Selected Extracts From My Diary
THE QUEEN’S SILVER Jubilee, and a sturdy, black WH Smith Desk Diary with handsome, embossed ‘1977’. Somewhat ruined by the overenthusiastic application of decorative tape to the cover – purchased with tokens off the back of Sugar Smacks packets in March – and a little Jubilee sticker.
I have filled the so-called ‘Memoranda’ section before the diary starts with many wonderful things, including another aerial view of our Action Man barracks, an in-depth questionnaire for all six of our Action Men (in which we discover that, for example, Captain Steven James Livingstone is nicknamed ‘Libby’, enjoys motorcycling and fish and chips and is best friends with Rodgers – honestly, it’s like backstage at the National), and a self-penned, quasi-Pythonesque Dictionary Of Useless And Silly Words (sample text: AGGRO – laying in the boot and dobbing over; BOGEYMEN – stupid, green, sticky blokes who get you when you come home from Cubs; PUNK ROCK – heavy ‘music’, Stranglers etc.; POUFF – a bit that way, queero; UGLY – Donny Osmond … and so it goes).
A further series of questionnaires have been filled in by non-fictional people, from Simon to Paul Milner. In my own, we discover that my favourite film is The Spy Who Loved Me, my favourite food is beans, my pet hates are vegetables and haircuts, and my favourite book is Airport ’77.
Joined-up writing lasts like a New Year’s resolution until 5 January, from whence it’s back to comic-style capitals. The drawings improve but a mood of couldn’t-care-less takes over towards the end of the year with very brief and scribbly entries. Funny age, 11–12.
Saturday, 1 January
Made a Lego house in the morning. Watched Swap Shop. Watched Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory in the afternoon, after playing Monopoly. New series of Jim’ll Fix It and Dr Who. Watched Starsky and Hutch.
Sunday, 2 January
Did drawing in the morning. More to my Target comic. Went to Nan Mabel’s for tea and the tea was lovely. Won 12p in bingo.1 I started doing a great picture of seagulls with my inks.
Saturday, 8 January
Went shopping this morning. I bought a fab Britains cowboy on horseback. Got some library books. Si went to the Cubs fancy dress party as Dracula. Dad mended my record player. We watched a new series of Mike Yarwood.2 Dad, Simon and I made our model planes. By the way Simon came second in his fancy dress party. Mum wouldn’t let us watch Starsky and Hutch.
Sunday, 9 January
Went for a ‘blow’ in the park. It was raining. We saw a squirrel. We saw some mice in the bird cages. Then we popped in Pap Collins’. I got two weeks of B&MFC.3 Pap gave us two a transfer each. Dad hung Simon’s plane up on the ceiling. I cut a load of faces out of the TV and Radio Times. And I’ve drawn cartoon bodies for them.
Tuesday, 18 January
Mum got us three a toothbrush each. Mine’s white. We had to draw a god for RE. I did Collius, God of Drawing! Mrs Goodall is away yet again. We had Mr Bates. No homework. Jes, Angus and I did a brill sequence in PE. Saw Spot On.4 Si went to Cubs.
Thursday, 10 February
I am getting brill at drawing figures now. In art I painted a footballer. I got 18/20 in the French test. Quite a bit of homework. It was our last lesson with Mrs Watling today as she is having a baby in April, she’s leaving tomorrow. I drew loads of figures tonight. I saw Just a Nimmo. Simon did his length at swimming.
Tuesday, 22 February
This morning I ‘lost’ my two Parker pens and so did Gibbons at the same time. Kim and Cameron also ‘lost’ theirs some weeks back. Very suspicious. I’ve been round all the classes.5 Choir’s back on again. A bit of homework. Mum cracked her false teeth and is using her spare ones.
Saturday, 26 February
This morning Swap Shop’s Swaporama came to Northampton. Si went. But in vain. And he got his shoes covered in thick mud.6 I stayed at home. Dad and Mum bought: a picture for the hall, a doormat and a mat for the kitchen. Mum and Dad went over the road to Mel and Margaret’s7 and Si and I stayed here and watched Thunderball.
