Some of my friends are made from paper and contain a magical ingredient. I’m pretty sure I couldn’t name all of them but many hold a special place or memory.
One of the things I wanted to make sure I did this year was revisit some of those old friends. A few are numbers in my list of 50 posts, so I’ll also get to talk about them as and when I get to those numbers.
One in particular I’m keen to get to is J.R.R Tolkein’s The Hobbit. I reckon I was around 9 or 10 when I first read this book.
At our school we had a library where we could ‘check-out’ books and take them home to read. We were only allowed one book at a time as the library was relatively small, but one summer over the long six week holiday I managed to check out The Hobbit, and because of the holiday I had it for the full six weeks.
I used to stay in bed in the mornings and read. Sometimes a few pages and sometimes a chapter. I’d savoured it, and it was like it is for many people, my gateway drug to the world of Middle Earth, The Lord of the Rings and all the associated tales and stories.
It didn’t make me a big reader of fantasy but I do have a small collection of Tolkein books. Strangely though I haven’t reread The Hobbit for what feels like a long time. I have a battered old paperback copy but to treat myself for my birthday I bought a copy as close to the that original ‘school’ version as I could find. It’s quite a beautiful thing with colour plate and black and white illustrations drawn by Tolkein and hardbound with a paper dust jacket.
I’m also waiting for the warmer summer days and my plan is to try and read it the same way if I can, or at least on a few occasions. I might have to forego the staying in bed reading as I’m not sure the dogs will let me get away with that but perhaps sitting in the garden after a dog walk with a coffee for an hour before I start my working day?
I’m guessing that all sounds quite elaborate, but I think there is something to rekindling the memories of reading the book that is more than just the words on the page. If you think for a moment about a favourite book, I’m pretty sure you’d be able to tell me a story about what was happening in your life at the time you were reading it. I know I can do this for quite a few of my favourites, and I think that perhaps your subconscious captures this as much as anything else.
Perhaps if you too have a similar story about a book that you loved you’d like to share it in the comments? I’d be interested to read about the books that have touched you and the backstory that goes with them.
Hello again, and a particular welcome to new subscribers, thanks for signing up 😃.
I’ve been thinking quite a bit this week about work and how I ended up where I am currently. It’s quite a convoluted story, so I won’t tell the whole thing, but like many things it started out with the inevitable question
So. What do you want to be when you grow up?
I don’t remember ever having a consistent answer to this question, although probably I would have said, “A vet”, or something similar. For a while this was what I wanted to do. I enjoyed the sciences at school, and was good at them (compared to other topics). I also had (and still do) a love for the outdoors, wildlife, nature, etc.
My downfall with this plan came, when I realised that I was allergic to certain animals, particularly long haired cats, and my thinking had to change. I still followed the science path (biology in particular) and eventually came out with my honours degree.
Ultimately in the world of work, I had a number of different jobs over the years (which will be separate posts at some point), and most had some relevance to my qualifications and love of the natural world/outdoors.
Mostly I followed what I was good at, nudged by what I loved, and I am where I am now in part because of that. However I think I followed the what I’m good at bit, perhaps too far. I wouldn’t say I love what I do in terms of the job that pays the bills. There’s a part of me that thinks at a certain point I made a poor choice in terms of a job (although it was probably the right decision at the time) and settled for something that I thought I wanted rather than what I needed.
Now no decision is necessarily a bad decision because ultimately there are things that I have done and have that wouldn’t have been possible if I’d made a different choice at that time. But the balance between good Vs. love would look different.
My recent thinking has been about whether I need to redress that balance in some way, and maybe I should be following what I love nudged by what I’m good at. I still need to balance the need to earn money against that, and in some ways I think that you shouldn’t necessarily use what you love to be you main source of income. It’s too easy to start to resent your “job”. How many times have you moved jobs partly because you were fed up with what you were doing? I know I’ve done that at least once. If your main source of income is doing what you love can that too turn sour?
If I could have some of those decisions again, I would make different decisions with hindsight, but those lessons can also inform the direction going forward. A balance between good vs. love seems key to me, and maybe now is the time in life to focus more on the latter.
Thanks for reading, if you have any thoughts on this I’d love to hear them in the comments.
You’ve probably noticed that I try to include at least one photo in these newsletters each week. Some of them even relate specifically to the story I want to tell.
I’ve been taking photographs since I was a boy. I can’t remember how old exactly but I started out with a little 110 Kodak camera that you flipped the cover open and it became a support to hold the camera steady with. I took a lot of photographs with that camera. Many of them have been lost to time, but I am slowly working my way through a couple of large boxes of prints and slides that I found when clearing my parents house that contain some of them, and many of the ones that my Dad took.
