nostalgia – Page 19 – Micky's Up blog

Slotting in just nicely

Published on January 26, 2021February 7, 2021 by mickyrichards1957Leave a comment

These days you have to tap in for everything. In the ‘60s and ‘70s, the only tapping-in being done was by the Stasi.

Back then, coin-operated machines were the Sixties equivalent of our near cashless society (well, cashless except for the odd half-a-crown). Imagine your horror during a ‘60s Christmas dinner, together with the 365-day anticipation of getting a sixpence in your slice of pudding, only to have both cheeks pierced by an Access card. (Not very flexible now, is it?)

There was a cigarette machine on the pavement near Tooting Bec Station which, with the correct change inserted, 20 Senior Service would magically appear. For an old Penny you could watch the trains in the model shop along from that same station – you could wave every modern-day card you carried from Visa to Kidney Donor via The Tufty Club – if you didn’t have real money, you’d see no train moving.

The launderette would pose similar problems if you’d travelled back in time with your current wallet (or phone). You could try all you like, if you didn’t have a couple of shillings to buy a small packet of Tide, you’d very quickly become like Queen Elizabeth I and only wash once a year. Imagine how angry the laundrette manager would become if you thought waving the hand-set of an old Bakelite at the spin dryer would make it rotate.

There still are vending machines for those who have kept a collection of florins; these are for people who haven’t cleaned their teeth; have headaches or haven’t had a vasectomy. If you’ve still not solved the solutions of the first two, you needn’t bother with the third.

Do keep the change, waiter.

Don’t forget your gym kit!

Published on January 12, 2021January 17, 2021 by mickyrichards1957Leave a comment

New year; new calendar. Will it have kittens on? A favourite football team? 12 pictures of Claudia Cardinale (I’m buying a calendar for a friend)? One thing is certain, mine won’t have the new moon turning up on the 15th of every month.

We never had a calendar as my Mum rarely attended school and so it never mattered what date it was as she couldn’t count further than 31. My Nan, however, in her Balham flat, had a very simple one showing the phases of the Moon. She’d have been an astronaut had she not had a fear of heights – and Martians.

More men would have had Pirelli calendars, only there was a general fear of foreign food in the ‘60s.

These days most shopping centres have pop-up stalls (seemingly all year round, thus catering for anyone who has just come out of a coma) serving every hobby and interest (unless you’re a budding astronomer). But you only really need one with several columns making sure no one forgets their gym kit so it’s academic what the pictures are. I created one one year for my household with a different Nazi each month; we’d got to October (Hermann Göring in a swimsuit) before anyone noticed.

Because I’m still working from home, I’ve erected a bird table outside my study window, a consequence of which is that my calendar for 2021 features Garden Birds. I’m looking forward to August – the index has promised “Great Tits”.

63 and only now going through adolescence 🙂

Postcards from the Devonian age

Published on December 5, 2020December 13, 2020 by mickyrichards1957Leave a comment

The last time I got a postcard the price of the stamp was 3d.

No one sends them anymore – not even the ones featuring very small men with wives with enormous, Pamela Anderson-like chests, looking at marrows or any odd-shaped vegetable mentioning its size etc.

As a kid, during the summer, I had two great aunts who, upon their arrival in Ilfracombe (might have been Pluto for all I knew, it sounded so far away from Balham), would write to me using every conceivable space on the card. There would always be a picture of the beach – not a sniff of a giant marrow 😊

It was lovely to receive, but the quid pro quo was that you had to send them back and would be forced by elder relatives – seemingly for the entire duration of the holiday – to write them.

“Wish you were here” being the obvious inclusion: but, however large you wrote it, it wasn’t covering the entire message area. So I would lie and write about the remains of a pterodactyl I’d found on Dungeness beach and wouldn’t be able to write a second card due to having been abducted by Ellen Terry (we were forced to visit her house in Kent one year). So, when I returned, having been released by the leading 19^th theatre actress, some aging relatives were quite surprised.

And the weather; you’d be in the same country and the weather probably similar, but you were, because you were British, obliged to mention it. You said it was hot, but then you’d never travelled to the Sahara Desert, the Grand Canyon or Mars.

I’d send more postcards, except they cost more than 3d to post and my marrows aren’t at their best in this cold weather. �

The postman only rings after playtime

Published on December 5, 2020December 6, 2020 by mickyrichards1957Leave a comment

In December, during the ‘60s, in my Balham primary school, there would be a temporary post box put in the playground.