Sunday, 27 February
Si went on the Cub cycle-cross at Overstone. We watched him. He came fifth. Very good. Nan M and Pap R came. I started a mad magazine called Ferret’s Own.
Friday, 4 March MY BIRTHDAY
I got … cassette recorder, two Parker pens, Concorde picture, Asterix book, money (about £7.50), Tempo. Went to the dentist’s in the afternoon. Had a filling. Si had couple out. A bit of homework. My party tomorrow sort of. Just Angus and Soardsy. Melissa is a bit off and was off school.
Sunday, 13 March
Si and I went down the field. Cor. Interesting. Sorry. My days are getting a bit boring these days.8
Monday, 14 March
Dad got us a Matchbox track from Green Shield Stamps. Went to the library after tea. Got: Heritage of Horror, Dad’s Army, Vision On and Asterix.
Wednesday, 16 March
Normal lessons. Usual stuff. It rained. No drama. Boring. Boring. (I mean today’s diary was boring.)
Thursday, 17 March
It rained a bit. Normal lessons.
Sunday, 20 March
Made a Jaws play kit (including rubber Jaws, Lego Orca, Quint, policeman and Professor Dreyfuss, two drunks, wreckage, boat).9 Played Newmarket.
Monday, 28 March
My denim waistcoat is well and truly finished. It snowed a tich bit but didn’t settle. Played with Carl. He gave me a load of Krazys and I’ve cut them out. Marbles are back in craze.
Friday, 13 May
Did athletics in games. Gained two Habitat marbles. Did drama and missed French. I had a brill scrap with Simon. I really bashed him in.
Wednesday, 18 May
Everyone went down the field, including: me, Angus, Dash, Kate, Taf, Gibby, B Jnr, Ally, Westy, Argy, Chris, Gibs, Si, Roobarb, Hirsty, etc. etc. etc.10 Argy and Gibby had a great scrap.
Saturday, 28 May
Went shopping. Melissa is being a twit. It was brill at swimming. It was sweltering. Poufter Dad won’t let me watch That’s Life. Maddo.11
Monday, 30 May
Played an ace game of stony for about two hours with me, Angus, Jes, Doyan,12 Little Paul, Doboe,13 David and Dashfield. Si gave me two marbles, two Habitats, one gobby and one ball bearing. Ace! Brill!
Sunday, 5 June
Looked at Dad’s Mayfair magazines. Wahey! Ssssh!14 Saw World About Us about a zoo doctor. That’s about all I spose. Si and I went on a Jubilee tour of the estate on bikes. We saw all the decorations.15
Tuesday, 14 June
We were all woke up at 6.30 because of loads of thunder plus rainrainrain. The garden was flooded, the roads were flooded and most of all, the school was flooded. It was about 24 inches deep in places. We nearly had to swim in the playground, but the spoilsport caretakers pumped it up.
Tuesday, 28 June
Simon went to Coombe Abbey. I got a Jubilee Crown presented in assembly for being ‘highly commended’ in an art comp. in which I painted the Muppets. I’ve joined the Dance and Movement Club.
Wednesday, 29 June
I got through to the second round of the Carol Barratt Art Prize and with the title ‘Wave After Wave’ in which you could do anything to do with the sea. I did a Jaws painting. Had loads of French homework. There was a car crash up the top of the street by the pub. One bloke got killed in it.
Tuesday, 12 July HOLS IN WALES
I got extreemly sunburnt. We went to Black Rock Sands. Congratulations!! You have won ‘Sentence of the Year 1977’ with the most interesting sentence ever written: ‘We went to Black Rock Sands.’ Wow! The way in which the words flow together. It is stupendous. (What does stupendous mean? Eh? Wot’s it mean? I dunno.)16
Wednesday, 20 July
It was quite nice and sunny. We discovered the hay barn and Mr Williams said we can climb on it so we did. We went to Black Rock Sands and in a café in Porthmadog I had a knickerbocker glory (45p).17 Si had a strawberry ice cream milk shake and Melissa had a strawberry whirl.
