Memories are like ghosts. Ghostly.
Wispy. Fuzzy.
I have such a memory of one Christmas in the late Sixties or early Seventies, when the family was still healthy and intact.
School was out for the holidays and a peaceful aura had settled over the house in the week before the Big Day.
My patents' life was probably frantic, but I didn't notice. The biggest thing for me was not being at school and the prospect of loads of new stuff on Christmas Day! Priorities!
My memory proper is about watching telly.
We had a lounge - me and my older brothers called it the boys room - with a half-size snooker table, stereogram and a black and white TV.
There were drawing books and pens around - we all loved drawing - and ragged copies of Creepy and Eerie at the side of the armchair.
There will have been a Radio Times or TV Times somewhere too, and maybe I had looked up what I ended up watching that day.
I was on the carpet in front of the gas fire, my belly with my chin propped up in my hands. Not fantastically comfortable but kids seem to like it.
The Christmas tree was up and lit with fairy lights. It may well have been morning but I have to ask whether anything was on TV in the morning back then?
The film, black and white on a black and white telly, started Arthur Askey, who was causing mayhem at a railway station. At some point a spectral train flies through the station and all hell breaks loose. I can just recall the ghostly steam rising from the loco as it charged by.
I think the film was called The Ghost Train.
It's a rare and semi-solid childhood memory, where most of the parts are there and one I treasure for it's simplicity, as the brilliant home it was in, where I grew up, was only part of my life a few years more after it.
Do you have murky Xmas recollections readers.
The API 1969 animated version of A Christmas Carol had a particularly unnsettling version of Jacob Marley's ghost that haunted me for years to come.I have occasionally seen it again on YouTube.
ReplyDeleteAlso, that Christmas I remember my older cousins got a portable record player with flashing colored lights built into the case that danced in time with the music.I was mesmerized by it.My parents bought them the Christmas record about Snoopy and The Red Baron to play on it.Whenever I hear that song, I see flashing psychedelic lights.Good, but murky memories.
I love A Christmas Carol and I think I know that animated version Brian. I can imagine Marley's ghost being terrifying. That Record Player sounds fantastic, I must listen to Snoopy and the Red Baron. Great memories and thanks for sharing. I bet you've got your Xmas menu all sewn up already!
DeleteThese are lovely memories, and it is true - they come and go like gossamer, and as I learned, cannot be totally trusted! My experience with Tron is an example - I will swear I saw it in the late 1970s, but it was not released until 1982! So memories are fun, but proceed with caution! SFZ
ReplyDeleteTron in the 1970's SF, it sort of fits doesn't it. There's on my two years difference between 1979 and 1982. Or is it three. Not much anyway. There was a famous time-slip in North West England once, in Liverpool.
Delete