Its use was for pupils to put our Christmas cards into, It was purely for our fellow pupils – although some didn’t realise this and those with relatives in far-away countries were quite disappointed that Auntie Gladys in Brisbane would moan she’d not received a single card for years.

The cards would be delivered; unless you had siblings at the school, you tended to get twenty-nine cards – from your fellow classmates.

I realised, after I’d finished full-time education, that you only tended to know your actual classmates, apart from the boys’ names announced at the Monday morning assembly announcing anyone with any sporting prowess or were (yet again) on detention.

Receiving so many cards was great, the problem was was that twenty-nine also had to be written. I got very bored signing everyone “Happy Christmas, Mick” and so mixed my signature up with people I’d seen on TV or were sporting heroes. I’d sign many as “John Drake” or “Amos Burke”; many girls in my class would wonder who Gerd Müller was, and several boys would get excited thinking they’d got a card from Nancy Sinatra or Mandy Rice-Davies.

This Christmas I shall be confusing friends and family with my Christmas signature of “Be lucky, Pol Pot”. Confusing as a. he’s dead and b. wasn’t terribly Christian. You certainly wouldn’t have wanted to sit on his knee, let alone enter his grotto. Be lucky, Mick.

Not so floppy Flopsy

Published on November 25, 2020November 29, 2020 by mickyrichards1957Leave a comment

Before discovering Radio Luxembourg, I was more than capable, as an only child, of entertaining myself at bedtime in my Balham flat.

As soon as it was lights out in HMP Mick, the wall of my bedroom would become a giant control panel, which would transport me to wherever I wanted to go – I rarely thought past Morden, though.

I’d pretend, where there was actually Flopsy Bunny wallpaper (neither parent were regular decorators), there were buttons to push, enabling me, in my ten-year-old brain, to travel, out of SW17, into a parallel universe (Morden).

During the day this same wall had been a goal into which I would head one of my dad’s nicked squash balls. By night I was Neil Armstrong, by day I’d be Gerd Müller.

To re-enact some of Müller’s many goals, I’d throw myself across my bed, oblivious to the fact there was invariably either a violin bow or pair of glasses lying there.

I gave the violin up as soon as I could; but, as I got older and found the spaceship wall less and less appealing, so my need for stronger and stronger glasses became increasingly necessary and visits to the opticians seemed almost weekly. I couldn’t work out the correlation. Seems my Nan had been right all along 😊

To infinity and beyond (well, the southern end of the Northern Line).

Lightweight and bitter

Published on November 17, 2020November 22, 2020 by mickyrichards1957Leave a comment

I’ve not drunk alcohol since 1976; I blame David Vine.

Before then, albeit for one legal year, I’d have the odd half in pubs near where I grew up in the ‘60s and ‘70s Balham. I wasn’t cut out for drinking, but I’d tag along. On Friday nights, when the Salvation Army sellers of War Cry would come into The Hope on Wandsworth Common, I’d be one of the few in our group capable of finishing the picture crossword in their weekly newspaper.

On 5^th April 1976 (my 19^th birthday) I went with my mates to the Surrey Tavern. We’d play pool there and put millions of pounds into the juke box to listen to Save your kisses for me; Fernando and Music by John Miles. These were the top 3 singles on my birthday. You really got your money’s worth with Music as it went on for about a week.

As I was singing along “Music was my first love” etc. etc., my mates thought it’d be hysterically funny to empty that month’s Smirnoff factory output into my half a pint of lager and lime.

Later that evening, when the world was spinning faster than anything they’d ever had at Battersea Funfair, I decided alcohol wasn’t for me.

The next month I went on holiday to Austria with my dad. He tempted me with what he called ‘innocuous’ light ale. What I didn’t realise, despite him being very well-read, was that this was one big word he didn’t fully know the meaning off. The words from the Tony Newley hit, ‘Stop the world I want to get off’ rang round my head again.

Travelling on a coach around Innsbruck the next day, I’ve never felt so ill; I still can’t listen to the theme tune to Ski Sunday without feeling nauseous!

Not so little fishy

Published on November 13, 2020November 15, 2020 by mickyrichards1957Leave a comment

During the early ‘60s I associated the Dick van Dyke Show with smoked haddock.