Sunday, 24 July
It was pretty sunny. But it was windy. I shot down an enemy Russian nuclear sonic guided missile anti-tank gun plane with a supersonic anti-nuclear plane double-barrelled triple-magazined anti-plane 59 vector gun. (You believe that don’t you?) Saw The Intelligence Men film. Wot ’orrible writing.
Monday, 25 July
It was quite a nice day. We played on bikes and on Simon’s ‘skateboard’ (bit of wood screwed on a roller skate!!). Tonight I went up Becky’s house to give her the fudge I got from Wales. But she wasn’t there so I’m going tomorrow maybe.
Tuesday, 26 July
This morning I cycled up Becky’s house and she was there this time. I gave her the fudge.18 I played with Carl after dinner and we made a Rollerball go-kart. (It’s only got a bit of wood on the front with ‘Rollerball’ written on it.)
Thursday, 28 July
Dean came down. Simon is being the most stupid git. He keeps being a bum. He is mad. He is thick. Simon smells. He is a slimy toad. He’s loony. He has the brain of a backward, demented chimpanzee.
Saturday, 30 July
We went shopping this morning. It was quite hot in the afternoon. I painted my British Infantry Support Group soldiers. They look brill. I’ve now got the set of Dr Whos (free in Weetabix) after a bit of swapping wiv Jonathan next door. Tonight we went up the park to see the paintings.19 We had an ice cream. Then we popped in Nan C’s. I got Action wiv an ace Spinball booklet. Wow! Action is the brillest comic in the universal solar system. So is Krazy.
Friday, 5 August
I painted the Afrika Korps and German soldiers. They look ace. It rained, but it soon cleared up. Gibby, Si and I played Tiggy Off Ground but Si was a bad sport. He is an absolute idiot. He’s a bum.
Saturday, 6 August
Wowee! I sent an alien drawing to Si’s comic 2000AD ages ago. Now it’s been printed and I’ll win £2.20 Wowee! It rained. Bum.
Tuesday, 30 August
Usual stuff. Skateboards. Si and I played Colditz. Watched The Rise and Fall of Reginald Perrin. I have now gone mad on crispbread.
Monday, 2 September
Started doing proper timetable. It was pretty simple. Had games. Wow! Is my scout car model looking great? You bet. I am now an honorary fan of the Fonz.21 He is cool. Fonz is very cool.
Monday, 12 September
The bad news: loads of homework. The really good news: we went to the library. We had chips. We went to Pap’s and he had bought me the Airfix 1/32 scale Crusader III tank. Wow, it is just too fantastically brilliantly ace for words.
Thursday, 15 September
I’ve finished my model. Hardly any homework. Angus came down. I am now a member of the Airfix Modellers Club. I sent away for it. I got a certificate, badge, sticker, membership card, voucher, stamps, letter and kit price list. Wow! And just for 35p. My number is 106339.
Sunday, 25 September
We went to Uncle Pete’s and Auntie Wendy’s at Wisbech. Uncle Pete gave us some plums, a load of old model planes and a load of lollies. There I did my Prinz Eugen model. It’s really detailed. It looks brill though.
Sunday, 9 October
Usual stuff. Played Lego. Si and I played around the building site on the dirt heaps. Ace fun. Also saw Flight Into Holocaust. A mini plane smashed straight into a skyscraper and it was all about rescuing the passengers.22
Thursday, 13 October
Usual lessons. No homework. Before Carl mended his wooden skateboard and gave it to me, he wrote off to the company. Today, they sent him back some new wheels so he gave them to me. Now my board really goes.
Wednesday, 19 October
Played hockey. In the game I came tearing down the wing, burning up the track. I did a 20mph hot shot which burned through the air at the speed of sound and tore through the back of the net and made an eight foot crater in the grass bank. To put it in a nutshell, I didn’t play very well.23
Monday, 24 October
This morning I went round Watto’s and we had an ace H0/00 war game. I had another war game with Si in the afternoon. Watto gave me an unfinished Buffalo Amphibian H0/00 Airfix model. He also lent me a Mad Don Martin book. It is brill. Dad went to London. Uncle Brian baby-sitted while Mum went out.
