Category: humor

I was often confused as a kid as both parents and grandparents would tell me things which, with the small knowledge I’ve gathered over sixty-plus years, were either horribly inaccurate or a total lie.

If ever I made a face (which tended to happen if my nan was cooking boiled fish in parsley sauce – a concoction which should be considered as an alternative to anthrax in biological warfare) she would say “if the wind changes, you’ll stay like that”.  The UK is situated in the path of a polar front jet stream – winds are frequent, facial disfigurements for me fortuitously weren’t.

My mum would use the word bleedin’ so much, growing up I realised that an urgent learning of the rudiments of First Aid was going to be a must.  Luckily, however, it seemed there was nothing inside our flat which was haemophiliac.

Bob’s your uncle was recited many times.  I never met Bob – even with much genealogical research.  My mum would “entertain” many people – several had the epithet “uncle” – in our flat, but none featured on my home-made family tree chart, even fewer called Bob!

And as for fairies being at the bottom of my garden: living in a fourth-floor flat, unless you can get apparitions amongst your begonias in your window boxes, there was never going to be a Fatima-like vision which I was perpetually promised.

And the word wireless these days doesn’t necessarily have to involve Lord Haw-Haw.

I’m unsure when dress down days were introduced.  If you’re a bloke, it was a hard thing to convert to.  Simply talking off a tie (which you’d worn for several working decades prior) isn’t really dress down.

Despite working in the City, I never wore a bowler hat (the intricate folding of the accompanying umbrella failed me miserably) but I did wear a suit and tie for years.

My first suit was purple (it was 1974!) – a strange choice given my only eye ailment is myopia rather than colour-blindness! Deep Purple were a fashionable group at the time, but the eponymous name didn’t translate well into work clothes.  Many fellow travellers thought I must be a bishop in mufti.

During the early days of dress down you got an insight as to what people looked like at weekends. Posh people would wear cords, the colour of which, made my purple look surprisingly normal.  Posh people also wear shoes (loafers which have seen better days, but that’s how the rich get rich) with no socks – a sure-fire way of contracting pneumonia!

Before ties were deemed unnecessary in the workplace there was competition within workers as to who had the best tie. This contest became null and void when workers from the suburbs would visit with their ties adorned with Homer Simpson, Taz of Tasmania or any Thunderbird pilot!

Virgil Tracy always beats anything from Hermes.

The term “smart casual” has entered our vocabulary. However, initially this was misinterpreted as I remember one day arriving at work and a fellow worker had dressed in army combats.  He looked like he was more likely about to invade Angola rather than help out with some filing!

If my surname was Fish then I think I’d probably be somewhat the wiser; although, given its current misbehaviour, as far as weather prediction is concerned, I might as well be Captain Haddock.

Growing up in London in the 60s & 70s it was cold in 1962/63 and hot in 1976, you also knew the next day would be the same; not these days. Is it because we all used too much Harmony hairspray or Brut anti-perspirant during this period?

Clothing, to cope with the changes in temperature, is different too. In the 60s we had duffel coats, a plastic rain hat and a mac with a belt you could tighten so much it was like wearing a Victorian corset (I never had a rain hat as a kid as I wasn’t allowed plastic near my mouth).

Today you can have multi-layer coats – usually made by unpronounceable named Teutonic companies – the harder the maker’s name is to articulate the warmer it’ll keep you.

To cope with the unseasonable heat, we are now seeing more public water dispensers. I don’t quite know when bottled water was invented, but certainly wasn’t evident in Balham in the 60s, unless you include the two water fountains in my school playground – who can’t forget the “refreshing” feeling, after a successful and energetic game of three-and-in, of the dribble of luke-warm water emanating from the playground fountain?

If it’s windy – eat less cabbage.

Summer holidays in the 60s did not start at Palma, Penzance nor at Puerto Banus; they began at Petty France.

A trip to London as an 11-year-old in 1968 to get a passport was exciting as we passed New Scotland Yard, where I hoped to steal a glimpse of Shaw Taylor, Stratford Johns or Officer Dibble.

The need for passports was to enable my parents and I to travel to Majorca; I couldn’t find Majorca in the London A-Z, so assumed it must be abroad.  As we waited in the interminable queue, and my parents practised their pigeon Majorcan, I wondered if there was a Significant France, which had more counters and fewer queues?

What passports don’t take into account is fashion – nor differing hair lengths through the ages.  You keep your passport for a decade and, sometime into the eighties, there was a part of people’s passports which was forever Les McKeown.

They do say, if you look like your passport photo you’re too ill to travel.  But neither can you smile; if you wear glasses you must be photographed without them. Because of retina recognition at Passport Control; if you wear glasses (as I do) you must remove them.  I now grope my way officially back into the UK like Mr Magoo!

These days passports can be renewed online.  However, there is the inherent danger of also visiting Amazon, Ocado or eBay. A consequence of which is you may receive a used passport the next day for £1, a substitute passport as they’d run out of the original or you’ve sold yourself to a man who’s coming round later to collect you!

