9 of 50

Thanks to Hilary who chose ‘42’ from my posts list. Sadly this isn’t one about the meaning of life, the universe and everything, but hopefully you’ll enjoy the tale just the same.

I think I was probably about 3 or 4 years old when this happened and although I remember it quite well, I suspect the memory of what happened is a little fuzzy around the edges. (I’ve since found some old slides from that night and they’re date stamped June 1976, so I would have been 4)

I was young enough that I still went to bed early, probably not all that long after having my ‘tea’ but on this particular night I can’t have been in bed all that long when my Mum came and woke me. “Come and have a look at what’s outside.”

It was a warm summer evening and still plenty light enough and as we went into the back garden I could hear a roaring noise. At the end of our garden and seemingly descending into it was a hot-air balloon.

It was so low in the sky that it appeared vast to my little eyes, I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. Thinking back on it now I suspect that the pilot was in quite a bit of trouble and was trying to gain height before he ran into the row of trees between our neighbour and next-door but one neighbours gardens, or worse the Portsmouth to London railway line. He was very low, and applying a lot of burner to try and provide lift to the ballon. Of course I was oblivious to this and thought for a while that the balloon was trying to land in our garden.

The commotion had bought most of the neighbors out into their gardens, as this was not something that was seen everyday and probably better than whatever was on telly.

Almost imperceptibly to start with, the balloon did gain height, and with the prevailing breeze missed the trees. One of the neighbors convinced my Dad (I suspect he didn’t need much convincing really) that they should follow the ballon and see where it came down. The two of them set off in his car with my Dad bringing along his camera. I managed to find the box of slides that he took that night and have added them throughout this post.

After the ballon was out of sight I was tucked back into bed, but the following morning I was asking a lot of questions of my Dad about what happened. They had followed the balloon a few miles and it hadn’t been able to gain much height and came down in a field not all that far away and in the next but one village. Thinking about it now I suspect that probably the pilot was trying for the fields not far from our house and had misjudged it a bit and had to gain some height and ultimately skipped over those fields before coming down a few miles further on.

The landing of the balloon had drawn quite a crowd, again probably because it wasn’t that common a sight.

For my young mind it was all very exciting, and not something you see everyday or that close up. I don’t think I’ve been that close to a hot air balloon since to be honest.

They still fascinate me to this day, the thought of riding on nothing but a sack of hot air, at the whim of the weather and prevailing wind in particular. I can’t say that I’m particularly keen to ride in one though, I think I prefer watching them rather than being an active participant!

Thanks for reading.

8 of 50

This is the second of the reader selected posts. Thanks to Stuart for picking N°53.

My better half calls the music of my youth my ‘Middle Aged, Middle of the Road Music’. It’s the music that I listened to a lot, particularly during my teens and twenties, although in my defence some of it is both older and more recent than that and I like discovering more recent artists and songs that I like. I do however postulate that ‘they don’t make make music like that anymore!’ and continue to listen to these tracks a lot to this day.

My earliest recollection of music was when I was old enough to start school. The radio would be on in the mornings, I think as much as a timecheck for my Mum so that I didn’t miss the school bus. It would be Radio 2 and Ray Moore and I had to leave the house before Terry Wogan came on to make my bus. Songs like Hole in the Ground by Bernard Cribbins and Della and the Dealer by Hoyt Axton are songs that have stuck in my head to this day, as well as pretty much any track by Showaddywaddy.

On days when I was too ill to go to school (I was a pretty sickly kid so these happened quite regularly) I realised that my Mum kept the radio on all day. I suspect that this was more because television was still a bit of a novelty and didn’t rally start until early afternoon, with the mornings being programmes for schools or Open University lessons. Radio was AM, FM, LW or SW there was no DAB, Smart Speakers or any of the things we have now. There were only 4 national stations BBC Radio 1, 2, 3 or 4; a local BBC Radio station (Radio Solent) and an independent local station – Radio Victory.

As I got older, Radio 2 became a bit square for me and I became a Radio 1 listener. I’d spend my Sunday evenings trying to record the two hour national chart show onto cassette so that I could play it back over the week. I’d watch Top of the Pops when I could persuade my parents to let me monopolise the TV for half-an-hour.

Now I’m older still, I’d say that I have become my parents and am now more of a Radio 2 listener, although with the advent of digital radio or services like Radio.Garden the world is literally everyone’s oyster for listening to radio and music.

As I type I’m listening to my Middle Aged, Middle of the Road Music and for the purposes of this newsletter I’ve even put together a playlist of some the tracks that came to mind when I started to think about what should be on it. I’d intended that this be a short playlist of about 20 tracks but it ended up being over 30, and then I thought about it a bit more, and this is Fifty From Fifty, so I give you 50 tracks. If you’re on Apple Music you can listen to it directly here.