Tuesday, 25 October
This afternoon we went to Auntie Margaret’s new big house.24 They have got a baby retriever called Jack. He is really nice. Saw Charlie’s Angels wiv a new Angel – Kris.
Wednesday, 2 November
Another stupid power cut. For two and a half hours. Power cuts are bum. So is Simon. He keeps playing with this loony friend of his: Paul McBride. What an idiotic pouf.
Monday, 14 November
Nothing happened today. Well obviously something happened but it’s so boring it’s not worth putting in. I mean, you would not be interested if I told you that we studied the industrial areas of France in geography or that we started to talk about Edward III in history. Or was it Edward II?
Tuesday, 15 November
I have finished making my skilful teddy in needlework. He is called Arthur.25
Saturday, 17 December
Went shopping. Angus came in the afternoon. He gave me a Christmas present: a Honda CB450 motorbike Airfix model. It is ace. He also gave me a ginger beer plant. Nan C baby-sitted again. I am mad.
Tuesday, 20 December
Wrapped up loads of presents. So did Dad. I started making my Honda model. It’s so fiddly I feel like smashing it up. But I won’t because it is too fabulous.
Saturday, 24 December CHRISTMAS EVE
Magic. Dad took me to Binleys and got me all the skateboard padding (helmet, elbow pads and knee pads) for a Christmas pressie to go with my skateboard. Went to the park after dinner. It’s Christmas tomorrow! Magic.26
Sunday, 25 December CHRISTMAS DAY
I got: £18.00 Newporter plastic deck skateboard, all the padding, Boeing 747 model, drawing book, Goodies Disaster Movie book, model knife, glue, 11 model paints, 64 Crayola crayons, Krazy annual, Gambler, Bert Fegg’s Nasty Book, Psycho, mini-stapler, Concorde model, Bugatti model, Lifeguard model, loads of pencils, diary, rubber, RAF refuelling set model, two monster jigsaws, Quality Streets. Magic! Magic! Magic!
Friday, 30 December MUM’S BIRTHDAY
More skateboarding. Dad bought me two good paint brushes. Dad took me with him when he played squash. It was a brill match. Dad lost against Les Hull 3–2. Dad played magic.
1. Nan M. and Pap R. had a home bingo set, pre-war, which would frequently come out at family gatherings and keep us all transfixed like the decent working-class people we deeply were. (We called out ‘House!’ – or ‘Hace!’ in Northamptonian – what further proof do you require?) The set consisted of a metal board (metal!) with all the numbers etched in by Pap himself in his old job, a cloth bag containing 100 wooden numbers, and a good thick book of paper bingo cards. It was all there. Just add a motley clutch of pens and half-pencils. The old ones are the best.
2. That’ll be Mike Yarwood in Persons, the first of four series he did under that imprint for the BBC between ’77 and ’81 (plus specials). Then he crossed the floor to Thames, where, like Morecambe & Wise before him (’78), his decline began. Why do they do it? Can the money matter so much? Or is it just a comedians’ graveyard, a resting place to which all dying stars are drawn? (I don’t blame Thames, that lovable warren by the river in Teddington: the Goodies went not to Thames but to LWT the same year as Yarwood defected and the diminishing effect was the same.)
3. Buster & Monster Fun Comic, whose merger was as easy to swallow as its new title. I read in the paper this morning that there’s an advertising agency called Abbott Mead Vickers BBDO. If you insist.
4. Possibly (I have no sources) a regional magazine programme. We certainly seemed to like it. (I even bothered to reproduce its logo in my diary: concentric circles.)
5. I think we know what I’m getting at here. I learned a valuable legal lesson while coping with the evident theft of my two Parker pens (I think one must have been a propelling pencil – I wouldn’t have had two ink pens): you must never accuse anybody, not even an unnamed pen-thieving ghost. Crime investigation is entirely euphemistic: my pens have gone missing; I have lost my pens.
