Anarchists Take On University of Keele Registrar Caveat Notice, Guessing January 1983

I’m not sure when the anarchists decided to go around the campus and replace Dr David Cohen’s “personal property” caveat notices with the anarchists’ inimitable take on the matter.

It seems I retained or liberated a copy or two of the anarchists’ notices for myself.

Anarchist Notice

The First Ten Days Of A Keele Term: Let’s Talk About Food Shopping, 10 to 19 January 1983

DALL-E 2 helped me imagine this sack of Maris Piper potatoes

There’s not a lot of interest to the general reader in my diary for the first 10 days of that term. Just in case you are curious, here is an image of the first week.

Studying, shopping and…not much else – let’s talk about food shopping.

In our flat, Barnes L54, we had a rota, based on three of us eating at the flat (Hamzah was outside that rota, mostly eating Halal food with the Malay crowd in Q-Block Barnes) and all four of us needing to do our bit cleaning.

I’m pretty sure that Chantelle was at least semi-detached from me and Alan Gorman by this stage – doing her bit but basically shopping for her share of the food duties with her share of the kitty.

Alan and I would make occasional trips to Newcastle-Under-Lyme together for the big food shops. No doubt 12 January 1983 was such a shop.

Sainsbury’s was the focus of such a shop. Periodically we needed to buy, not only the regular groceries, but also a sack of potatoes. Normally, in those days, Maris Pipers, which were cheap and available in large sacks at Sainsbury’s.

Actually my cooking very rarely used the potatoes. I would tend to make the rice and pasta/noodle based dishes that added some variety to our diet. But Chantelle was a “meat, potatoes and two veg” sort of lass, while Alan was such a lad. Chantelle did sometimes do a mean spag. bol. (who in those Keele flats did not?) so it wasn’t all potatoes with those two. Alan I recall, was partial to pies and sausages. There was an excellent sausage-specialist butcher on the High Street and we’d often venture there for top quality sausages at affordable student prices. I have previously discussed – click here or below -the fact that, for those two, the main meal, in the evening, was named tea.

But there were other meals. Lunch (or as the other two might call it, dinner) would normally comprise something based on sliced bread. One of the staples we tended to have to go on that sliced bread was a form of liver-based pâté sold in tubes at Sainsbury’s at that time for relatively small change.

Forty years on, I don’t think Sainsbury’s sells that stuff any more but Asda sells something similar – see image below.

Image “borrowed” from Asda in consideration of promoting their product link-wise

White bread, own-brand margarine and that variety of pâté was never our dinner (tea) but was quite often our lunch (dinner) and/or our supper. Alan insisted on pronouncing that word pate (which might rhyme with gate or hate) – he had no truck with a pretentious pronunciation such as “pâté“. To be fair, I don’t think merchants like Sainsbury’s dared to put the accents on labels for such comestibles in those days, so the tube label probably read “pate”.

“Supper”, students of this Ogblog series might recall, is the ad hoc meal later in the evening (especially favoured by Alan) after a session down the boozer or possibly after a session of evening study.

Indeed, the sack of potatoes came into its own for supper, as quite often, the preferred “dish” was a chip pan full of chips.

Now look here, Dall-E 2, when I said “well used” I didn’t quite expect…but this will do.

Actually “our” chip pan (by which I really mean Alan’s) was filthy-looking on the outside but didn’t look “caked-on-gunge-like” inside, because we permanently kept it topped up with oil/fat, so it would never dry out. We mostly used rapeseed oil as the chip fat – that was the cheapest source of cooking oil in those days – which seems strange, forty years on.

