Nostalgia isn't what it used to be

A recent discovery, of previously unseen family photos from 1973, had me fondly remembering the good old days.

Until I thought about it a bit more.

After my Mum died, we had the sad task of disposing of the contents of the house me and my brothers had grown up in. I wound up with several boxes of odds and ends, which I put in a cupboard, and hadn’t plucked up the courage to look at for nearly a decade.

When I recently opened one, I discovered a vintage slide viewer (you could tell it was old – it was actually made in England and it didn’t work properly) and a box of slides. To my surprise and delight, there were photos of me and my younger brother when we were small that I hadn’t seen before.

To give that some context, whilst some families were filming each other with Super 8 cameras, or reeling off endless rolls of film, photographic evidence proving that I haven’t always been old, hairy and tired is scarcer than rocking horse poo.

I sent them off to a company I found on the internet, and now have lovely digital versions of the images. Notes written in pencil on some of the slides show them to be from 1973. And what happy memories these warm-toned photos conjure up.

As I was impossibly young (not to mention cute) I was happily oblivious to what was happening around me at that time in my life, unless it involved Monopoly, Biggles books, or running around endlessly, falling off my bike and arguing with my little brother.

So I looked up 1973. It seems that whilst I was striking a pose for the camera, rail workers and civil servants were striking too, but in a different way. When I was contemplating jumping off a river bank and ‘bombing’ my sibling, the IRA were bombing London for real.

As I soaked up the sun, Pink Floyd were contemplating The Dark Side Of The Moon. And as I cooled down with a Cider Lolly, Last Of The Summer Wine was uncorked onto the nation’s TV screens for the first time.

I probably wasn’t allowed out of my road, but the three day week was just around the corner.

I was wearing hopelessly baggy shorts in some of the photos, whilst Dawn had decided to Tie A Yellow Ribbon Round The Old Oak Tree. As my Dad smiled from his deckchair, someone in Whitehall was introducing VAT. And whilst my Mum hugged her boys tightly whilst Dad took a picture, Princess Anne was marrying Captain Mark Phillips.

I think my Dad owned an Austin Allegro, but not that year, as they’d only just been launched.

I suppose it’s just as well I wasn’t aware of the dark clouds overhead, as I enjoyed the summer sunshine. Otherwise, I might have grown up to be an embittered, cynical, cantankerous and grumpy old...

Oh. Right.

This column might first have appeared in the North West Evening Mail as my 'Thank Grumpy it's Friday' column, on the 29th of November. Unfortunately, it hasn't appeared on their website yet, but as it hasn't been updated for a week, I can only assume their web chap is on holiday, or sulking. As I don't received a print copy of the paper until tomorrow, I'm unsure if it has actually been included.

I sent them the same photo of a 6 year old me that you can see above, so they may have concluded that I've finally lost what little of the plot I still had, and dumped me. We'll see...

(Compilations, compilations... so many compilations! Tonight's is a Q Magazine free cover CD from July 1996, called "Mmmmm...")
xx

Making an exhibition of yourself

Now and again, it’s good to reaffirm that you’re a (relatively) normal human being. One excellent way of doing this is to go to a business exhibition. Despite what you might have surmised from reading my previous columns, I am employable, and even capable of acting like a regular person most of the time, even joining in the Monday morning conversation about the weather over the weekend, and why (insert name of footyballs manager here) should be fired immediately. The mug! True, there are times, often involving a caffeine deficiency, where it is like having the distilled essence of ten moody teenagers in the room, but I try and get that out of the way when people I genuinely like aren’t around to see it. As part of my ongoing experiment with what others call ‘working’, my ‘job’ involves me occasionally needing to go and see what some of my colleagues get up to outside the office, and what our competitors do to try and make sure that they do whatever my colleagues do better than ...

"It's all gone quiet..." said Roobarb

If, like me, you grew up (and I’m aware of the irony in that) in the ‘70s, February was a tough month, with the sad news that Richard Briers and Bob Godfrey had died. Briers had a distinguished acting career and is, quite rightly, fondly remembered most for his character in ‘The Good Life’. Amongst his many roles, both serious and comedic, he also lent his voice to a startling bit of animation that burst it’s wobbly way on to our wooden-box-surrounded screens in 1974. The 1970s seemed to be largely hued in varying shades of beige, with hints of mustard yellow and burnt orange, and colour TV was a relatively new experience still, so the animated adventures of a daft dog and caustic cat who were the shades of dayglo green and pink normally reserved for highlighter pens, must have been a bit of a shock to the eyes at the time. It caused mine to open very wide indeed. Roobarb was written by Grange Calveley, and brought vividly into life by Godfrey, whose strange, shaky-looking sty...

Suffering from natural obsolescence

You know you’re getting old when it dawns on you that you’re outliving technological breakthroughs. You know the sort of thing – something revolutionary, that heralds a seismic shift it the way the modern world operates. Clever, time-saving, breathtaking and life-changing (and featuring a circuit board). It’s the future, baby! Until it isn’t any more. I got to pondering this when we laughed heartily in the office about someone asking if our camcorder used “tape”. Tape? Get with the times, Daddy-o! If it ain’t digital then for-get-it! I then attempted to explain to an impossibly young colleague that video tape in a camcorder was indeed once a “thing”, requiring the carrying of something the size of a briefcase around on your shoulder, containing batteries normally reserved for a bus, and a start-up time from pressing ‘Record’ so lengthy, couples were already getting divorced by the time it was ready to record them saying “I do”. After explaining what tape was, I realised I’d ...

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