I also learnt a more practical lesson: to use biros and Pentels at school in future. Pens are not meant to be of sentimental value. There should be no whodunit after the loss of a pen. Not even the ‘loss’.
6. Our maiden brush with the painted whore of television. Swaporama, the town-hopping roadshow part of Swap Shop, always looked enjoyably chaotic on TV, with battered toys being passed across the crowd for barter – but it was only when Simon went down to Abington Park the week the circus came to Northampton that we discovered just how unenjoyably chaotic it was. I remember the call-out at the start of Swap Shop that morning: Keith Chegwin up the familiar, nay iconic climbing frame shaped like a space rocket. At that delicious moment I tasted the thrill of seeing a piece of playground apparatus I’d ascended, on telly, with Cheggers up it. The Swaporama may have been local that Saturday – less than a mile from where I was sitting – but for me, at home, the experience remained remote: clean and annexed. For Simon it was mud-caked and humiliating, and when he got back and related his woes, the screen came down: the real Wizard of Oz was revealed.
7. New arrivals in Winsford Way: the popular Mills family, from the West Midlands. Mel (bald and gregarious), Margaret, elder son Martin (went to agricultural college where, one hopes, he was able to properly cultivate that bum-fluff moustache) and daughter Sarah (had a lot of problems with her legs or was it her back?). We liked them so much, when they moved away to Crowborough in East Sussex, we went to visit them. I fell in a river, possibly the Ouse, and Mel entertained us with a road sign he’d spotted locally bearing the place-names BALLS GREEN and BLACOMBE (which doesn’t exist, so perhaps he’d misread BALCOMBE, or tweaked it for comic effect).
8. First sighting of ‘onset teenage ennui’.
9. I have by now seen Jaws (18 March with Dad, Simon and Angus). Though an ‘A’ certificate, it is by far the most frightening film of my 12 years on earth, and thus, I am now obsessed with it.
10. Some of these names are just that: B Jnr, Ally, Westy, Argy, Chris, Gibs. Who were these abbreviated souls? I can identify the following: Dash is definitely Chris Dashfield (who also had a Soda Stream); Kate possibly Katy Prout (but I wouldn’t put money it); Taf and Gibby the aforementioned Givelin brothers; Roobarb – Paul Roberts; and Hirsty – David Hirst. And that’s ignoring ‘etc. etc. etc.’ whoever in God’s nickname they were.
11. The epithet ‘maddo’ is so me and Simon. I don’t think anyone else has ever said it.
12. Self-styled nickname for John Lewis, tenuously derived from the fact that John is ‘Johan’ is Dutch. I never understood it either, but I idolised the long-haired Lewis so much at this stage I would have called him anything he’d asked me to. Daddy, Sir, anything.
13. Another incomprehensible nickname, this time for Stephen Tite, tall blond kid with bee-sting lips. (Often shortened to Dobs.) He and Lewis had come from the same ecosystem at another lower school where these bizarre names had originated. At least Dave Watson was just Watto.
14. Another disappointing but inevitable slide into proto-adolescence. Dad kept his frankly tame soft porn mags – Mayfair and Penthouse, none of your tat – in the garage. Mum wouldn’t have them in the house, but she seemed to know he kept them, which is interesting. (For instance I didn’t have to smuggle the Penthouse he bought in Bournemouth into the house inside my Mad Super Special.) Poring over these soft-focus, undressed but mostly knees-together ‘rude ladies’ – as we called them – was certainly a necessary voyage of anatomical discovery, but I was more interested in Mayfair’s monthly comic strip ‘Carrie’, in which the heroine would lose her clothes in a variety of inventive ways. These gave me my first ‘confused’ feelings.
