Category: Comedy

In the 1970s, when foreign travel started to take off, access to information at home was limited to your daily newspaper, News at Ten or a set of reliable homing pigeons; the lack of news, once abroad, was frustrating and people would scour kiosks in Spain and France hopeful of a two-day-old Daily Telegraph sent from Blighty.

Your holiday would be ruined, not just for NOT drinking the water or failing to take your Enterovioform three-years before your trip, but if you weren’t up to speed with the Test or County Championship cricket scores.  You wanted to be that person, like the major in Fawlty Towers, who goes back to the (almost built) hotel and announces that “Hampshire won!”

But was there that same demand in this country?

I remember the man who sold newspapers and magazines outside Balham Tube station, who called everyone “John”; was he visited by people who’d wandered off the beaten track (as Balham rarely gets a mention in any Michelin guide) looking for a copy of Paris Match (seeing how the latest strikes were going), Süddeutsche Zeitung (sending off for the deck-chair-sized towel offer) or El Pais (how many Brits had drunk the water?) and if he was, did he call them Jean, Johann or Juan?

Chalky White, whom you’d could identify and win £5 if you were carrying a Daily Mirror on holiday (invariably in Shanklin), is alive and well and waiting to be spotted in Bali.   Hope he’s taken his tablets!

I’ve been commuting or forty-five years now and the activities on my journey home have changed considerably.

In 1974, when I first started journeying back to south-west London, having got on at Embankment, I’d have finished the Evening News picture crossword by the Elephant and would have (unsuccessfully) spotted the ball by Clapham Common.

The only time you’d have heard the word wireless on the Underground would have been people telling you what they were going to listen to on it later that evening!

Now papers are packed with things like Sudokus and other things which sound vaguely like types of motorbikes, martial arts or members of the Imperial Japanese Navy! (Ironically, the No. 1 when I first started commuting was Carl Douglas’s Kung Fu Fighting, which is a martial art).

No more do people get the Evening Standard to look for the stop press to see the teatime cricket scores, they can listen on their phones to former public-school types telling you exactly that, whilst throwing in cake recipes.

These days you’ll know in pretty much in advance what the next day’s newspaper headline will be and no longer will reading “Queen Anne, dead” be a surprise.

Futoshiki? Thank you, but I’m allergic to most fish.

 

I was never destined to become a civil engineer with the toys I was given as a kid.

In my Balham flat, growing up in the 60s, there wasn’t a sniff of Meccano; although my mum was constantly hoovering up discarded pieces of an Airfix ME110 I’d scattered in a fit of pique to the four corners of my bedroom (mum was careful hoovering as she thought she might find a miniature Rudolf Hess, although may, in the sixties, have been more constructive looking for Martin Bormann!).

I only had one rectangular piece of Lego – with which I could pretend was a table, a sentry box or bench depending on which side I laid it.

So, my creative construction juices were never encouraged as a kid.   I did have a Willy Wombat glove puppet but, as anyone who’s ever watched the National Geographic TV channel will know, marsupials aren’t renowned for their construction skills (although very good at transmitting urgent messages).

So the much-needed bridge over the River Wandle was never going to materialise with me as the project manager.

I did, however, play with my Spirograph a lot, which might have been the cause of my myopia 😊

 

 

 

 

 

In the early 70s I discovered that Aramis wasn’t just a third of a band of musketeers, but was a brand of after shave available in Balham Boot’s and something to daubed on in the unlikely event a girl might talk to me. (I could have owned Estee Lauder and girls were unlikely to talk to me).

I was a massive fan of Aramis and Paco Rabane (having not studied 17^th Century Spanish literature in any great depth meant I never thought he might have been Don Quixote’s little helper).  These were my scents of choice as a teenager.  I tried Kouros (not one of the remaining 66.6% of musketeers) but always came out in a rash – not a good look unless the girl you fancied took an inordinate interest in dermatological problems.

As my taste in after shaves became increasingly more sophisticated, I was appalled one Christmas when my paternal grandmother gave me a bottle of Avon’s Windjammer.  If I’d have wanted anything to jam my wind, I’d have bought a packet of Carter’s Little Liver Pills.

Whilst my perennial search for the perfect scent continued, I often admired the girls’ perfume selection. I was fascinated by the elegance of the packaging of YSL’s Rive Gauche – arguably one of the best right back Paris St Germain have ever had.

