Category: playtime

I have a step counter on my watch and am obsessed with how many steps I do each day.

I look back to when I was a kid, a time when the word “school run” was something you’d do if you bunked off, I walked everywhere (when I wasn’t running).

They suggest, like eating five pieces of fruit (pineapple chunks and Jaffa Cakes don’t count), that you attempt to walk 10,000-steps a day.

I think I’d have achieved this walking to and from my Tooting school from my Balham flat.

Sometimes I’d skip; sometimes I practiced my bowling action while humming the main theme to Patton: Lust for glory.  I was a mixture of George C Scott and Richie Benaud. 

Couple this walk with running around like a maniac during playtime, the 10,000-steps were invariably achieved before Double Chemistry.  Road Runner meets Pipette Man.

However, all that walking and playing football in the playground during playtime, with school shoes on, gave you an appreciation of how Margot Fonteyn must have felt.  At least I never had to wear a tutu. 

My fitbit also monitors my sleep; what it doesn’t tell me is why I no longer dream about Claudia Cardinale every night.  So, modern technology, not all it’s cracked up to be.

It’s Sunday morning, only another 9,995-steps to go.

I’m not so old that I remember writing with a goose feather, but writing implements have changed over the years.

I remember my first day at my Balham primary school; I sat at my new desk, wondering when my afternoon rest was going to start, when I had a lump of slate and chalk thrust into my hand.  Was I expected to start a fire with them?  Was this a type of drum? Was I to write the odds of the 3.30 at Newmarket?

Before this I’d only had crayons.  My nan had a biro to do the Evening News crossword every night. I wasn’t allowed that as, the only time I’d been given one, I bit the end off and got blue ink all over my mouth.  My mother assumed I was part of a royal family.  Biology not one of her stronger suits.

When I was ten, we were introduced to italic pens.  After ten years of mastering writing with crayons and the occasional pencil, suddenly everything had to be slanted – like I was doing my classwork from the other side of the desk.

At secondary school the desks were so old, there were still inkwells in every desk.  With the advent of cartridges, the only use of the redundant inkwell was to place your mid-morning tuck-shop iced bun in.   Although, if you found you suddenly had royal blue icing, the inkwells were clearly still being used.

But if your cartridge had run out, there were always the geese running amok on the rugby field.

As a kid, growing up in my Balham flat, I had central heating; Hot Wheels and 35 glove puppets.  It begs the question: why on Earth did I play in puddles the moment it rained?

We had no running rivers with bridges over them (I’d have built one, but wasn’t terribly adept with Meccano), so there were no opportunities for playing Pooh Sticks. 

But, when it rained, we had puddles and would reenact Pearl Harbour.

Because I wasn’t well-versed in laundry matters, I would get very dirty – and wet.  Having built dams using stones; half bricks; mates’ satchels, we imagined we were fighting Admiral Tojo until I had to go in for my tea.

Thrilled with the fact I’d subverted the Japanese Navy, and knowing I wasn’t about to have Sushi for tea (this was Balham in the ‘60s), I would re-enter my flat.

The moment my mother saw my clothes, she went berserk.  I immediately apologised.  To which I heard the all-too-frequent refrain: “You’re always bleedin’ sorry, Michael”.  Being called “Michael” meant trouble; I was no longer “my little Mickey Mouse”.

It was a quiet teatime that evening; we watched I love Lucy in total silence while eating our smoked haddock.

As I explained to Sooty and Sweep, two of my glove puppets, who were on each hand – how was I to know mud was difficult to get out of a brand new school shirt?  Was I sponsored by Dreft?  Sooty never did answer. 

I’ve had a fear of cheese for exactly 58-years now (I’m writing this on 5^th April 2022, the day I turned 65).

My parents had thrown a party in our Balham flat when I was seven.  Twenty kids all in one small lounge, together with two heavy smokers and an assortment of matches and lighters scattered like cushions in a Habitat furniture display.  What could possibly go wrong?

One lad at my school at the party was very susceptible to nose-bleeds – they were so regular, if we’d been allowed watches, you could have set your time by him.  Of course, during a very competitive Postman’s knock, my mate’s nose began to bleed.  The flat turned into the set of Emergency! Ward 10 as my mother’s Bracklesham Bay tea towel quickly became a tourniquet.   Several of the guests (can you call seven-year-olds guests?) thought this was real life “doctors and nurses” and had replaced the much-promised Pass the parcel round. 

Not content with the salmon and chicken paste sandwiches, I asked my mother for a cheese sandwich.  When it arrived, I decided I didn’t want it; my mother made me eat it and my relationship with Camembert; Edam or even a Dairylea triangle ended on that fateful April 1964 afternoon.

Still, everyone got cake and an item of stationery (as one did in those days), although my mum got the rubber order wrong, thus avoiding many young pregnancies.  

The transition from primary to secondary school for me in 1968 was disconcerting: as if taking a different direction along Balham High Road wasn’t bad enough, no one had ever told me about biology.

We’d not studied any science at primary school, so I was ill-prepared for my first lesson at my new school.

As we walked towards the biology lab there was much sniggering from the more sexually aware boys in my form. There was much talk of seeing more body parts than you would peeking over someone’s shoulder at the barber’s staring at a two-year-old copy of Health & Efficiency.

Among us thirty boys, those in the know mentioned that the word “reproduction” was what to listen out for.

We were not disappointed.   Well, not at first.  After we were all settled, the biology master, using slides, which would have seemed archaic even at the turn-of-the-century Chinese lantern show, proceeded to show us how reproduction works – for amoebas.   The groans in the classroom, for the more mature boys, had matched what they’d hoped to have heard on the screen.

You cannot see an amoeba with the naked eye and as dissection was also on the syllabus, I was beginning to wonder how they could make knives that small?  Unless The Borrowers were lab assistants?

I learned precious little during my science lessons apart from you soon find out who the form pyromaniac is when introduced to a Bunsen Burner and that a pipette is not a small pip. 

Later that evening I was asked what I’d done at school that day? I replied I’d learned about the birds and the amoebas. I could see the relief across my mum’s face as she thought, “that’s one less conversation I don’t need to have”.