If not here’s the playlist:

1. You Can Call Me Al – Paul Simon

2. Moon Over Bourbon Street – Sting

3. In the Air Tonight – Phil Collins

4. Money For Nothing – Dire Straits

5. Walk Of Life – Dire Straits

6. Bridge Over Troubled Water – Simon & Garfunkel

7. Summer of ’69 – Bryan Adams

8. Jennifer She Said – Lloyd Cole & The Commotions

9. Russians – Sting

10. Invisible Touch – Genesis

11. Real Gone Kid – Deacon Blue

12. Desire – U2

13. The King of Rock ‘N’ Roll – Prefab Sprout

14. Paradise City – Guns N’ Roses

15. Cheek To Cheek – Fred Astaire

16. Manic Monday – The Bangles

17. The Hole In the Ground – Bernard Cribbins

18. Uptown Girl – Billy Joel

19. Born In the U.S.A. – Bruce Springsteen

20. The Road to Hell (Part 2) – Chris Rea

21. Electric Dreams – Phil Oakley & Giorgio Moroder

22. Big Yellow Taxi – Counting Crows

23. Queen of the New Year – Deacon Blue

24. Wonderful Tonight – Eric Clapton

25. Thorn in My Side – Eurythmics

26. Come On Eileen – Dexys Midnight Runners

27. Jack & Diane – John Cougar Mellencamp

28. Daydream Believer – The Monkees

29. (Is This the Way To) Amarillo – Tony Christie

30. Della and the Dealer – Hoyt Axton

31. East Bound and Down – Jerry Reed

32. Deeper Water – Paul Kelly

33. Under the Moon of Love – Showaddywaddy

34 Waterfront – Simple Minds

35 The Lion Sleeps Tonight – Tight Fit

36 Shoot to Thrill – AC/DC

37 Sharp Dressed Man – ZZ Top

38 One Week – Barenaked Ladies

39 Little Red Corvette – Prince

40 Convoy – C.W. McCall

41 Run to the Hills – Iron Maiden

42 Need You Tonight – INXS

43 Radio Ga Ga – Queen

44 The Way It Is – Bruce Hornsby & The Range

45 Africa – Toto

46 Every Breath You Take – The Police

47 Into the Great Wide Open – Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers

48 Music to Watch Girls By – Andy Williams

49 We Have All the Time in the World – Louis Armstrong

50 End of the Line – The Traveling Wilburys

I suspect with very little effort I could go on and on and on, but for brevity and for fear of overloading your emails I won’t. In fact since I put together the initial 50 tracklist I’ve been listening to it a lot. I’ve had it on in the car and pretty much anytime I’ve been listening to music, I’ve been listening to this playlist. Each time I’ve thought of something else that should be on there, one track has triggered a memory of another or the thought that this playlist won’t be complete without. . . . . . . .

I think perhaps once this post goes live I might keep adding to the playlist and see where is goes, so if you’re not reading this newsletter on or shortly after the day it goes out, don’t be surprised if the playlist has grown somewhat.

I also wonder if this can be called middle aged music anymore? Afterall I doubt that I’ll make 100+ years of age so this is becoming what exactly for a playlist? The Saga Tracks? Feel free to drop me a comment with what you think it should perhaps be called now.

Thanks for reading.

7 of 50

Last week I asked readers to choose the next post(s) from my list by picking the numbers of different posts. This completely random allocation of posts has bought some great memories to the top of the list. So this is the first of them, chosen by Gavin.

As a kid when the school holidays came around particularly the long summer break we mostly used to make our own fun. When we could, and were able to persuade a parent to give us a lift one of the things we liked to do was go and mess about in canoes.

At a nearby lake you could hire a kayak, Canadian canoe or a row boat by the half-hour. In effect this was as long as you wanted when they weren’t busy. We’d go, hire out a boat each or if there were a few of us share a Canadian canoe, rarely a rowboat. Then we would literally mess about in boats.

The lake is shared with coarse fisherman, so you had to be careful not to get too close to the fishing slips or you’d upset the fisherman if you got tangled in their lines, but anywhere else was fair game. We’d have races between buoys and waterfights – how we never actually sank one another is probably more than a matter of luck than judgement, and the fact that water pistols back then weren’t quite the super-soakers of today. Try and see if we could work out how deep the lake actually was, although we never did come up with an answer to that.

Typically we’d come back to shore much, much wetter than when we went in but having had the best time and pretty exhausted which I suspect rated highly on the parental scale. On good days, if the persuaded parent had hung around – they’d often walk a dog around the perimeter of the lake – we’d also get treated to an ice cream from the little shack that was next to the little playground by the side of the lake. In hindsight I suspect this was to let us dry out a bit before we were packed back into a car. We’d go home happy and exhausted and hoping that we could do the same again tomorrow or perhaps next week.