 

 

I wanted to be Joe Davis when I was growing up; the five-foot folding snooker table, which took up 90% of my bedroom, was the investment I needed to help this dream materialise; I already had comedy glasses.

As I grew older, and was allowed out of my bedroom unaccompanied, I discovered, during the 60s and 70s, there were as many snooker halls then as there are Prets and Costas now!

Many were above Burton’s, meaning you could buy a suit and get a century break (Ok, eight) within the same building.

Many halls were temperance; the strongest drink you could get was black coffee – unless you included WD40 for the squeaky doors – although this doesn’t mix too well with Bovril.

The greatest expense, aside from the table hire, were pieces of chalk. I’d always forget my chalk and collected over 100 small, used-only-once, blue cubes;  I finally ground them down and gave them to my mother stating they were the new, exotic range of Bronnley bath salts.

Snooker was made popular in July 1969 with the introduction of Pot Black.  The thrill of this game was somewhat negated as a majority of UK TVs in 1969 were still black and white; thus meaning the grey ball scored one as well as seven – given the vertical hold on the TV was always on the blink in my flat, I always thought snooker was played at sea during a force ten gale.

My favourite player, once colour TV was more prevalent, was Perrie Mans; he, like me, had clearly made his waistcoats out of discarded curtains! Although, being professional, he’d have removed the hooks!

 

 

Due to a pathological fear of cheese, I’d have never have made it as a chef

Having failed a vast majority of my O-levels in 1973, my father took me to an industrial psychologist in Gloucester Place to establish which career I should pursue: Astronaut was out due to a morbid dread of flying; postman was never an option due to a teenage propensity to getting verrucae and the role of Prime Minister was already taken by Ted Heath – although I did hoard candles – handy during the three-day week power cuts.

At the psychologists I was given a series of tests: one was a list of hundred potential occupations, grouped in pairs. I had to choose one of the two.  One couple was bishop or miner?  This was a no-brainer as I don’t like getting dirty and as a choir-boy looked quite charming in cassock and surplice.

Lastly, I had an interview with the psychologist who, having analysed the results, and me assuming I’d be a shoo-in for the next Archbishop of Canterbury, suggested a career in hotel & catering.

I had immediate visions of running a hotel but suddenly realised I’d have to start at the bottom and wouldn’t have suited being dressed as a chambermaid – I haven’t got the legs.

And so, went into advertising – where you don’t have to wear a pinny – unless the client is particularly demanding.

So, what was room service’s loss became the world of conning people into buying something they really don’t want’s gain!

You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave! Unless you don’t want your ten-bob deposit back!

In the 60s, my mum took me twice to the Streatham Odeon: once to see Mary Poppins and once to see The Supremes.

I saw them both in quick succession and wondered, halfway through Love Child, why Julie Andrews wasn’t in the line-up?  And why they ended the concert singing Baby Love and not A spoonful of sugar?

When I saw The Supremes, Diana Ross had left the group to commence a career starting World Cup Finals and I thought I was well within my rights to expect the expert nanny, together with her magical umbrella to be on the stage singing You can’t hurry love. (This song was originally written for the 1937 Cockney musical, Me and My Girl and the version was to have been called, You can’t hurry, love.)

I’m thrilled, however, that the Streatham Odeon is still functioning as a cinema; the Balham Odeon is now a Majestic Wine House – not so much Kia Ora more a fine Beaujolais and the Mayfair Tooting is now a bank (via, in the 70s, an upmarket snooker hall – which, of course, in Tooting, is oxymoronic) and will probably end up being a pub – as most old banks do.

I suppose there is a link, as the grocer where Mary Poppins bought her sugar was called Nathan Jones.

In September 1968, after a series of exams and interviews, and having gained a place at my Tooting grammar school, I was amazed that the first set of homework was to cover our text books.

I was anticipating, in my first week to have gone home to split the atom; remembered the dates of the reigns of all the Anglo-Saxon monarchs or knowing that in binary 01000101 is 69 (which, when you’re 11, is just another number).

Over the next few days we would all come back to our school rooms with our books adorned in whatever material our parents had left lying around our houses.

Most had used brown paper, one or two had gone down the wallpaper remnant route, with one boy coming in with his books covered with red, flock wallpaper which looked suspiciously like the same wallpaper which decorated the Granada Tooting; I never went to tea at this boy’s house but I’d have bet his carpet would have had the word GRANADA inscribed into the weaving.

Another lad came in with his books bedecked in Thunderbirds wallpaper; sadly, for him, in the teachers’ eyes, Thunderbirds were not “GO” and he consequently got a detention – even Virgil Tracy couldn’t rescue him from that!

The homework did get harder: the toughest assignment being charged with looking after the class amoeba (this was a grammar school, so no run-of-the-mill hamster) for an entire weekend, making sure it didn’t die or get impregnated by other organisms.