I Remember the Test Card

 When tellies were still young in the UK there was a test card.

I remember it so well, as much as I remember my fave TV shows.

Trouble is, I don't know why I know the test card because it only appeared at midnight or thereabouts. 

The end of telly.

The cut-off point until the morrow.

Was I up at midnight or did the test card go right into my teens and beyond in the Seventies?

I recall my old Dad falling asleep during late shows like Kodiak and the test card whistling. Is that right? Did it whistle? To wake you up? 

Strange how it all seemed so normal at the time, when now you can watch telly anywhere, anytime and it doesn't whistle to rouse you!

I wonder what happened to the test card girl? Did she get promoted to a proper show? Oh, I guess I could look it up but I like to ponder about her life. 

The doll was strange too. A sort of green clown. Was it a commercially available toy? And did she ever finish her game of noughts and crosses? 

Did you have a test card on TV at the close of the day where you are? 

Wearing Bottle Tops

As a kid I'd collect bottle tops. 

Tizer, sarsaparilla, dandelion and burdock, lemonade and all those other brill fizzy drinks. 

Whilst my brothers were collecting matchboxes I'd wear my latest bottle top with pride on my tank top.

Trouble is I don't remember how I fastened them to my clothes.

Recently on holiday my zest for caps was rekindled by Fritz Kola and it's striking logo of two faces. 

I managed to attach one to our fridge door with a magnet, but I doubt that's how we did it back in the day when we wore them.

How did we do it? 

In the Realm of the Cave Bear

 Yesterday we went to a cave system in the German town of Iserlohn in the Sauerland region, the Dechenhöhle.

I have a feeling I visited caves with my folks as a kid though it's unclear, but I do enjoy the activity.

Several kids were in our group and they all liked the museum at the start, which included life size reconstructions of cave bears and then strange looking cave lions, which we all agreed we'd never heard of before. Have you? 

The cave itself was full of thousands of wet stalagmites, tites and pillars and a constant temp of 10 degrees. It takes the stalactites a century to grow just 1 cm, a human lifetime. 

We weren't allowed to take snaps but I squeezed one off before the guide arrived! 

At the end the Gift Shop was a hit with dino parts being popular.

Did you visit caves as a kid? 

In the footsteps of John Le Carré

We have arrived at our final stopover on a German rail tour and I'm so excited to be here.

Königswinter.

60 years in the making, I missed out on visiting two years ago when we visited Bonn, but this time I was determined for the missus and me to end here.

Being a boomer and a cold war kid I have always been fascinated by spies. 

Königswinter was spy central in the 50's and 60's. Bonn, the West German capital was just across the Rhein and the post-war republic's first Chancellor worked and lived here, Conrad Adenauer.

But personally much more important to me is the fact that Königswinter was the residence of one John Le Carré, the master spy author and my late Dad's favourite. I can clearly remember his small collection of Readers Digest hardbacks of Smileys People, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold and A Little Town in Germany, which is set in neighbouring Bonn.

Understandably the actual Gästhaus where Le Carré stayed is unknown, as he himself was an assistant secretary at the British Embassy in Bonn, before becoming a full-time writer when The Spy Who Came in from the Cold made him world famous.

Oddly, I can find no trace at all of Le Carré in Königswinter, unlike Lord Byron and Turner, whose residences are on the town map.

I even asked in a second hand bookshop if they had any of his books. Nichts.

No matter, I'm making up my own spy master footprints!

My second hand retro pen bought in the town's charity shop in commemoration of the author,

The attaché cases stacked unceremoniously in said shop too. Who knows what they once contained!

And imagining that this old photo of a hotel here held the sort of milieu Le Carré mixed in as part of the post-war diplomatic service.

Dossier closed!

😎

Were You in the Scouts?

 My Granddaughter just gone to an evening dance class.

I was never one for clubs and classes. No cubs, scouts, adventure scouts, football, band practice, Sunday school for me. Nothing.

Until the early 1970's kung fu craze and then I joined a Wing Chun club, a Judo Club and an Aikido club, which I had to drop. Too many clubs! 

I did A-Level English at evening class and later on Woodwork.

We're you in any clubs or evening classes readers? 

Are you now? 

Cornflakes and Hot Milk!

I remembered the other day that I had cornflakes as a kid with .... Hot milk! 

The memory came flooding back. The milk was creamy too and heated up it left a sort of bubble scum on the flakes in the bowl. 

Not sure I could eat it now, deffo not with creamy milk. Semi-skimmed maybe!

Hot Milk was also poured over Weetabix, which was better I think. The two went together really well, all sugared up.

Don't think Sugar Puffs or even Shredded Wheat got the hot milk treatment though. Of course Ready Brek was made for it, the best of all, central heating for kids! 

Did you enjoy hot milk on your cereals readers? 

Karloff and Crimplene

 Memory is like a baking soda diver, sometimes stubbornly staying under, sometimes rising madly in the bubbles.

