Category: humour

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.

My failure to pass Maths O-Level three times (1973, 74 & 75) was not helped by my total misunderstanding of what a slide rule was meant for. If you wanted a straight line, with a little bobble in, then a slide rule was just that – forget that it was designed for complex multiplication and duplication; although, when I first got mine I thought it was broken as the middle bit kept sliding out.

Log tables were also useless if you were destined to regularly fail maths exams; however, if you had a slightly uneven desk, then a log table book was the ideal thing. Many restaurants use them for wobbly tables when they’ve run out of beer-mats.

My question is: what was the set-square for in the student Helix geometry set?  Compass, yes – if you’d forgotten your darts; protractor, yes – if you needed to draw half a moon or an ox-bow lake.  But a set-square?  It would remain, gathering dust like Miss Haversham’s dining room, in your protective plastic wallet, with no ostensible use.  Perhaps my school believed Tooting was going to be the source of budding architects?

It wasn’t until I failed my third maths O-level that I realised that trigonometry wasn’t a type of dinosaur, cosine was not a type of lettuce and Pythagoras’ theorem was not an ancient ruin just outside Athens.

Pi’s off, love!

I had the remains of an ME109 in my bedroom once; although this sounds like a quote from a cab driver, it is the result of my first (and only) attempt to construct an Airfix model.

As a child I’d go to tea with other kids and invariably see the Battle of Britain being fought out on their ceilings. I was very envious of this and decided I’d have a go.  I’d start slowly and build up – I could, with one plane, re-enact Rudolf Hess’s lone flight to Scotland – on my ceiling!

Off to the model shop in Tooting Bec I went and procured an Airfix model kit of an ME109.  I told the shopkeeper I was a direct descendant of Willy Messerschmidt and asked for a discount.  With the Cold War still raging, this wasn’t bright, so set off home, together with my over-priced miniature plane.

Half an hour later I realised how tricky it was getting glue off carpet; and hands; and gerbils! The glue went everywhere except on the crucial hinge bits of the ME109.  Half hour after that, with many pieces of balsa wood having been scattered to the four corners of my bedroom, it looked like Kenneth More and Robert Shaw had been in personally and destroyed it.

I never attempted to construct another model. I did keep the bits of balsa wood on the walls, carpet and various rodents with the vain hope of winning the Turner Prize; sadly, Tracey Emin had thought of this first!

During my school days in the sixties I was in danger of making school nit nurse redundant.

Whilst I never had a specific bath night, I do remember regular washing of my hair. It wasn’t the actual washing I didn’t like – I quite liked the smell of Vosene or the occasional Fairy Liquid when we were cutting back on shampoo – it was the methods my mother employed to get my hair clean.

We didn’t have a shower attachment which you affix to the bath-taps, but we did have a massive sink in the kitchen. If my mother washed my hair whilst cooking, there was the danger of coming out of the kitchen smelling of a combination of Vosene and egg ‘n’ chips.

My hair was washed over the sink with a plastic device which hung over the edge of the sink to help ease the shock of cold enamel on nape of neck; people facing the Guillotine were more comfortable.  I preferred my hair to be washed whilst I faced the ceiling, as the yellow nicotine patch was preferable than looking at the potato peelings.

A cup was used to rinse my hair – most times it didn’t contain my mum’s Guinness, although I’m sure the iron might have strengthened my follicles.

My hair would then be vigorously dried with a tea towel from the Isle of Wight. As my head was being rubbed as if I were an old English Sheepdog I would see visions of Ventor, Alum Bay sands and Parkhurst Prison passing, at sub-liminal speeds, before my eyes.

I never did get nits, but then I’m told they don’t like clean hair. Or perhaps all head lice are allergic to potatoes?