Speaking Mandarin segments

cherry

With panic buying now a way of life, like watching Corrie or turning the gas off before you leave the house. And, as it becomes so, will our diets change or perhaps we might revert to things you’d forgotten about since childhood, but now remains the only things left on the shelves?
Over the decades, with the introduction of increasingly exotic foods, there must have been a point when you told yourself: these are the last tinned peaches I’m eating.
I think many of us of a certain age can remember refusing to eat corned beef because of its connotations with typhoid – not a good marketing gimmick. (This was before the Falklands War and blaming the Argentinians came naturally even in the early ‘60s).
It used to be perceived as a treat – opening up a tin of fruit in syrup – especially if it involved a glacé cherry – although an inevitable family fight would ensue over whose cherry this was as there was usually only one half in each tin. The scuffling being good practice for shopping these days?
There does, though, seem to be a surfeit of hundreds & thousands – always a treat to top off a tinned pear, less so corned beef.
Along from the pear halves, mandarin segments and peach slices are tins of prunes; given the paucity of toilet roll, this is far too much of a risk. And, as such, my collection, in the loft, of Charles Buchan’s Football Monthly magazines, are now beginning to look highly endangered.  Spam’s off, love

I’d do anything

marty

As a football fan, I’ve been lucky to have watched the beautiful game at the Bernabéu; the San Siro and both German Olympic stadia in Berlin and Munich; but the zenith of my footballing viewing has got to be Sandy Lane, former home of Tooting & Mitcham FC.
Here I watched a charity game between Tooting & Mitcham and a team of celebrities – think Robbie Williams’ games only in 1968 – and in Mitcham.
I went because my comedy hero, Marty Feldman was playing. Great writer and actor, no Charlie Cooke.
The game, like most charity games, had an unexpected celebrity kick it off. In this case it was Mark Lester, who played the title role in the film Oliver. Like Diana Ross at the 1994 World Cup only with more begging.
I am one-year older than Mark Lester, but even at that tender age, although you dreamed of playing with grown-ups, when reality kicked in (literally) you wanted to hurriedly produce a note from your mum excusing you from the first half.
Mark Lester kicked off and immediately trotted back to the safety of the dug-out, changing rooms or Nancy.
But, imagine if he’d stayed on and discovered that Tooting & Mitcham had Oliver Reed in their starting XI? He’d have terrorized the poor urchin for ninety-minutes.
Picture the scene: Young Mark gets the ball from the comedy equivalent of Jimmy Greaves, dribbles inside several Tooting & Mitcham defenders, is about to shoot, balances, raises his leg and then suddenly hears the death-cry behind him of ‘Bullesye!’
This was 1968; you couldn’t do that now, FIFA have introduced a rule which says you can’t have a pit-bull terrier playing at centre-half.

 

If it’s Tuesday, it must be Rapunzel

pinocchio

What bloody day is it?
I’ve not felt this day confusion since my last six-week school holiday and given my last playtime was forty-seven years ago, I’ve lost count which day it is.
Given the lockdown could last for months, I’ve decided I might get a set of seven underpants and, together with my name tag, sew in a label stating which day of the week it is.
The only problem, given the current shortages and delays in deliveries of certain items, you can’t guarantee what you want and end up with a substitution like when the Ocado delivery person gives you spam when you’d ordered sun-dried tomatoes.
Having ordered my daily pants, I notice from the confirmation, that they will all be Disney-themed. Therefore, no need for any sewing-in of any day tags, I shall simply create a mnemonic to remember which day it is: Mickey; Tigger; Woody (insert your own gag here); Tinkerbell; Anyone from Frozen; Simba and Snow White.
The inherent danger here is if it’s Thursday and I have an accident with Tinkerbell pants on.
My favourite Disney character is Pinocchio – sadly there in no day of the week beginning with P, so I won’t be wearing those; no bad thing if I ever started to lie wearing them. Mind you, in this cold weather, that’s largely academic.
Do you want to build a snowman?

