Category: 70s

I’ve not really got the physique for leggings. I have long legs but, because my tummy’s sponsored by Picnic, and my body is less a temple, more a row of terraced houses in Bolton!

During my 42-years of commuting up to the City from various SW London stations, I’ve noticed an increasing amount of my fellow travellers wearing leggings. And it seems the earlier the train, the more multi-coloured the leg attire.

This is a relatively new fashion.

Years ago, on the early train, you’d expect to see either people in suits or men in overalls carrying either a spirit level or a tool box – both of which would be paint-splattered (do they come with paint already splattered or is the new owner presented with a small tin of Dulux and left to their own devices?

But back in the 70s, during my early years of commuting, there was not the proliferation of gyms there are now. If you wanted to keep fit or build your body, you’d buy a Bullworker or send off for the Charles Atlas Body-building course, advertised every week in the Sunday Express.  (I never sent off for one as I like the taste of sand being kicked at me at speed)

My question is this: are these legging-clad commuters actually going to a gym or preparing perhaps for the Tour de France?  Last week a man got on at Clapham Junction wearing leggings together with a jacket and shirt on.  Is this all the rage now too?  I’ve not been to Paris Fashion Week for a while now, so I’m out of the haute couture loop.  Or possibly the leggings are too tight it affects blood flowing to the brain and manifests itself in the ability to coordinate clothes either side of your waist?

I’d like to see bowler hats returning to commuters’ outfits; if you’re swapping this for a pair of leggings then, like pregnant (or very lazy) women sporting “Baby on board” badges, have a sticker which says: “My personal trainer knows lots of Latin”.

In the 70s, aside from wearing outrageously flared jeans and growing your hair longer than your mother, there was a massive desire to display Pampas grass in one’s front garden.

In all innocence, wanna-be Percy Throwers would go to their local garden centre (or, more likely, florist, as this was the 70s) to buy up flora from the south American mountainside.

Unbeknownst to these amateur horticulturalists, having Pampas grass in your front garden advertised houses where swingers’ parties might take place.

In the 70s, I lived in a fourth-floor flat and as such had no Pampas grass our window box – no bad thing, as this might have attracted abseiling swingers – although, they’d have been given a suitable welcome by my mum, but warned about not taking off their safety helmets.

Not everyone had Pampas grass in their front gardens. Which begs the question, what might other floral displays have secretly indicated?  What did a pot of begonias hide?  The housewife inside had an even better display of begonias? Was a front garden full of poppies indicating the house was actually a clandestine crack den?  Anyone designing some massive phallus out of a privet hedge clearly saw no need for Pampas grass.

Pampas grass would always remain outside due to the leaves being particularly sharp. Anyone not knowing that could bleed to death before throwing their car keys into an old ashtray advertising Kensitas.  Always a dampener at any party, a guest bleeding to death (especially if you’ve just hoovered), unless the paramedics, who arrive, enjoy dressing up in a uniform and can throw a set of ambulance keys into an ashtray at short range.

I now live in a house but whilst I have no Pampas grass growing outside, I do have a barbed wire fence which sends the message: thank you, but my drive doesn’t need re-surfacing.

Next week we’ll be discussing people who grew Pampas grass in their back garden.

I could have had a black belt in karate, but only attended six lessons.

In 1975, I started karate lessons in a Portacabin next to the A&E department at St George’s Hospital in Tooting.  At the time, I didn’t know whether this was ironic or simply a precaution if someone were to hit you with a roundhouse kick they’d just mastered while you were still trying to work out how to tie the (nowhere near black) belt keeping up your trousers.

I had an aunt, who lived in Flowersmead on Balham High Road. As her only nephew she took a great interest in what I did.  However, the character in Richard Sheridan’s “The Rivals”, Mrs Malaprop, could have been based on my aunt; she invariably got the place names just slightly wrong where I went to undertake my activities.

My aunt would shop, while visiting my Nan, her sister, in the dairy housed within Du Cane Court, where I also lived.  She would announce proudly to the other shoppers that her nephew went to Karachi every Tuesday. The other shoppers were probably thinking: “4,880 miles? Every Tuesday? Bit of a trek, just for one day?  And those who knew what I did for a living would probably ponder: Didn’t know there were advertising agencies in Western Pakistan.”

Because of my love of cricket as a kid, I’d frequently visit The Oval and Lord’s.   I’d often be accosted by other tenants inside the flats genuinely asking if I was alright, or more to the point, cured?  My aunt had told people I’d been to Lourdes.

