-Shield stamp books would come in handy.

In the mid-sixties peoples’ minds were temporarily taken off the ever-decreasing lengths of skirts as a possible smallpox scare hit our island.  Everyone was encouraged to get inoculated against this killer disease; I remember queuing up outside my doctors on Balham High Road to get mine.  Similar to going to foreign climes and the need to have a little bit of typhoid or West Nile Fever injected into you (you have to feel for the people of the West Nile having such a vicious disease named after their home town – it’d never happen in West Hampstead) the vaccine for smallpox is the bovine disease, cow pox.  When this first began in 1796 satirical magazines showed cartoons of patients growing little cows from their limbs.

My mum got cow pox.  It meant two things: if she got smallpox she’d be stuffed and secondly, she couldn’t be inoculated against it.   Whilst she was ill she was forced to wear a bell, get milked twice away and only answered to the name of Daisy. It was rather typical of my mum – she and ailments went together like Pete ‘n’ Dud, Ron and Reg, Julian and Sandy.  She rarely took me to school as she’d often have “one of her heads” – as a youngster I wonder quite how many heads she possessed?  Could she remove them like Frankenstein’s monster?  Was the The Exorcist based on my mum and her head-swapping ability?

Sadly, my mother could also pick up diseases by hearing about them on the TV.  There could be a documentary about Dengue Fever on the telly one night, by early morning my mother thought she had the early symptoms. Always embarrassing being dropped at the school gates when one of your parents is ringing a bell screaming ‘unclean’.

Starting next week Norway, a country famous for regularly achieving “null points” at Eurovision, ranting racist (but with very good knowledge of UK history) football commentators and introducing the world to the word “Quisling” is to start switching off its country’s FM radio signal.

I am sure there will be many Norwegians from Oslo to Narvik who may not possess a digital radio.  There may be many inhabitants of Hammerfest who only own transistor radios; their only form of entertainment from next week could well end up being “pin the tail on the herring”.

This move to digital-only radio will also happen in the UK and I’m reminded of the joy different forms of radio has given me over the years as well as increasing my myopia.

The block of flats in Balham where I used to live had, when it was first built in 1936, radios installed into every flat.  They would play the Light Service (this had programmes with a lot of people saying “can I do you now, sir?”; the Home Service – mainly news read by virtually anyone except William Joyce and the Third Programme which cheered everyone up during the war years playing mostly Mahler.

By the 60s most of the radios hardly worked.  In my Nan’s flat it still worked but you had to go inside a cupboard in which it was housed.  I spent many hours inside this cupboard listening to programmes such as “I’m sorry I’ll read that again” and deciding which Mahler symphony I liked the least.  As well as the radio, also inside my Nan’s cupboard lay the central heating system; it was very hot inside the cupboard.  I remember after 30 minutes of “The Clitheroe Kid” I’d lost half a stone.  After the radio stopped working my Nan would hire out the cupboard to apprentice jockeys hopeful of a ride at Epsom.

I also had a transistor radio and would listen under my covers to the Top 30 on Radio Luxembourg; under torchlight I would write down the charts as they were played.  This is something I’ve never admitted to my optician – or psychiatrist.

I remember listening to a lot of sport on medium wave; Police activity on short wave (always handy when living so close to HMP Wandsworth) and long wave with my ear very close to the in-car speaker to Test Match cricket when not in the country, but you could see it from France.

I will bemoan the move to purely digital, but first it will be manifold Norwegians who will no longer be able to tune in to “De Bueskytter – the everyday story of fiord folk”