I’m not quite sure when this stopped being a thing though, perhaps when we got to secondary school and there were more things to do during the holidays, but last year I revisited the lake.

It was a sort of a spur of the moment thing, our vet’s main practice is nearby and I had to stop in and pick some pills up for one of the dogs. It was a Saturday afternoon, and I thought I take one of the dogs with me and we’d go and take a walk around the lake.

It was much busier than I remember it being when I was a kid and we were lucky to find a parking spot, but we did our walk. Inevitably the place has changed a bit. The ice cream shack is now a much bigger, properly constructed cafe. The playground equipment has been improved, but I’d swear that some of it is still the stuff that was there 40+ years ago. You can still hire boats – although at the time that was closed due to Covid – and they still have a similar selection but have added pedalos to the fleet. We had a nice walk, and there’s now a boardwalk that takes you out over the water that wasn’t there when I was a kid.

I’d say it’s changed quite a bit, but at the same time is very much the place I remember from my childhood and although the numbers of people about made me feel slightly uncomfortable because of Covid, it was nice to see that it is still so well used.

I don’t think I’ll ever make it out on to the water in a kayak again, but never say never, however I could see me going back again for a walk around. It’s a great resource for the area and one I’m please to see is still going strong.

I hope you enjoyed that memory snapshot, I’ll be posting the others that have been chosen over the coming weeks.

6 of 50

It was an unbelievably wet day. One of those days when the windscreen wipers couldn’t quite keep pace with the rain and huge puddles were forming on the side of the road and in every little depression on the road. It’s not a day that you’d really want to be out in.

It was 1977 and I was 5. My Dad had told me that we were going out after lunch and when I’d enquired where we were going he said it was a surprise. He managed to keep the secret against my very persistent questioning and the “Are we there yet?” queries when in the car. We ploughed on through the vile weather until we reached our destination.

Even as we queued outside the rather spectacular building with the huge columns, I didn’t know what was in store. I remember looking at all the posters in the glass fronted advertising cases outside but still not comprehending.

I didn’t really know where we were until we were inside. A cinema – the building has since been a fast food restaurant and a store for a well known clothing brand – but in 1977 this was a cinema.

On that day and whenever we went there subsequently we always sat “upstairs”, I’m not sure why and I don’t know of many cinemas that still have that facility, but Dad bought our tickets and we went up the staircase and took our seats.

I still didn’t know what we had come to see and it wasn’t until the film started that I realised that it would be a film that would have a big impact on my life and also trips to the cinema with my Dad.

The film was Star Wars. I was literally amazed at the sight of robots, spacecraft and planets from another galaxy (one far, far, away).

After Star Wars in the years that followed he took me to see The Empire Strikes Back, and Return of the Jedi. When the prequel trilogy came out, I took him to see those three films. It became a thing that we did together. When the first of the final three films came out, he was too ill to go to the cinema, and I didn’t want to go without him. When it was released on DVD, I bought him a copy, planning to sit down one rainy afternoon and watch it together. Sadly he was too ill for that and he never got to see it. He never got to see the final two movies either, but I did go to the cinema to watch them and to honour those memories.

If he were here today he would be 85, today is his birthday. I’ll watch Star Wars this afternoon.

May The Force Be With You

Thanks for reading, I hope you enjoy these posts and if you do please feel free to share them.

I want to try a little experiment for my next post. I have a list of 53 ideas for posts, so I’d like you to pick what the next post is going to be by picking a number between 1 and 53 and posting it in the comments. Numbers 8, 16, 17, 20, 24 & 34, have already been used but all of the others are up for grabs. So pick a number and next week’s post will be a lucky dip.

5 of 50

When you turn 50 (or actually a little before) you start to get an interesting range of offers. ‘Over 50’s life insurance’, ‘equity release’, ‘Saga membership’, ‘funeral plan’; and that’s coupled with all the other ‘offers’ from my doctor for a health check and financial advisor for a wealth check (I like that they call it a wealth check even when they know full well I don’t have any).

I guess when you’re younger it’s much more a case of which fan club you want to belong to – I was a member of both the Buzby Club, and the Desperate Dan Pie Eaters Club – and perhaps as you got a little older about getting a driving licence, and then a mortgage and other ‘responsibilities’.

Now someone somewhere is trying to sell you something because of your ‘characteristics’ and at the moment for me that’s my age and my guess is it must be a lucrative market, even if I’m not buying in.

As you’ll probably have guessed by now if you’ve been reading these newsletters, I am quite nostalgic about those simpler days. An uncomplicated approach. Where you weren’t bombarded with offers for things that you didn’t really need but everyone thought you should have.

