Category: nostalgia

These days everyone can pretend to be David Bailey. Most people have phones, in which are built-in cameras which would put Lord Snowden to shame.
I am conscious, when growing up in south London in the ‘60s, that these photo opportunities for me were rare. The one I use on social media was taken when I was four in 1961.
I remember the preparation and actual taking of the photographs took an age, plus there was the added resentment that my bedroom had become the make-shift studio. I did not want my photo taken (an attitude I still have, fifty-nine years later) and I think it shows as poor Sooty, with whom I am posing, gets strangled making me look like I’ve been brought up in Boston rather than Balham.
The desire to play with Sooty and my thirty-odd other hand puppets, rather than looking angelic, never faded. With the exception of the mandatory primary school photograph (without Sooty), there remain few photos of me. Neither parent owning a camera didn’t aid matters. Although my mum did borrow an aging relative’s Box Brownie during one summer holiday; she held no ambition to become the next Annie Leibovitz (although she did like her posh biscuits).
Other families usually had one relative adept at taking still and/or moving pictures of their offspring and you’d dread the invite round to someone’s house to witness their holiday that year with a blurry, shaky, grainy silent memory of that summer in Bognor courtesy of their cine-camera.
I wonder if I’d had a puppet of Sweep things might have been better?

And, smile 😊

As a football fan, I’ve been lucky to have watched the beautiful game at the Bernabéu; the San Siro and both German Olympic stadia in Berlin and Munich; but the zenith of my footballing viewing has got to be Sandy Lane, former home of Tooting & Mitcham FC.
Here I watched a charity game between Tooting & Mitcham and a team of celebrities – think Robbie Williams’ games only in 1968 – and in Mitcham.
I went because my comedy hero, Marty Feldman was playing. Great writer and actor, no Charlie Cooke.
The game, like most charity games, had an unexpected celebrity kick it off. In this case it was Mark Lester, who played the title role in the film Oliver. Like Diana Ross at the 1994 World Cup only with more begging.
I am one-year older than Mark Lester, but even at that tender age, although you dreamed of playing with grown-ups, when reality kicked in (literally) you wanted to hurriedly produce a note from your mum excusing you from the first half.
Mark Lester kicked off and immediately trotted back to the safety of the dug-out, changing rooms or Nancy.
But, imagine if he’d stayed on and discovered that Tooting & Mitcham had Oliver Reed in their starting XI? He’d have terrorized the poor urchin for ninety-minutes.
Picture the scene: Young Mark gets the ball from the comedy equivalent of Jimmy Greaves, dribbles inside several Tooting & Mitcham defenders, is about to shoot, balances, raises his leg and then suddenly hears the death-cry behind him of ‘Bullesye!’
This was 1968; you couldn’t do that now, FIFA have introduced a rule which says you can’t have a pit-bull terrier playing at centre-half.

The day you felt you’d become a man (certainly in the rituals in place in south London in the ‘60s) would be the time you no longer need the bench to sit on at the barbers. In effect, you’d only started to enter adolescence and the well-thumbed copies of Parade, Reveille and Health & Efficiency, almost overnight, became more interesting than the Beano or Charles Buchan’s Football Monthly.
The time you did, at least in the barber’s eyes, become a man, was when your mum no longer took you. Although in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, with so many people opting for longer hair (I blame Chicory Tip), I’m surprised anyone went to the barbers, unless they needed something for the weekend and knew too many people working in their local Boot’s.
I can remember sitting for ages in my Balham barber’s knowing, when accompanied by my mum, that the magazines could have been housed in Fort Knox, such was the chance of me touching one, let alone opening one.
You would wait patiently looking around the shop at photos of hairstyles you could have (although many of the photos were quite old, so if you wanted to look like Clement Attlee, this was the place to go). There were also many displays of , some magic stick which stopped you bleeding after shaving and combs. Things for the weekend were not in sight. When you hadn’t yet entered puberty (some days I think I’m still waiting) things for the weekend were footballs, Jimmy Clitheroe and roast beef; this might explain why I have fourteen children.

The closest I ever got to witnessing any form of diabolistic activities growing up in Balham in the ‘60s was during a full moon.
My nan and my great aunt would take me (I always feared I was about to be offered as a sacrifice up to some pagan god who lived in the River Wandle) into the gardens of our block of flats, with their purses, and “turn their money over” (or in my great aunt’s case, rearrange her collection of Embassy cigarette coupons).
Animals weren’t allowed in our flats, so there was little chance of having your path crossed by a black cat and because the flats reached the height of eight storeys, you rarely saw any ladders to inadvertently walk under. So, my chances of become superstitious (like my aged relatives) were limited; we were too poor to have mirrors.
There were receptacles for putting in eyes of newts, toes of frogs and wools of bats, but these were meant to be for rubbish – people tended to use them for discarding old copies of the TV Times and Reveille rather than dismembered reptiles. Again, little evidence of witches.
Every November there would be a big fire in the garages where we lived. After the release of the 1973 film, The Wicker Man, came out, and after all the coin-churning, I’d half expected Edward Woodward to suddenly appear round the back of a Ford Cortina.
I’m not allowed matches, so it wasn’t me.