It’s Wagner!

wagner

I like to think my Man Cave is slightly more sophisticated than Fred Flintstone’s.
While I haven’t got a pet dinosaur (walking it day and night in mid-winter doesn’t appeal) I do have everything I need in my self-appointed self-isolation room.
Because I’m working from home, and with no one to talk to (or at as I’m an only child), I need to have elements of distraction and comfort. I have a desk; an ergonomic chair; a sofa for lounging on, in the style of Noel Coward, when I’m not having to look at Excel spreadsheets, Word documents or participate in Zoom video calls.
But above all, I have BBC Radio 3.
I realise classical music isn’t everyone’s cup of tea (I have plenty of that too) but, as I sang in a church choir (arguably when I looked my most angelic) and also played in the school orchestra – I was third violin (mainly because they didn’t have a fourth, fifth or six – I wasn’t brilliant, but it did get me out of Maths); although if Richard Wagner had ever heard me playing his overture to Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, he’d have turned in his Bayreuthian grave.
This exposure, throughout my life, has endeared me to the genre of music they play on Radio 3 (although I do struggle with Jazz Record Requests), especially Essential Classics which is on during weekdays mornings – it offers great, accessible music with some light-hearted banter too – it keeps me sane, plus sometimes I can sing along or pretend I still own a violin.
However, because it is on in the background, I tend to forget it is on and on it remains during my newly-increased habit of video conference calls. While no one in my offices or any of my clients believe I’m training to be one a concert pianist, I was asked the other day, “What is that noise?” (The overture to Fidelio) I now know not everyone likes Beethoven and many people with whom I have these calls think it is a film about a giant dog. I have yet to fully master “mute” during some of these calls – although there is a part of me which believes I’m educating and entertaining my fellow video call participants.
A video conference call in itself is a curious things: several people on my computer screen, in their own contained box, make it like watching an episode of Celebrity Squares. As, at 62, I’m invariably the oldest one on the call and think of myself as Arthur Mullard or Pat Coombs.
I must encourage more of my video callers to listen to Radio 3, who knows, some might come away knowing that Wagner isn’t just some random bloke who appeared in X-Factor.

Cheap, cheap

top of the pops

When people are asked to name their favourite album, no one ever mentions Top of the Pops – Volume 18.

I would play it endlessly in my south London flat, listening to the songs which were in the charts at the time. I’d listen to them under my eiderdown on Radio Luxembourg. But, on these records, none were by the original artists.

I was fourteen in July 1971 and had the lowly weekly income of 50p, these LPs quenched my musical desire cheaply (which was ironic given one of the songs on the record was “Chirpy, Chirpy, Cheap, Cheap”).

During this time there was a proliferation of impersonators on the TV. It was my naive belief that if they could mimic Harold Wilson, they could also do Harold Melvin. I did not appreciate at the time that these covers were done by professional session musicians who were as good at doing Ted Nugent as Mike Yarwood was Ted Heath.

During these times there were rivals to the Top of the Pops LP series: Hot Hits being one. However, you tended to be loyal to one, bit like either preferring Monty Python to The Goodies, Max Factor to Rimmel or Harry Potter to anything by Dostoyevsky.

But, dear reader, I bought these LPs purely for musical pleasure and not because the album covers showing women in provocative poses. I was 14 and still thinking about which new I-Spy book to get. Honest, guv.

Haircut 100 (days in solitude)

haircut

When will I get my hair cut (properly) again? As the amount of conference calls grows, so is my consciousness to look professional, but, if my hair isn’t likely to get cut for another three months, there is the danger it will be the length it was in 1970, the only difference being, I’m no longer thirteen and Mungo Jerry not Number One.
I wonder if that’s what will happen with contact only via a phone or computer screen? If this is the route we’re going I might as well get my flares down from the loft now and buy as many different coloured pieces of wool to create the mother of all tank-tops.
I will probably have a fear of girls, as I did when 13. My insistence of wearing tank-tops, which would have made the biblical Joseph look colour blind, didn’t exactly help my cause.
When this is all over and get invited to my first party will I be taking a Party 7, a bottle of Blue Nun together with the Simon & Garfunkel album, Bridge over Troubled Water. And all this smelling of too much Aramis. If the latter is correct that will ensure my own social distancing will continue.
(Although there is a certain irony that the 8th best-selling single in 1970 was the England World Cup squad singing Back Home. I’m surprised this isn’t played during any messages given by Boris Johnson).
I’m at that age when I can remember great details about 1970 but cannot remember much about yesterday (oh yes, I stayed in).
1970 was the first year of Glastonbury, a town previously only famous through King Arthur having rented a flat there. Half a crowns were no longer legal tender and given that these were the coin which were fed to the gas meter I feared my teenage years would be in perpetual darkness (and owning such a selection of tank-tops I’m surprised there weren’t).
Will my return to work show a 1970s-length hair or will everyone have thought themselves an amateur Vidal Sassoon? Or return looking like Yul Brunner, Duncan Goodhew or Uncle Fester?
I shall miss going to my barber. To whom will I be able to tell where I’ve been on my holidays, that I don’t work locally and that I am the person who last cut my hair?
I think I might watch an episode of Desmond’s for some ideas.