As I get older my diver prefers not to rise as much now and infuriatingly I find myself forgetting my youth.

One thing I can't recall at all now is actually going to bed as a kid. 

I know I did or else I'd be a gibbering wreck somewhere.

No, the physical act of getting under the crimplene cover (hiding the coarse blankets) eludes me.

I know what my room looked liked. Well some of it. I had shelves with toys on. At some later point I had a stereo and some LPs (my first was Rock Around the Clock). There was an old coat cupboard, which I kept well shut as it was scary. Below the window was a large sideboard, where there must have clothes but I've no memory of any clothes in the room. The single clearest recollection is a huge six foot black and white poster of Karloff's Frankenstein, which was directly above my bed. 

There may have been a metal alarm clock.

Unlike my European partner, who enjoyed comfy feather duvets as a kid in the Sixties and early Seventies, my blankets were itchy and everything was covered in rayon or frilly crimplene. Do they even exist anymore?

Years earlier, when our sisters still lived at home, I shared a room and bunk bed with one of my brothers. I have no memory of this at all except an old fish tank and the toilet next door!

I'd love to recall lying in bed, getting tucked in, sipping Mum's cocoa and reading Thunderbirds annuals all night but I can't. They're as elusive as Tracy Island itself!

Do you recall going to sleep as a kid readers?

Steak Canadian and the Rockin' Boys

I couldn't believe my eyes down at Farmfoods. There in the frozen food compartment was a pile of Steak Canadian! Those flat wafer-thin steaks that fried in seconds! 

Wow! Cor! Did that bring back memories. Back in the mid 1970's I'd invite mates round to listen to rockers like Budgie, Skynyrd and Rush on the music-centre in my Folks' breakfast room. I'd raid the chest freezer in the shed and grab some steak canadian. Then I'd peel spuds, slice 'em up and make fab home-made chips. Topped off with marrowfat peas, it was the real reason my rockin' mates came round! 😃 Sometimes I'd change the menu to include frozen chicken and mushroom pies - with my own gravy. I even knew how to make a roux! I was way better at cooking age 14 than I am now! 

I shall once again relive those halcyon days soon and make the steak Canadian special again and crank up the stereo. Alas, the rockin' boys are distant memories now. 

Did you, do you like Steak Canadian? 🎸

Were you Ever Envious of Someone Else's Toys?

 It's true. You can't possibly have everything as a kid.

I had my eye on something my cousin Andy had. He'd got it from a relative in the States circa 1967 or 8. I'm not even sure you could get it in Blighty!

Yep, envy. Green I was.

The toy was the magnificent and marvellous Strange Change Machine!

He could make his own dinosaurs! 

God how I wanted it!

Still do! 

Ring any bells?

Christmas is Saved!

 The good news is .... My mate Mark has saved Christmas! 

The darn plumbers never showed to fix their mistakes but Mark grabbed his tool bag ( and his young son!) and came to the rescue! 

A couple of hours later, both leaks fixed! 

Yay!

💦💦

With the house warm and dry again I've been relaxing with my new NASA 2001 Space Glider, the unusual blue one. It's a real Austrian beauty! 

Our plastic Christmas gnomes think so too! They'd like a ride home! 

To Finland!

(At least I think I they're Finnish looking at the label!)

My old Mum and Dad are with me in spirit too. Mine was a difficult entrance into the world 65 years ago today, but I'll be forever grateful to my old Mum for going through hell for me, spending weeks recovering  in hospital once I arrived that Christmas in 1960.

Thanks Mum!

❤️

Is Xmas When you got New Toys?

Was it Christmas when you got your new toys as a kid?

It was for me.

OK, there was a slow drip of gifts and impulse buys throughout the year, maybe a surprise at Easter and certainly pick-me-ups when I was ill and off school (yay!).

But it was Christmas Day when my shelves were re-stocked properly, the new must-haves like Haunted House and the Johnny Seven One Man Army appearing under the tree (just how did Father Christmas get that down the chimney?). 

My Christmas-located birthday just added to the festive bonanza and basically the two big days brought me up to date in the world of toydom and annuals, not to mention clothes and selection boxes! (They were the best!)

What was it like for you readers? 

A Captain's Christmas

If there was one toy I could take to Mars it would be Mattel's Captain Lazer. With his Leonard Nimoy looks and glam rock boots the Captain is the coolest toy ever. I adored him as a kid. My old Mum must have forgot to leave it out for me on Xmas morning 1968 (I think), so on hearing my sobbing she quickly retrieved it from under her bed, came down stairs and handed it to me wrapped in paper. 

"There you go Son, Santa didn't forget after all".

Good old Mum. She was the real Santa!

I even wrote a poem about ol' Cap when I was a young teenager. Such is the power of the Captain's dazzling eyes and chest plate. I think the neatest stuff though, were his lazer attachments; the rod, the barrel and my favourite, the purple shield. Callisto and his cissy string pistol never stood a chance against the might of the glowing Captain!

