Category: humor

With the exception of Rupert the Bear annuals, growing up in the sixties didn’t offer the choice of books available to kids today.

My book collection consisted of a second-hand 1958 Denis Compton annual, an I-Spy Zeppelins (probably third-hand) and three of the set of twenty-four Noddy books;  I remember vividly Noddy Book No. 4, entitled: “Here comes Noddy again” – this was about Noddy being kidnapped, not his sexual prowess.

I have three grandchildren, two of whom are nearly one-year-old. Their combined libraries would rival those of the British, Bodleian and Balham!

One series which dominates the twins’ bookshelves is “That’s not my Something” (like puppy, kitten unicorn).  The premise is the first five double-pages features puppies, kittens or unicorns not belonging to the reader.  The sixth double page spread reveals the ostensibly lost puppy/kitten/unicorn with the phase, “That’s my unicorn – its head has a massive stick coming out of it!” (or something like that)

We never had books this exciting growing up, and I pondered if we had, what they’d have been?

“That’s not my ration book; all the stamps are missing!”

“That’s not my home-made go-kart; none of the constituent parts are stolen!” or

“That’s not my TV; Bonanza’s never in colour, therefore a valve has blown and the set’s on fire!”

Night, night children everywhere, unless you happen to live in the dark, dark wood, as featured in Noddy Book No. 4.

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!

Although destined, as a bit of a geek, to become a train-spotter, an unnatural affinity to trolley buses deigned this was never going to happen.

As a kid, my nan had a grassy-knoll-type flat whose window overlooked Balham High Road; I would spend hours staring out of this window making a list of the buses travelling up and down the street.

I didn’t need an especially large sheet as there were only three routes: 88,155 and 181. I’d sit, eating my nan’s Callard & Bowser’s toffees (she had no teeth, so toffees were a complete waste on her) recording each bus as it passed.  I would do this until I spotted my Auntie Vera’s alighting from here 155 as she returned from her job at Freeman’s near the Oval.

Sometimes a complete spanner would be thrown in the works by the appearance of a 711 Green Line Bus. This vehicle never stopped at any of the two stops I could see so, in my mind it never existed – a bit like the little-known philosophical theory, Schrödinger’s Bus. It certainly was never entered onto the toffee-covered list.

In the mid-60s, when I was around eight, my Auntie Vera decided she would take me on a trolley bus. We travelled on a 155 to Wimbledon where we picked up the trolley bus to Belmont.  It might as well have been to Belize, such was my geographical lack of knowledge anywhere outside SW17.  Ironically I now live near there (Belmont, not Belize, where I still don’t quite know where it is (it is only near Belmont alphabetically)).

Three years on and I had my next out-of-Balham experience. I was selected to play for the school cricket team.  The first fixture was away at Sutton Manor (now Sutton Grammar).  I stood, with my dad, on the platform at Balham, looking in a direction I’d never been before (dad had assured me they’d all been lavender fields the week before).  I assumed that, before we even got to Sutton, we’d have fallen off the end of the world.

When I changed schools from Bec to Emanuel I discovered several of my new form-mates were into plane spotting. I asked my dad if this would possibly be something for me? He replied saying: as long as I knew what an ME109 looked like, I’d probably best stick to bus-spotting.  Any more fares, please?