Vole steam ahead

trees

Bit like being in the Scrubs, you are now allowed to leave your house once a day for exercise.
Because of the closure of gyms nationally, and therefore the need to find a replacement to my cancelled Zumba classes, I am taking advantage of this allowance from the correctly-advised government-induced curfew.
A few days in and I’m witnessing things near my house I’d driven past previously (probably quite badly as Lewis Hamilton I’m not) but can now stop and think and wonder which aspect of flora and fauna I’m looking at.
However, the disadvantage of having been brought up in urban south London, means my limited knowledge of nature is confined to the ability of being able to identify different dog turds. We did have trees, but they would either be goalpost one, goalpost two or a very thick cricket wicket. No one ever returned home saying “Mother, dearest, my friends and I managed to scale the entire height of a Canadian Redwood earlier.” (Also, because this was Tooting Bec Common and not a park in Vancouver)
Having escaped, like the TV programme to, suburbia, the nature-identification needs are far greater. Aside from identifying a dead mouse (it could have been a vole or a shrew, I’m assuming here) I’m struggling with my lack of knowledge.
Because of this ignorance I’m thinking of taking a series of educational books with me on my daily hike: The Observer Book of Birds; the Observer Book of Trees; the Observer Book of Dead Rodents.
Carrying the contents of a small mobile library could also act as a replacement for the free weights I use at the gym. I could strengthen my biceps courtesy of a book with several pages devoted to pictures of deceased gerbils.
I’m going out early in the morning for my walk. I’m at that age when I wake up early and have invariably done the ironing by half four. Walking around you notice many things about peoples’ houses: the porch lights which come on when you walk past (handy if you’re an aspiring burglar – which I could be as I suit black); as the houses get bigger, so the car number plates become more personalised (my car’s number plate is MDZ, which would work if my surname was Zither) and whose nets need cleaning.
Today, during my hour-long traipse, I passed four people, two running, two walking like me (the two walking probably having a copy of I-Spy in Suburbia tucked inside their newly-bought kagools. The normal British response would be to ignore any passer-by, but these are different times and I’m wondering what the correct protocol might be? Should I have said anything or even doffed my cap (or in today’s case, my Bayern Munich bobble hat)?
As this process continues then I’m sure we’ll all be talking – albeit shouting across various roads to each other, keeping a safe distance, obviously, “Did you see that dead mouse on Banstead Road?” “That was no mouse, that was an aardvark!”
This in turn will prompt me to return home and order the Observer Book of Ant-Eaters.
Time to wash my nets.

WFH; WTF; VPL

cabin

I’m one week in into working from home or WFH to give it its abbreviated title. It would seem these are the words used by WFH novices; veterans of WFH call it: “working remotely”.
However, with the closure of anywhere where you can sit for hours on end tending an increasingly cold cardboard cup of something which originally housed a large latte, these “remote” people will be restricted to WFH and therefore, be on the same level as us WFH newbies.
This could go on for three-months – or, if you’re a gynaecologist, a trimester. I am not a gynaecologist and the nearest I will be to being one is that I own several pairs of gloves, most of which have remnants of begonias on them, none, as I’m 62, have a giant loop of elastic attached.

