Category: 70s

Flatulence will get you everywhere

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Did people fart less in the 70s?

Because of the changes at Waterloo Station throughout the summer I have had to experiment and vary (in case I’m followed) my journeys home.

This week I travelled from Victoria, via my home town of Balham, en route to Suburbia.  I was lucky as I was the only person in a carriage of four banks of four seats. That was until a late-boarding passenger got in my compartment and proceeded to sit next to me?  Did I have some invisible sign above my head saying “This man is lonely, sit next to him”?  But this was the second time that week where this had happened to me – empty carriage, then suddenly I have a new friend.  Had I been horrible in a previous life and this was some form of commuting karma on the 18.50?

My all-too-close neighbour began to entertain himself with that evening’s Standard.  Chewed pencil in hand, he duly went about completing the Sudoku. I’ve never seen anyone complete one so quickly; but then, I’ve never seen anyone using  the number 24 in one of the squares before.  Sudoku done, on to the crossword; and cryptic one at that!  I thought this man would struggle with “Hot beverage (3) “T” something “A”” let alone dig deep into his knowledge of Greek mythology to seek out possible answers.  However, I was wrong as the man next to me wrote HAEMOGLOBIN as one of the answers.  A considerable feat on two counts: one, it’s not the easiest word to spell and two, it’s not easy to get an eleven-letter word into seven-letter spaces!  He had completed the crossword (before we’d even got to Wandsworth Common) by using the word haemoglobin as every answer.  I assume he’d just learned the word?

However, it was just outside Balham when the flatulence began. Was this due to excitement of the speed in completing the Standard puzzle page?  Too many bubbles in his second can of Stella? Or bad diet?

I began commuting in 1974, the same year McDonalds opened their first restaurant in the UK. Before then, when I’d frequently visited my paternal grandmother in her council flat in St John’s Wood, the only food people would have on the train would be housed in Tupperware boxes (Tupperware was introduced into the UK in 1946 when the containers were used more for somewhere to put your ration book rather than actual food).

Before the influx of fast food, the only times you’d hear “take away” would be at primary school and if you’re nan had been collected by people in white coats as she’s thought she was Joan of Arc again (one of the many dangers of owning a three-bar fire). Nowadays, food available (especially at train stations) is manifold.  People will eat couscous (not remembering these were the people fighting in Kenya during the 60s); Sushi was the girl at school with a lisp and Vegan was one of the main characters in The Sweeney.

We are lucky in London that we have greater choice than we did in the 60s and 70s, when you had on one hand, top-end (unattainable) restaurants and hotels and at the other, cafes, where you came out smelling of what you’d just eaten and with nothing in between.

I’m going to write to British Rail asking them for a selection of new signs on their carriages: “NO FARTING”, “NO LOW HAEMOGLOBIN” OR EVEN “NO ONE ELSE”

More tea, Vicar?

 

Sign of the Ford Zodiac

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There should be playtime in the workplace. Fifteen mental minutes when you can run around before going back to your office, sweating like a pig before creating more content for your last primary school year county project; never has so much rubbish been written about Middlesex as there was by me in my south London primary school in the late sixties.

Within my school most boys wanted to play professional football or cricket (we weren’t allowed in the girls’ playground, which was no bad thing as this was where the threat of kiss chase lurked and, as a ten/eleven-year-old boy, all girls were considered soppy). (My mother had warned me that using other peoples’ toilet seats would induce VD; for me, kiss chase was simply the start of a slippery slope towards a life of contracting sexually-transmitted diseases.  My mother’s Chinese lantern presentations on the subject make me wonder how I ever talked to girls, let alone realise that kiss chase may well have been better fun than three-and-in).

In the confines of the boys’ playground, we’d emulate Peter Osgood or Colin Cowdrey – some of the boys who weren’t very sporty played cover drives like Peter Osgood and chested balls down and volleyed them like Colin Cowdrey. This was our desire, except for one boy in our class.  He wanted to be a Ford Zodiac.

Whilst we would hope, while we were running around, that possibly there’d be scouts from Chelsea or Fulham or Tooting & Mitcham if you were slightly more realistic; this one lad was hoping to have someone spot him from the Dagenham Motor Works. We all wanted to be footballers, he wanted to be a faux-wood dash board, leatherette steering wheel or alternator.   We were trying to make the ball swerve off the outside of our foot like Pele, our mutual classmate would run around, changing an imaginary gear like Marcel Marceau.

I never got to play for Chelsea, but then, fifty years later, I’ve never had to replace my clutch, although I think I’ve started to leak brake fluid!

Luxembourg Calling

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Until I was thirteen, I thought music was probably best heard under a thick blanket.

Armed with transistor radio, torch, blanket to muffle the sound of the transistor radio and ears which would make a pipistrelle bat jealous to listen out for potentially vituperative parents, in the evenings I would listen to Radio Luxembourg. I also had a pencil and paper to list the midweek Top 20. Unlike the BBC, who had their Top 20 inside Pick of the Pops, Radio Luxembourg’s offering was midweek.  My bed had so much stationery in it, it resembled a branch of WH Smith.

Because we lacked money, and to earn a few bob more, my father had a twice-weekly evening pools round around the back streets between Tooting High Street and St Benedict’s Hospital. My mum would drive him in our Austin A40 to his destination and follow him round (like kerb-crawling except my dad didn’t have the opportunity to stick his head in the car to ask “inside or out”).  I would sit in the back, listening to my radio.  These were days before car radios (which kept car radio theft down to a minimum); I would sit, one hand on the radio almost glued to my ear and the other on a pencil to write down the chart as it was unveiled.

Eventually we’d head home with my dad having been to one too many houses with people hiding behind their respective sofas. The chart, at this point, would only be about mid-way, so my sheet, with the numbers 10 to 1 remained blank.

By the time my strict parents had sent me to bed (ostensibly to sleep) the top five were yet to be revealed. Once the light was turned off, my listening post was hastily erected; important items were produced from under my pillow (this must have confused the Tooth Fairy).  My writing kit and torch came into their own as I rapidly wrote down (probably not grammatically correct) songs like, “signed, sealed, delivered, I’m yours”.

My interest in music coincided with my rapid eyesight decline (I have since learned my myopia was, due to another hobby discovered as a teenager, not helped, either!). I don’t think this was aided by some of the 70s bands having ridiculously long names – why couldn’t groups be called Lulu or Dana?  Why choose Dave, Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick and Tich?  If I’d have wanted to witness such names I’d have watched episodes of Trumpton.