Mince was very reasonable at Sainsbury’s back then, but my “dining on a budget” bankable meat protein was chicken livers, which you could get at that time for 29p per pound in Sainsbury’s, jammed into conveniently small frozen tubs, so I could have a few on standby in our tiny freezer drawer. These would serve two purposes:

  • a signature dish of chicken livers and rice – the livers casseroled with tomatoes and onions to make a rich gravy. My wife, Janie, even today, talks highly of that dish of mine, although it is some while since I have made it;
  • occasional production of a batch of chopped liver (gehakte leber) with egg and onions, using my mother’s recipe. Strangely, I might yet find a yellowed piece of paper with that recipe in her own hand, inside a recipe book somewhere. It is a course form of pâté (or do I mean pate?) which I used to make using a potato masher or, I seem to recall at one stage, a hand-controlled grinder device that my mother let me take to Keele with me as she by then had a better one. I recall that Alan very much liked this dish, although I’m not sure whether or not he preferred it to the flavour-enhanced tubes. Whether Alan’s youthful exposure to this quintessentially Jewish dish played a part in him marrying a Jewish lass many years later we can only wonder.
Jollymon001, CC BY-SA 4.0

I’ll write more about shopping in Newcastle and some more sophisticated dishes at some future stage, but for now, I think I’ve ground out enough material from this topic.

Return To Keele For “Twelve Days Of Post-Christmas”/New Year 1983 After A Very Short Seasonal Break In London, 23 December 1982 to 9 January 1983

Boat & Horses Newcastle borrowed and edited from WhatPub.

I returned to Keele very soon after Christmas, for reasons that need no more explaining in this piece than they did in my last substantive piece for 1982.

Just A Few Days In Streatham, 23 to 28 December 1982

I basically just spent a few days in London with family and friends that year:

Thursday 23 December…went over to Wendy’s [Robbins] for the afternoon…

Friday 24 December…went over to [Andy & Fiona] Levinson’s…

Saturday 25 December…Benjamins [Doreen, Stanley, Jane & Lisa] came over in evening…

Sunday 26 December…went to [neighbours Eardley & Aidrienne] Dadonka’s in evening…

Monday 27 December …Italian meal [almost certainly Il Carretto]…met Jim [Bateman] in evening…

Tuesday 28 December …did some taping. Went to [John & Lily] Hoggan’s in afternoon. Nice Chinese meal [almost certainly Mrs Wong‘s]. Paul [Deacon] came in evening

Back To Keele For “Twelve Days Of Post-Christmas” Before the Start Of Term, 29 December 1982 to 9 January 1983

The diary mostly refers to hanging around with Liza O’Connor during that pre-term period.

On New Year’s Eve it seems that I made some dinner at Barnes L54, the menu for which is lost in the mists of time but it would have probably been one of my Chinese wok specials. We then went to the Boat and Horses in Newcastle for a New Year’s Eve party.

I have a feeling that Liza’s brother Liam was involved – possibly even the brains behind the idea. But it might have also involved Ashley Fletcher and/or Bob & Sally (Bob Miller and Sally Hyman). I certainly recall Bob having an affection for a Bass pub around there, but perhaps not that one and/or perhaps not New Year’s Eve.

It must have been a good night because it seems we dossed all day the following day, reporting only watching a film on (Alan Gorman’s) TV in the evening. New Years Day aged 20.

Friday 7 January – went to visit Simon {Jacobs] & Jon [Gorvett] today – went to pub, shopped etc.

I think those two must have been sharing a place off campus by then. I must ask them.

OK, I think I have assessed that those 12 days before the start of term do not contain a great deal of interest for the general reader. There are several mentions of doing some work, as well as several more of spending time with Liza.

In the interest of science, I have assessed the text and can provide the following, quantitative data about those 12 days.

  • Days spent with Liza but not working: six.
  • Days spent working and also seeing Liza: one.
  • Days spent working and not seeing Liza: four, three of which described as “did a little work”, only one described as “worked all day”;
  • Days spent neither working nor seeing Liza: one.

Also in the interests of science, forty years on, I have been playing with bots ChatGPT and DALL-E over the seasonal break, with predictably hilarious results.

As I have so few images from my Keele years, I thought I’d get DALL-E to help me depict that seasonal break. The above picture is a DALL-E image generated solely from the instruction:

Depict a University Student in January 1983 spending 12 days before the start of term dossing with his friends and girlfriend, doing a little work but not much.

Looks only a smidge like me, but more importantly I think DALL-E has erred on the side of the work rather than the dossing. Probably just as well.