What are the essentials to a three-month imprisonment? There could be a lot of downtime, so read everything by PG Wodehouse, this is essential to keep your spirits up and also books by John Buchan to read about the derring-dos you’ll be re-enacting once you’re released from your confinement.

john macnab
It is also important to have one DVD – the BBC version of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy being my DVD of choice and have my own competition with myself before I say “dead, mate!” to the TV screen.

tinker
You must still take on liquid – you don’t want to be the person who doesn’t return to work because they’ve dehydrated. Drink Benecol drinks if you have high cholesterol, Irn Bru, if you don’t. Don’t start eating more cake as your gym has been closed, time to get that Bullworker down from the loft if you’re tempted by a Victoria sponge.

Bullworker_in_1960s
Learn another language. Esperanto will probably be the favourite as we’re all in the same boat and we all need one thing which will bind us together. If you can’t get hold of a copy of Teach Yourself Esperanto then buy John Buchan’s John Macnab and learn how to capture salmon off posh Scottish people.
Knitting, crochet and cross-stitch will become less important as most people tend to only create toilet roll covers and soon we’ll be out of that – if you have a garden, build a pine forest – suddenly you’ll start to get on with your neighbour (wouldn’t that be nice, to quote the Small Faces).
But worth occupying your heavily-washed hands (opticians will soon be closed, so you don’t want to be doing too much self-isolating) so, building the Bismarck out of discarded matches might help pass the time – unless you’re a convicted pyromaniac, in which case carrying on sniffing glue while constructing an Airfix ME1019.

me 109
And if you’re looking for live sport, badminton is still on, but I bet you’ve not watched it longer than five minutes before you’re saying: “Stone me, they hit that hard, don’t they?”
Stay safe and remember, it’s just a matter of time before they are re-showing Mind your language.

shuttlecock

Generation (Dure)X

parade

The day you felt you’d become a man (certainly in the rituals in place in south London in the ‘60s) would be the time you no longer need the bench to sit on at the barbers. In effect, you’d only started to enter adolescence and the well-thumbed copies of Parade, Reveille and Health & Efficiency, almost overnight, became more interesting than the Beano or Charles Buchan’s Football Monthly.
The time you did, at least in the barber’s eyes, become a man, was when your mum no longer took you. Although in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, with so many people opting for longer hair (I blame Chicory Tip), I’m surprised anyone went to the barbers, unless they needed something for the weekend and knew too many people working in their local Boot’s.
I can remember sitting for ages in my Balham barber’s knowing, when accompanied by my mum, that the magazines could have been housed in Fort Knox, such was the chance of me touching one, let alone opening one.
You would wait patiently looking around the shop at photos of hairstyles you could have (although many of the photos were quite old, so if you wanted to look like Clement Attlee, this was the place to go). There were also many displays of , some magic stick which stopped you bleeding after shaving and combs. Things for the weekend were not in sight. When you hadn’t yet entered puberty (some days I think I’m still waiting) things for the weekend were footballs, Jimmy Clitheroe and roast beef; this might explain why I have fourteen children.

Under the Moon

new moon

The closest I ever got to witnessing any form of diabolistic activities growing up in Balham in the ‘60s was during a full moon.
My nan and my great aunt would take me (I always feared I was about to be offered as a sacrifice up to some pagan god who lived in the River Wandle) into the gardens of our block of flats, with their purses, and “turn their money over” (or in my great aunt’s case, rearrange her collection of Embassy cigarette coupons).
Animals weren’t allowed in our flats, so there was little chance of having your path crossed by a black cat and because the flats reached the height of eight storeys, you rarely saw any ladders to inadvertently walk under. So, my chances of become superstitious (like my aged relatives) were limited; we were too poor to have mirrors.
There were receptacles for putting in eyes of newts, toes of frogs and wools of bats, but these were meant to be for rubbish – people tended to use them for discarding old copies of the TV Times and Reveille rather than dismembered reptiles. Again, little evidence of witches.
Every November there would be a big fire in the garages where we lived. After the release of the 1973 film, The Wicker Man, came out, and after all the coin-churning, I’d half expected Edward Woodward to suddenly appear round the back of a Ford Cortina.
I’m not allowed matches, so it wasn’t me.