Yes, I know, you can’t read it. I’ll transcribe it below. Not a lot went on. My main purpose for the next few weeks was to be ready for my Bar Mitzvah, which was a big thing. Between times, it seems I did a lot of taping and watching television and not much going outside and enjoying the summer.
Sunday, 13 July 1975 – classes good. Played boule with dad. TV West Side Story.
Monday 14 July 1975 went to West End. Had bar mitzvah test. Passed with flying colours. TV Star Trek, My Honourable Mrs.
Tuesday, 15 July 1975 – classes good. Last lesson with Morris. TV The Gold Diggers of 1935.
Wednesday, 16 July 1975 played with Andy. Made more recordings. Got a case. Deciding holiday.
Thursday, 17 July 1975 – made more recordings, TV Apollo – Soyuz link up – landmark, Three Comedies of Marriage.
Friday, 18 July 1975 – another uneventful day. Went to Uncle Cyril [next door], more tapes etc, TV Main Chance.
Saturday 19 July 1975 – went to shule in morning. Uneventful afternoon. TV The Jokers, Crown Court.
The tapes I was making, colluding with “Uncle” Cyril Barnett next door, were a mixture of gramophone records and reel-to-reel tapes of his.
One box set of gramophone records comprised a collection: Herbert Von Karajan Karajan Conducts The Popular Classics. I taped the whole collection apart from:
- those items I already had (I had been given a box set of Tchaikovsky Ballet Suites for my Bar Mitzvah)
- Mozart’s Ave Verum Corpus, which my mum would have deemed inappropriate – not least for a kid who was about to have his Bar Mitzvah. Mum’s attempts to dissuade me from Christian sacred music failed dismally, as my interest in early music (although not religion per se) blossomed later, but that’s another set of stories.
The other material mostly comprised albums from musicals of the 1960s. I’ll trawl my lists for those and playlist them separately. One of them, I recall, was Fiddler on the Roof sung in Yiddish, which pleased Grandma Anne no end. It does sound appropriate (albeit a bit weird to the untrained ear) given the context of the musical. It occurs to me, of course, that you can find pretty much anything on YouTube music, and of course that obscure thing was no exception. Here’s a link if you are curious – I’ll listen to it some other time, for old time’s sake – although I think this recording is a more recent album.
Shortly after the Apollo-Soyuz link-up – surely the high watermark of detente before the Hawks in the Pentagon and the Whitehouse decided to restart the Cold War – I was in the USSR. I remember seeing what looked like a Galt toy, because it was made of some kind pale wood. No plastic, no batteries. As I recall (badly) it took the form of a globe, around whose equators two spacecraft could rotate in opposite directions if you squeezed a lever. When they met, they ‘docked’ with a satisfying click. In my memory – which I don’t trust for a second – each spacecraft was ridden by a bear, much as you’d ride a motorbike. I can’t remember if there was a difference between the two bears. Probably, the American bear had better cigarettes. Who didn’t?