Category: humour

Sign of the Ford Zodiac

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zodiacmk3

There should be playtime in the workplace. Fifteen mental minutes when you can run around before going back to your office, sweating like a pig before creating more content for your last primary school year county project; never has so much rubbish been written about Middlesex as there was by me in my south London primary school in the late sixties.

Within my school most boys wanted to play professional football or cricket (we weren’t allowed in the girls’ playground, which was no bad thing as this was where the threat of kiss chase lurked and, as a ten/eleven-year-old boy, all girls were considered soppy). (My mother had warned me that using other peoples’ toilet seats would induce VD; for me, kiss chase was simply the start of a slippery slope towards a life of contracting sexually-transmitted diseases.  My mother’s Chinese lantern presentations on the subject make me wonder how I ever talked to girls, let alone realise that kiss chase may well have been better fun than three-and-in).

In the confines of the boys’ playground, we’d emulate Peter Osgood or Colin Cowdrey – some of the boys who weren’t very sporty played cover drives like Peter Osgood and chested balls down and volleyed them like Colin Cowdrey. This was our desire, except for one boy in our class.  He wanted to be a Ford Zodiac.

Whilst we would hope, while we were running around, that possibly there’d be scouts from Chelsea or Fulham or Tooting & Mitcham if you were slightly more realistic; this one lad was hoping to have someone spot him from the Dagenham Motor Works. We all wanted to be footballers, he wanted to be a faux-wood dash board, leatherette steering wheel or alternator.   We were trying to make the ball swerve off the outside of our foot like Pele, our mutual classmate would run around, changing an imaginary gear like Marcel Marceau.

I never got to play for Chelsea, but then, fifty years later, I’ve never had to replace my clutch, although I think I’ve started to leak brake fluid!

Bus-spotting (like train-spotting but with less heroin)

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trolley bus

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?

Luxembourg Calling

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luxmic

Until I was thirteen, I thought music was probably best heard under a thick blanket.

Armed with transistor radio, torch, blanket to muffle the sound of the transistor radio and ears which would make a pipistrelle bat jealous to listen out for potentially vituperative parents, in the evenings I would listen to Radio Luxembourg. I also had a pencil and paper to list the midweek Top 20. Unlike the BBC, who had their Top 20 inside Pick of the Pops, Radio Luxembourg’s offering was midweek.  My bed had so much stationery in it, it resembled a branch of WH Smith.

Because we lacked money, and to earn a few bob more, my father had a twice-weekly evening pools round around the back streets between Tooting High Street and St Benedict’s Hospital. My mum would drive him in our Austin A40 to his destination and follow him round (like kerb-crawling except my dad didn’t have the opportunity to stick his head in the car to ask “inside or out”).  I would sit in the back, listening to my radio.  These were days before car radios (which kept car radio theft down to a minimum); I would sit, one hand on the radio almost glued to my ear and the other on a pencil to write down the chart as it was unveiled.

Eventually we’d head home with my dad having been to one too many houses with people hiding behind their respective sofas. The chart, at this point, would only be about mid-way, so my sheet, with the numbers 10 to 1 remained blank.

By the time my strict parents had sent me to bed (ostensibly to sleep) the top five were yet to be revealed. Once the light was turned off, my listening post was hastily erected; important items were produced from under my pillow (this must have confused the Tooth Fairy).  My writing kit and torch came into their own as I rapidly wrote down (probably not grammatically correct) songs like, “signed, sealed, delivered, I’m yours”.

My interest in music coincided with my rapid eyesight decline (I have since learned my myopia was, due to another hobby discovered as a teenager, not helped, either!). I don’t think this was aided by some of the 70s bands having ridiculously long names – why couldn’t groups be called Lulu or Dana?  Why choose Dave, Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick and Tich?  If I’d have wanted to witness such names I’d have watched episodes of Trumpton.