15. I’m looking at a photo taken on Jubilee Bank Holiday, 7 June. We seem to be in the spirit of this great royal occasion: Mum, Simon and I are wearing identical red, white and blue ‘Jeans’ T-shirts with Union Jacks on the sleeves, and Jubilee-styled party hats (Simon has fixed an Action Man Union Jack to his and it is hanging down over his eyes, the wag). Melissa is waving a flag. Not a trace of irony here, but it’s difficult to convey to people how royal the nation was in 1977. Winsford Way’s ‘street party’ took place not in the street (it was a through road) but in a large tent in Jean and Geoff’s back garden. I have decorated my diary by writing each letter in alternate red and blue Tempo. As I write it is the Queen’s Golden Jubilee year and I feel I am in good company not giving a fuck.
16. Irony and sarcasm have arrived, like unwanted, boorish gatecrashers at a party. There’ll be trouble.
17. I’d wanted one of these ever since seeing The Punch and Judy Man (1962), in which Tony Hancock and child actor Nicholas Webb methodically devour a ‘Piltdown Glory’ each, one rain-soaked seaside afternoon: ‘two scoops of luscious vanilla, two scoops of tasty chocolate, a succulent slice of banana, juicy peach fingers in pure cane syrup, topped with super-smooth butter-fat cream. Oh – and a cherry!’ (Mine wasn’t that elaborate but it was good enough for me.)
18. A tragic tale of unrequited interest. Becky was Rebecca Warren, befreckled, buxom star of the choir and in the year above. I took a shine to her, mistook her polite reciprocation for encouragement and bought her fudge from Wales. She accepted the gift gracefully but I was simply not ready for boy-girl friendship with the new undertones of pre-teenhood ‘confusion’. It was awful, like something out of Mike Leigh. I became obsessed with a small hole in her jumper as we sat there in her mum’s front room, eyeing the time. She looked better in school uniform I thought. I never went back. Married to a man called Tim now.
19. The 16th annual Abington Park Art Exhibition, a pleasant diversion in any year. Anyone could enter a painting, and red stickers were applied to those that had been sold. In later years, I entered pictures of my own, slightly inappropriate caricatures of film stars that always got hung inside the museum in a dark corner (1980: the cast of The Poseidon Adventure; 1983: Donald Sutherland and William Atherton from Day of the Locust – which I actually sold to someone whom I was heartbroken to learn hadn’t a clue who the two men were; 1984: a pair of Marlon Brandos, as Vito Corleone and Walter E Kurtz).
20. Fame at last. The issue was dated 13 August (‘Prog 25’, as they called them in 2000AD) and I received a letter of notification from the editor Tharg with the traditional salutation, ‘Borag Thungg, Earthlet’. It came of course from Kings Reach Tower in Waterloo, London, the home of publishers IPC – where I would later work.
21. The most significant thing about my love (at first sight) of Happy Days was the fact that I didn’t realise it was set in the 1950s. I just thought it was what America was like – and in terms of high school and ice cream parlours I was right. Happy Days must have been into its second ‘season’ by now, having taken two years to cross the Atlantic. (It began in 1974 in the States after the success of the film American Graffiti convinced ABC to pick up the rejected 1972 pilot Love and the Happy Day.)
22. I wonder if the terrorists who flew into the World Trade Center on 11 September 2001 caught this TV movie? It starred Patrick Wayne (son of John) and Christopher Mitchum (son of Robert); also Lloyd Nolan and Sid Caesar for disaster movie ballast (Airport and Airport ’75 respectively).
23. I actually discovered a moderate ability for hockey, quite out of step with my Eddie ‘The Eagle’ Edwards performance in every other school sport. Never played for the team or bought my own stick or anything but the fact that I wasn’t bad is worth noting.
24. As coincidence would have it, two of my uncles are called Alan (one of them spelt Allen). Both are self-employed builders; both built themselves big houses in posh streets. Uncle Alan and Auntie Margaret (Dad’s sister) did it first.
25. After the Fonz, Arthur Fonzarelli.
26. Blame Selwyn Froggitt for this, eponymous Scarsdale halfwit off the Yorkshire TV sitcom, by now into its third rip-roaring series. I don’t know why it took this long to start using his catch-phrase.