I was never very good at playing cricket, perhaps I might have done better if I’d had Our Lady as a coach, rather than Alf Gover?

43-years today I started work. With two O-levels you tended not to be placed on the fast-track graduate scheme; you were, however, almost over-qualified to be a messenger.

My role for the first three-months of my advertising career was as a messenger; my role was, twice a day, to travel to Fleet Street, where most for the major UK national newspapers were and representatives of most regional newspapers: 63 Fleet Street housed the Southampton Evening Echo; 85, Portsmouth News and Sunderland Echo, 107, Isle of Wight County Press (handy if you wanted to know what was going on with cats and the rooves of Ventnor supermarket car parks).  I had to collect newspapers in which my company’s clients had run advertisements.

During my three-months I worked out I could save the money I’d be given for bus fares by walking from the agency in Howland Street to Fleet Street (this is how money laundering begins!).

Because I travelled alone I would rest in the Wimpy on Bride Lane or Mick’s Café on Fleet Street. I would dream that, with all the savings I was making on fiddling expenses, I’d open my own café, which, of course, would also be called Mick’s Cafe.  I also found that, if I’d drunk too many ice-cream floats in the Wimpy, there were very nice toilets, where Kent Messenger was on 76 Shoe Lane.

On one occasion, for our client Martini, I was given an A-Z and told to go to Brewer Street to collect a copy of Men Only, where the client had an ad on the back cover.

I’d never been to Soho before. Not knowing where the offices of Paul Raymond Publications were exactly, I walked quite slowly down Brewer Street.  As I walked down the street thinking the lighting bill must be quite large, a man suddenly appeared from a doorway to distract me from my utility costs ruminations.  “Would you like a girl for the afternoon?” he asked.  I thought to myself, is this a bit like having the school hamster for a weekend – a temporary loan?  And would he be supplying the girl equivalent of sawdust and sunflower seeds? I replied, “No thank you, I need to get this month’s Men Only” – he looked at me and, seeing the thick lenses of my glasses, assumed this was probably not the first time I’d sought out a copy!

I found the building and, after asking the receptionist for a copy of that month’s magazine, waited as several scantily-clad women walked past me. I assumed there’d been some failure in the building’s air-conditioning.

(Sadly) I never returned to the building and the nearest I ever got to seeing scantily-clad women was an old woman in a bikini on a beach in Hythe, plastered over the Kent Messenger.  I’d often wished to see similar pictures in my local Balham & Tooting News, but a topless Alf Dubbs was the nearest I ever got.

I look back, 43-years later and wondered that I should have thought less hamster more beaver!

I was a dog owner for half a day.

I was ten and my mother thought she could win Cruft’s; the procurement of a West Highland Terrier would show us the road to victory.

What my mother had not anticipated was the trickiness of owning a dog whilst living on the fourth floor of a block of flats. I think she’d anticipated the dog either being on an extremely long lead or possessing the ability to fly (perhaps she thought she was buying a Harrier rather than Terrier?)

My mother also found out, in these fateful few hours of dog-ownership, that un-house-trained dogs giving no warning of doing a pooh, nor have the talent to order a lift to the correct floor to get to down to the communal gardens.

To be fair to the dog, during these morning hours, my mother had been sporting her newly-acquired curlers which would have loosened the bowels of most living organism.

By lunchtime, with a very nervous and understandably incontinent dog, the dog was returned to its previous owners, the people who also owned La Patisserie on Balham High Road. They had got rid of the dog as it had (literally) eaten all the pies. The dog had now been returned to be a perpetual menace to a selection of Fondant Fancies.

To avert my being so distraught over the loss of the free-poohing dog, my mother promised me a pet (as long as it wasn’t a dog, obviously). I fancied an aardvark, but mother said it would ruin her newly-laid shag-pile carpet with its burrowing.  I had (and still have) a terrible fear of birds, so a budgie, parrot or pterodactyl (we’d just started studying dinosaurs at school and hadn’t got as far as the extinction bit) were all out of the equation.

I chose a mouse, which I unimaginatively called Jerry.  Its toilet habits were similar to the terrier, only on an acceptably smaller scale.  Throughout the sixties, seventies and most of the eighties, I never owned another pet, having lived in various flats scattered around south-west London.

I now live in a house and an aardvark is back on the agenda as I have an ant infestation and it will save me money on the special powder. I think one would make a great pet, although a right bugger if it ever caught a cold!