Category: humour

Around this time of year, when I was growing up in London in the 60s and 70s, I’d anticipate copious amounts of postcards from friends and relatives arriving showing pictures of a place within the town they were staying where they’d never visit, but locally it was iconic, and/or telling me they wished I was there (which begs the question: why wasn’t I invited in the first place?)

Cards would come from far-reaching places such as Bognor, Bournemouth, Bideford – having been brought up in Balham it seemed that my friends and relatives were incapable of travelling anywhere which didn’t begin with a “B”. (These days people will travel to Belize, Bolivia, Bogota – nice, but do they do a nice cream tea there?)

No one sends postcards anymore; instead of “wish you were here” on the back of a card featuring a beach, historical monument or a cartoon of a large-breasted woman berating her diminutive husband with an innuendo like “why can’t your sand castle be that big?” you get a text or an email which says: “arrived safely”, swiftly followed by over a hundred Instagram photos of the baggage retrieval area of some distant airport and bemoaning the fact that why is it so few people speak English in the Belgian Congo?

One of the last postcards I sent was in 1973, around this time of year, wishing that my mum and dad were here and hoping I’d done well in my O-levels.  I hadn’t; the punishment being the next year with two weeks in Benidorm – also beginning with B – like Bubonica Pestis (a little-known Greek island).

I always fancied being Big Chief I-Spy as I collected several of the pocket-sized books he began publishing from his office in Bouverie Street, throughout the 50s and 60s.

Because I rarely travelled outside the SW17 postcode as a child, books like I-Spy On The Farm; I-Spy At The Zoo and I-Spy Country Crafts remained largely empty.  Although I did once make my own entry of 100 points for spotting a Woolly Mammoth on an imaginary farm.

I nearly completed I-Spy In The Street – spotting a Belisha Beacon; a Zebra Crossing and, if you took your A6 book out at night and walked up Bedford Hill in Balham, you’d get fifty points for spying “a lady of the night”.

The most marks you could get in I-Spy On The Train was ticking off a severed head which’d been poked too far out of a window you used to be able to pull down.

In 2011 new editions were launched to bring the series more up-to-date: I-Spy On A Car Journey In France being one.  Within this the top points were: seeing the suspension go on a car carrying far too much cheap, Beaujolais; a French policeman nicking the car in front just because it had GB stickers on and General de Gaulle saying “Non!” (all a bit academic after Brexit).

The idea was actually first thought of in the seventeenth century with I-Spy At The Public Execution, where you were encouraged to look out for a basket (extra points if it contained a head); an axe and a woman with no teeth, knitting and swearing at the same time.

Keep ‘em peeled, as Big Chief I-Spy would say *

*With apologies to Shaw Taylor

Unless I’d suddenly acquired a shocking sense of direction, after being given a new bike, living on the 4^th floor of a block of flats, may have been life threatening.

However, I never owned a bike (new, old or jet-propelled in case of emergencies). My parents clearly realised that turning right from our lounge would have led me to become more lemming than Lance.

Because of my devotion to Twix, Lycra is not my clothing of choice.  Although, men of my age in their droves are switching to cycling from playing golf.  However, I’m better off holding a putter rather than looking like I’d had one shoved down my Lycra shorts (especially in cold weather).

In the 60s, growing up in south London, few people had bikes, going everywhere by “Shank’s Pony”; which I realised, later on in life, didn’t mean they owned horses.

I did have a bright blue scooter and was allowed to propel myself (supervised) around Wandsworth and Tooting Bec Commons. This may be why I have one quadricep bigger than the other as I never mastered changing legs.  (I became very proficient at accelerating past The Priory on Tooting Bec Common as that was very menacing).

There were no cycle lanes back then – no need as there were fewer cars. The only markings on the roads were hop-scotch grids – and the occasional chalk outline of a man on Balham High Road – I assume this was some prehistoric cave painting, like the Cerne Abbas Giant – he’d have certainly looked good in Lycra.

I always wanted a Chopper – but that’s perhaps a question for my gynaecologist?

There was a time when you could travel from Balham (if you lived there) to (almost) the outer limits of the Universe (as long as a London Transport bus went there) for only ten bob.

A Red Rover was a frequent purchase for me and my mates in the late 60s, early 70s; a time when we were young teenagers and had irresponsible parents who’d cast us onto the streets, armed only with ten shillings, a Tupperware cup full of Coke and or milk (depending on how nauseous you wanted to get), a Penguin and a selection of (one) sandwiches made with the pride of the Shippam’s factory.   Travelling from Balham, most of our packed lunches had been consumed by Clapham North.

I had a paternal aunt and two cousins who lived in North Harrow (which, when looking at the bus map at Balham Underground Station, might have been outside the Universe, let alone at its furthest boundary). I decided we should take a selection of ostensibly twenty buses and go and visit my dad’s remote family.  It seemingly took several weeks but, having successfully arrived, starving by this point as we’d mistimed our food intake (which is why none of us joined the Commandoes), we discovered they were out.  No mobile phones those days to say: “Hi, Auntie Betty, we’re coming to visit”, not even a couple of old yoghurt pots to communicate our impending arrival.  So, skint, hungry and tired we ventured back to south London with my friends assuming this extended family didn’t exist.

I go nowhere these days without the aforementioned yoghurt pots (in case of emergencies) and always have a ten-shilling note hidden inside the secret heel of my shoe – the one next to the beaver footprint.

It was watching Emergency – Ward 10 that I decided I was probably not best cut out to be a doctor.  Even in black and white, blood looked pretty gruesome. However, I’m sure the ITV series which ran for a decade between 1957-1967 inspired many people to be asked “what’s the bleeding time?”

In the 60s there was precious little TV choice; even when the third channel, BBC2, was added in 1964.  Although, as a seven-year-old, this seemed to involve watching lots of men with beards sitting around talking about the meaning of life – very late at night; in the 70s, if you couldn’t sleep and turned the TV on you’d be confronted by (probably the same) men wearing tank-tops and shirts with collars nearly touching their elbows pointing at complex charts or doing unspeakable things with pipettes.

However, in south London, with careers officers at school telling you to be a secretary if you were a girl and an armed robber or accountant depending on which type of boys’ school you attended, TV could have possibly given that much-needed career-inspiration? Perhaps All Gas and Gaiters encouraged people to join the church or a Reg Varney-induced moment would have made being a bus driver appealing, although running a motel in the Midlands wouldn’t have been attractive as you’d be forever sorting out the love life of the village idiot.

TV did inspire me and, despite having often seen the actor who played Mr Verity in Balham Sketchley’s, I have enjoyed forty-plus years working in the Home Guard.