Every Saturday evening, as the activities of everybody’s favourite Cockney would be played out on our TV screens, my mum would serve up smoked haddock. Having flirted with the fishmongers in Balham Market to get their finest fish, I still, to this day, cannot stomach the taste and whenever you go to a restaurant (remember those?) the fish of the day is invariably haddock. There clearly is no God – which is more than can be said of the omnipresent haddock.

The opposite effect on me is with roast beef: my brain conjures up images of Ted Moult. He’d by on the radio (wireless for older listeners) every Sunday (he’d alternate with Jimmy Clitheroe on the Brain’s Trust) and there is still this association. Whenever I’d see an Everest Double Glazing ad on the telly, I’d start salivating – I do that now, but that may be an age thing.

However, I do blame Lucille Ball for my allergy to prawns. My mum’s divi must have come in one week as she decided to buy prawns instead of the haddock. Fine by me. Shortly after another slapstick episode of US situation comedy I decided that I didn’t love Lucy that much and her show should have been sponsored by Kaolin & Morphine.

But the worst taste and smell for me: boiled fish in parsley sauce. My nan would make it and was the worse smell ever and am reminded of it whenever I read Dante’s Inferno; the recipe had come from the tenth circle of Hell – so awful, it wasn’t even in the book.

Stage fright

Published on October 22, 2020October 25, 2020 by mickyrichards1957Leave a comment

In the late ‘70s I joined an Am Dram group (still have shirts with stage make-up on). We’d mostly perform in a Balham school hall, where there was more a smell of rotting plimsolls than greasepaint.

Having started with one line, I worked my way up to be given larger parts. This impressed some of the younger girls in the group. Well, one in particular.

We’d just performed a revue at the old Tooting Bec (Mental) Hospital. Tough gig as many of the audience couldn’t clap as they still had their straitjackets on.

During the revue I’d sung, danced (albeit in a ballerina costume) and acted.

It was at this time when I’d started my career in advertising and earlier that day had bought the book, “Teach yourself advertising”; still haven’t finished it nearly fifty years on.

The show finished, and Tooting’s answer to Nurse Ratched had returned her cares to their rooms, we left the hospital to return to our respective homes.

As we approached Hurley’s on Balham High Road there were just two of us left. Me and a girl in our troupe. As we got to her house I was invited in for coffee, except it wasn’t for coffee it was for “coffee”.

With a fear of girls even now, being alone with a girl filled me with dread, especially after the door had been locked, the pet Alsatian, Himmler, tied up, no obvious sign of a percolator and the announcement of “mum’s out for the evening” I went into blind panic.

I stood up, announced that I had bought a new book and needed to read it before the morning and left, coffee-less.

Oddly I have three children, but back then, you could get all sorts of things off the Freeman’s catalogue.

Wheelie TV bin

Published on October 17, 2020October 18, 2020 by mickyrichards1957Leave a comment

There was no better feeling of euphoria inside my Balham classroom during the ‘60s than when the school TV was wheeled in.

As schoolkid you couldn’t have given a monkey’s that you were about to witness the funeral of a great statesman, the launch of an ocean-going liner or the exploration of other parts of the universe.

Neither Churchill, Queen Elizabeth II (the boat, not the monarch) nor Neil Armstrong could take away that feeling of ‘soon, we’ll not be working.’ Only double playtime, or an inset day, had that ability of relief from the monotony of learning about the Stone Age; the four times table or the tricks of the baby Jesus in later life.

It would be the school caretaker who would wheel the machine into the classroom (there were no IT assistants in the ‘60s – the only IT we knew about those days was the creature from The Addams Family). The TV was housed in a wooden box (the size of which wouldn’t have looked out of place outside Troy) and placed in the centre of the room, in front of the blackboard, thus hiding any trick way of remembering that four times four is sixteen.

And so, plugged in, warmed up (this took the best part of a week), we then sat watching corteges, yachts and automobiles (OK, Moon buggies).

At the end of it there was a sense of anti-climax as many of us had never heard of Churchill, unlikely to go on a cruise or fly to the Moon, we’d resume our daily tasks. I don’t think we missed much schooling as I know my four times table (up to 12), know how to slay a mammoth and know that the adult baby Jesus wouldn’t have needed flint to have started a fire.