These three coloured lazer parts reminded me of the cool weapons and accessories which came with Colorform's Outer Space Men, probably the best space toy range ever made. In fact Mattel's Major Matt Mason range and the Outer Space Men fit together perfectly. Callisto could easily be an Outer Space Man! Ol' Cap was so cool that Mattel used his body again for a new generation in the Seventies, by which time Captain Lazer will have been but a distant ray blast.

Finally I'd like to mention the sound the Cap's backpack made. I've talked about it before and will no doubt again. It is one of those iconic sounds unique to a Sixties childhood, like a spring rattling round a paint tin. 

Words like 'bodoingggggg' and 'de-de-de-de-de' don't do it justice. What do you think readers? 

What was that sound like?

*Pics of my second Captain bought in 2014.

Ghosts of Christmas Past

 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. 

Richard Allen's Skinhead

 I remember these from the Seventies. I saw them in bookshops back then.

My memory was jogged by a modern monotone reprint of Skinhead I saw in a charity shop in Castleford,  but it's the colourful NEL original I remember.

Suedehead is the other NEL paperback I recall vividly, never really knowing what a suedehead was. I didn't know any.

Richard Allen's quest to novelize every category of Seventies British yoof knew no bounds!

Books all new to me but available online include Knuckle Girls and Terrace Terrors.  I have to wonder if the author made these group names up or were they known like that?

Are the cover characters on the Allens actors do you think?

Boot Boys is a sub-culture I came across as a young teenager and these two fellas look more stylish than I remember them being. I knew them as Bovver Boys, who's passion was a bit of aggro and some argee bargee!

Sorts and Smoothies are new to me. Well, I can guess what a Smoothie was - I reckon a sort of mod - but Sorts, no. Clearly a girl thing. But hang on, that Smoothie bloke is on the Boot Boys cover too! He had two careers!

There's no doubt more Richard Allen field guides like these. What about Mods, Hippies, Greasers, Bikers, Teds, Punks, Yobs and Rockers?

Are these paperbacks icons now would you say? 

What was Halloween Like for You?

As things biuld up steadily towards Halloween here in Blighty, what with the shop aisles brim full of witches, ghouls and zombies, I've been trying to recall Halloween for me in the Sixties.

Being a monster nut I would have thought I'd have adored the whole thing, but I'm really struggling to recall much at all, so much so, that I'm now thinking Halloween wasn't a big thing in Sixties Preston, where I grew up. I'm even beginning to think trick or treating wasn't even a thing in the 60's, a custom that was yet to come over from the States. Or?

Unlike Christmas, which I remember vividly and to some extent, Bonfire Night, which WAS a big deal back then, Halloween can't have been anything like it is now in the UK, a night I've now come to savour as I've got older. There's no great party or shindig that we have, it's just the whole eerie atmosphere of the candle-lit evening, the true start of the dark season and the cold gateway to Winter.

I assume for American readers Halloween has always been massive, even in the 50's and 60's. Maybe even before that?

What was it like as a kid where you live in the world and how is it now for you?

BRAAAAAINS!

 

I wouldn't take it to Titan but I'd have it the day before I left.

A blast from the past, Mr. Brain's Pork Faggots, found in the frozen aisle at Farm foods! They'd been there fifty years! Ha ha!

Bread and butter, Yorkshire tea and three hot faggots with gravy.

Nostalgia never tasted so good! 

How does it look? Were and are you a fan?

The Long Shadows of Late Summer

Here's a late summer pic of my old pops reading in the back garden. No idea what though. 

I think the object on the floor next to the chair is a tall glass.

I reckon the toy tractor had been mine but kept on for younger nephews and nieces. 

My guess is it was taken in the early 1970's.

Do you have any of your old toy photos readers?

What Were Your Sundays Like as a Kid?

 I remember Sundays as a kid.

Calm. Family coming round. Another day to carry on playing with toys.

Then School, OK at first, became a drudge and I knew that Monday followed Sunday.

Nothing was open. No shops. Basically church was open. 

Family still came round. Sunny days with nephews and nieces. 

But Sunday wasn't Saturday.

The day drew steadily towards School on Monday.

The evening's TV were the weekend's epitaph.

Songs of Praise or Highway. 

There was no going back.

What were your Sundays like readers?

Did you have a TV in your Bedroom?

I never had a telly in my bedroom.  None of my friends did in the late Sixties/ Seventies.

Up till 1970 our family TV was black and white.

All the great kids TV like Thunderbirds and Captain Scarlet was black and white too! 

 It only went colour at our house for the Mexico 1970 World Cup! 

What are your telly memories readers? 

Super Cycle Streamers

Do you remember bike streamers like these readers?

They attached to the handlebars and streamed out as you pelted down the hill on your chopper, streaming like a shoal of eels in the sun.

Further bike coolness could be had from spoke smackers, those bits of card pegged onto your wheel that clattered as they turned.

Happy days on the saddle.

What bike hacks did you have?