It was him that got me interested in photography and taught me the basics. He was interested in many things throughout his life but photography was probably one of the most constant.
I graduated to an SLR camera when I was a little older and that evolved into a number of different cameras over time. I probably got into digital photography around late 2002 and again that has evolved, and was my main focus for many years until early 2020.
With impeccable timing as Covid started to take off (the two are not related it was a coincidence). I thought I’d go back to film for a bit and asked for some rolls of film for my birthday.
I actually received them a little early, but after having loaded up my camera and exposed about a third of a roll, the first lockdown hit and my rate of taking new pictures of any kind slowed. Eventually I finished the roll and got them developed, and an old hobby started to snowball once again. I experimented a bit with infrared film and a number of different cameras, including ones gifted to me by a friend, who heard me talk about getting back into film photography.
I still get a buzz from waiting for the roll to be developed and getting the images back.
I’d estimate that now – phone pics aside – my photography is roughly half-and-half split between film and digital. I enjoy both, but using film again has also taught me to experiment more with my digital cameras too. Looking at the emulsions used in film and trying to recreate some of the style with digital images.
In some ways I think this is a lifetime hobby, but I am conscious of my own health and mortality. There is a predisposition to a certain eye condition on my Dad’s side of the family, and ultimately this may result in my not being able to continue with photography and some other things. However for the now I am enjoying myself.
This is the last of the reader selected posts, thanks to Karen for picking N°9.
This post also marks the 20% mark of Fifty From Fifty. I hope you’re enjoying these posts. If you are please consider sharing them on your social media.
There are very few periods in my life when I/we didn’t have pets. When I was at university (but there were pets at home who I saw during holidays and ‘reading weeks’) and when I first owned my own home (but there was plenty of pet sitting done). So outside of that I don’t remember a time when there weren’t pets.
There were cats, dogs, a tortoise, guinea pigs, and tropical fish, some I have clearer memories of than others. For example I know we had a tortoise when I was very little, but I’m not sure how long my parents had already had it for or what ultimately happened to it.
My Dad kept tropical fish for a time and I remember going with him to the fish shop (not the sort that also served chips) and looking at the tanks and tanks of brightly lit fish that lined the walls. The neon tetras and other flashes of colour that were in my limited field of view.
As I got older guinea pigs were introduced. Two small white squeaky blobs – Starsky and Hutch (can you guess what we were watching on tv at the time?)
They seemed to live for years, and my job was to make sure that they had food and water and that their cage was cleaned out regularly. In the warmer months it lived in the garden but when it got too cold, they came in to our little lean-to conservatory.
A constant during this whole period was our cat, Soots. He lived to a ripe old age, but strangely other than the photo at the top I have no pictures of him. He was a proper ‘witches cat’, jet black and like many cats quite aloof, he mellowed with age though. We also ‘inherited’ our next door neighbours cat when she died. She was an old cat who slept for a lot of the day, only really coming out to eat and use her little tray. She could be affectionate but only on her terms.
Now ask me today what sort of a person am I when it comes to animals and I would without hesitation say a dog-person. If the world is split between cat-people and dog-people and all the shades in between then I am definitely of the canine variety.
There have been six dogs in my life. Three that we’ve had from shelters and three as puppies.
The first was a rescue. When I was deemed old enough, and after a lot of pestering as to whether we could get a dog, and when my parents working arrangements were such that there was someone around for a good proportion of the day.
We got Crystal from an RSPCA shelter. She’d been mistreated and rescued by them at less than six months of age, she had many fears when we first got her. She lived many years between me being 8 and 23. We walked many miles together and went many places.
After Crystal came Jessie and Lacey, both rescues from the RSPCA and who came together because they’d been living together previously.
Then came Sparky and a few years later Wilson.
When Sparky passed away we got Ruby.
Ultimately I think I have learnt more about life and emotions from having pets – particularly dogs – than from anything else in my entire life. Ultimately I’m in the privileged position to have had so many pets but they are/were such sources of inspiration and happiness that even now I still mourn the ones that are no longer here.
Wilson is getting on in years now and isn’t well. We have many trips to the vets and he has a lot of medication. Ultimately I suspect he is on borrowed time, but no one really knows how long that might be.
As I’ve gotten older I’ve also thought about when the right time might be to not have another dog. I can’t tell you when that is, other than not yet.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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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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