I remember I used to have my hair cut in Bentalls. It was a much bigger store then. You went up to about the third floor and through the men's clothing department. They had fixed seats arranged either side of the room facing the mirrors along the walls, as was the style in those days, and if you were a child, they had a board that they would place across the two arms of the chair so you could be level with the mirror. I never had a short back and sides, I used to have a Boston. I remember their penultimate act, before they showed you what your haircut looked like from the back with a hand mirror, would be to put talcum powder on the back of your neck and brush it off.

I remember I had a Wibbly-Wobbly Ball (quite famous in its time - that might not even have been its name and I don't think you can get them nowadays. Inflatable, about the size of a football but slightly cubed with a weight inside that made it fly and bounce in a wibbly-wobbly way) that floated out to sea and my Uncle Vic wouldn't save it. I am sure he would have been able to because it didn't seem that deep to me but he was always mucking about so kept pretending he couldn't get to it and by the time he was ready to, it had gone too far. I never forgave him until one day...

I remember playing on the beach at Seatown and my son Eliot losing one of his flip-flops in the waves. We both stood there watching as it floated slowly out to sea. The beach is very steep so it gets very deep within yards of the water's edge, and as my ability to swim diminishes immediately I am unable to feel the beach beneath my feet when I stand up, I couldn't dive in and retrieve it. However, enter stage right, we saw a swimmer swimming, as swimmers do, along the beach about 50 yards out. He saw the flip-flop, grabbed it as he went past and threw it back to us.