Life lessons teach us that if something sounds too good to be true, then it probably is. So I suspect all of these recent offers, perhaps with the exception of the one from my doctor which is probably as bad as it sounds, are not worth it and I’ll be passing on them. That said I wonder if there are any cool things that you get when you turn 50? I’m pretty sure that there’ll be some cake, but that’s not an exclusive thing to turning 50 – although the number of candles making your cake a fire hazard probably is – so I don’t think I can claim one for that.

Then again does it matter? With all that is happening in the world, these things are trivial in comparison. I grew up wondering whether there was going to be a nuclear war and now all those years later there’s a dictator threatening the same thing again. So have things really changed all that much over 50 years? There might be more junk mail than there was in the 1970’s but an apocalyptic conflict seems just as real a threat now as then.

Is it a case of the more things change the more they stay the same, and it is just the personalities that change? That collectively we learn nothing or perhaps don’t want to learn those lessons. That collectively we are so resistant to change that we actually don’t no matter the outward appearance.

I doubt there’s very much that can be taken from my 50 life lessons and applied to global geopolitics but there is such resistance to doing anything at all that is meaningful that it is staggering.

Thanks for reading this newsletter, I hope you’re enjoying it. If you are please feel free to share it using the button below. If for any reason you’re not and want to stop getting these emails, there’s an unsubscribe link at the bottom of each email.

4 of 50

It seems there is too much horror in the world at the moment, so I thought I’d write about something a little more light hearted this week.

In the late 70’s and early 80’s money was tight and it wasn’t uncommon to be given hand-me-downs. Clothes that an older friend or relative had worn and grown out of and was then given to you and which if it survived the rigours of your use would be passed on again.

Some of my old clothes regularly went to one of my cousins families who had younger children and they in turn passed them on to another cousin. This included clothes from their daughter which obviously were of no use to me, but often we transported them if we were going to see them.

On one such trip on a weekend we’d gone to see my Uncle and Aunt with a bag of those clothes. These were duly handed over when we arrived and nothing more was thought about it. After lunch my Uncle suggested that we go for a walk as it was such a nice day and have a look at the new housing estate that was being built at the end of their road.

I think it must have been a Saturday and there had been workmen there in the morning but they’d obviously now gone home for the remainder of the weekend. This was also in the day before health and safety on building sites was a thing and you could walk around and look inside the partially constructed buildings with no one to stop you.

I remember we’d looked inside a couple of houses and were about to walk into a third. I was in front and went to walk across the concrete driveway of the next house up to the front door. Only the concrete driveway hadn’t set yet. It was still very wet cement, obviously newly laid that morning. I took a couple of steps and quickly sank up to my knees. I managed to extricate myself with a little help from my Uncle and we went back to his house to quickly wash off the cement before it had a chance to do me any damage.

I was lucky, no skin burns or other problems, but my trousers were beyond salvage, and they certainly wouldn’t be entering the hand-me-down cycle now either. The only problem though was that I now of course didn’t have a pair of trousers to wear. No problem there was of course a big bag of hand-me-downs from my other cousins. However they were all girls clothes. After trying to get into some of the trousers and realising that they didn’t fit, the only thing that came close was a skirt. It wasn’t even as if I could get away with pretending that this was a kilt. This was most definitely a girls skirt.

I was mortified. Late 70’s me having to wear a girls skirt for the rest of the day. A GIRLS SKIRT! the shame of it. Fortunately no one would ever know, oh no wait, that’s my Dad taking a photo of me. I was of the age when girls were a thing to be reviled, oh the foolishness of youth. This was a punishment of the severest kind.

Of course I got off pretty lightly. I wouldn’t have liked to have been around on Monday morning when the builders returned to site to find the footprints now cast forever into their set concrete.

Anyway, when we did finally get home that evening, as you can probably imagine, I changed my skirt for something more suitable almost instantly we got in the house, and I have had a new found respect for wet concrete ever since.

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I’ve just come on here to write up a book review (it’s embargoed until 6th March, so pop back then to read it) and realised that the weeds have been growing a bit in my absence.

This is mostly due to concentrating on my Fifty From Fifty newsletter which has been going for a few weeks now. I’m not cross-posting those entries to the blog as I wanted it to be a stand alone venture which ultimately will come to an end. If you’re interested in reading it you can do so at the link above and you can also subscribe there to have it delivered directly to your email inbox. I’ve also had a couple of busy weeks with work, trips to the vet and sorting things out for my Mum which has left me little time to write or at least write coherently (if I ever do).

I am hoping that perhaps I can free up some time to write a little more here going forward but I guess we’ll just have to see how that pans out.