Wednesday, November 25, 2015

I remember when Dave used to drive my cab home I used to think he kept switching his engine off and on at traffic lights. Now - because I have it - I realise he had auto idle. Unlike most of my workmates, I used to enjoy listening to his stories about Cliff Richard, Jeff Beck, John McLaughlin and Val Doonican (or was it someone else who drove their car into Carshalton Ponds?).

I remember Hattie Jacques mentioning how lovely it was that when she worked with Eric Sykes (she used to pay his sister in his TV series, with Deryck Guyler as Corky, the local beat bobby) reference was never made to her size or weight. And if you compare that show with, for example, Hancock's Half Hour, where she had to put up with constant fat jokes, it's true. 

I remember something heights. An atmosphere tape at the NFS studios. Golan Heights?

I remember my mum's pools coupons being filled with Xs and Os.

I remember Threads, a BBC drama about a nuclear aftermath. Probably the first play I taped on VHS.

I remember buying Shallow Grave on VHS for 99p one Christmas Eve in HMV - or it might have been Our Price.

I remember lending to a guy who wanted to start a paintball business. And I remember his wife was wearing a tight-fitting dress and no bra.

I remember Graham's first law of banking. It applies to everything. Leave stuff. It'll sort itself out.

I remember, on many occasions throughout my life, feeling that something was slipping away, either fizzling out or turning to shit, but that I had had the best of it: The Sussex Club, now no more; Elmer Sands, a ghost town, near enough; the school stage gang or TMDS/TAS - there's no way nowadays that the caretaker would let us make our own way into and out of the school to work on scenery in our own time for the love of it; banking - the stuff we were given at Christmas by grateful customers; Fleet Street - catching the tale end of the system whereby you pretty much got paid shedloads of money for just being there in case anything happened - being taught by JV, who had come up though hot metal yet took to QuarkXPress like a duck to water. And it's still happening: Golden Cap, where seasonal pitches have been withdrawn so I don't know when I'm going to see Bernie and Phyllis again; Metro, where the digital editions are about to be revamped, so who knows what is going to happen?

I remember beginning this blog 10 years ago today. And I suspect I will make this my last entry...