Whilst the shop assistants in Balham Boot’s were quite persuasive, they had nothing on Valerie Leon!

Everywhere these days, a previously bare wall, has been covered in graffiti; usually with uninterpretable hieroglyphics people have tattooed on their upper arm for a bet assuming it’s Japanese.

I blame Banksy (the man with the spray can and mouse stencil, not the Stoke & England World Cup hero).

As a kid in the sixties I can only remember one piece of graffiti in my formative years. As you entered Wandsworth Common from the Balham end, displayed on the first wall, you saw Ban The Bomb.

When I was five, I could read, but not having lived through the second world war, assumed, having been subjected to lots of music as a child, that The Bomb were a group and this message had been daubed by fans of The Beatles; The Stones or The Swinging Blue Jeans.

As I grew older and realised that CND wasn’t a shortened form of the Irish group Clannad, it dawned on me which bomb they were talking about.

Shame it didn’t read Ban The Bombe as I’ve never been a fan of circular ice cream desserts.

Toffee apples, despite purporting to being part of your five-a-day, would not be a food (unless he or she’d been struck off by the BDA and you’d not been informed) your dentist would recommend consuming.

But because toffee apples tend to only be eaten on one specific day (like dates on Boxing Day), and unless you’ve an appointment on the 31st October, this warning will never be relayed to you.

It is odd that toffee apples tend to feature only on Halloween. Whilst studying Macbeth for English Lit O-level in 1973 I cannot recall, whenever the three witches appeared, that they were doing unspeakable things with apples – they tended to stick to frogs and newts.

Apple-bobbing would feature at many of the children’s parties I attended in the south London area as a kid, although, once parents realised this was much like water-boarding, it was quickly replaced with pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey; much safer – small child, sharp object, blinded – what could possibly go wrong?

For me, the novelty of toffee apples stopped the moment the last piece of toffee was eaten. I had no interest in the actual fruit. I look back and wonder, if I’d have known how much crowns cost, should I have opted for candy floss?  No, because that’s bad for your teeth.  Hang on a minute……

In September 1968 I beheld my first wooden vaulting horse.

It lived in the gym in the labyrinth under my Tooting secondary school – where no humans dared venture and probably housed a three-headed dog – there were suspicious teeth marks on the wall-bars.

This horse, at first sight, seemed the size of a Shetland pony. However, when we were told what we had to do on it and over it, suddenly it was the size of the one I’d imagined had been plonked outside Troy.

I’d watched, admiringly, the success of the Czechoslovakian gymnast, Vera Caslavska at that year’s Olympics, as she glided over the wooden horse as if she were being operated by strings. Much as I looked like Joe 90, I had no strings attached and certainly nothing which was going to help me over the horse.  I was, having watched the eponymous 1950 film, also surprised there weren’t sprinklings of discarded soil around the wooden horse.

My turn came to vault over the horse: I ran and promptly stopped like a runner in the Grand National who doesn’t fancy Becher’s Brook.   I couldn’t do it and subsequently found out during that academic year that I could neither climb a rope nor do anything vaguely precarious on wall-bars.

This inherent danger was greater than what I’d experienced at my Balham primary school when all you had to do during PE was run around in your pants pretending to be a tree.

At secondary school we were told that all the trees had got Dutch Elm Disease and so would we if we didn’t vault over a horse.

I guess I was more Ronnie than Olga Korbut

You’re probably not allowed to wear just pants these days.

With Brexit looming does this mean we’ll revert to using Imperial currency?   If so, how many Euros will you get for an old ten-bob note?

I shall look forward to shop windows displaying their clothes’ prices in guineas and going to a greengrocer where there are hand-written cards showing bananas are 1/6 for a pound 😊.

In 1971 I remember buying a set of the “new” decimal coins from a Post Office on Balham High Road.   (I’m assuming they were the real thing as the bloke running the Post Office was Polish and he could have been selling me a set of out-of-circulation Zlotys for all I knew).  They were in a Perspex box and remember thinking how any of those coins were going to fit in a gas meter which only took half-crowns!  (I bought several candles too, just in case).

If this money does return then I’m getting my half-full jar of threepenny bits (insert you own gag here) down from the loft, where it has lain dormant since the bank amnesty ended for pre-decimal coinage.   I shall also be curious to see how much a farthing gets me.

I think I may invest in some sheep too in case bartering comes back and will bird-feeding still only cost tuppence a bag?