The second half of February 1976 is punctuated in my diary by three major things, as my now adult, aging brain condenses it.
Firstly, for at least a week, which was mostly a half term holiday, I was nursing a cold which I attribute unequivocally to the miserable, freezing experience of the Gravesend rifle range the preceding Friday:
No ifs…butts on the rifle range, obviously, but…no buts, if I get cold and miserable, a head cold is an inevitable outcome.
Monday, 16 February 1976, Lloyd [Green – to work on Shalom magazine no doubt]. Got cold. TV Waltons.
Tuesday, 17 February 1976, Still streaming cold. TV Bob, Ellery Queen (a half), Pro-celeb golf & all day TV.
Wednesday 18 February 1976, still cold. TV, Benny Hill, Freddie Starr and all day TV.
Thursday 19th February 1976 Back to school. Still have cold. TV World At War, When The Boat Comes In, Film [The Fixer].
Friday 20 February 1976 – cold going. TV Sale Of The Century, Liver Birds, Steptoe, Open All Hours.
Secondly, I went with my parents to see the Bear Pit production at school. I say “Black Comedy” but it was actually a double-feature: The Man in the Bowler Hat by AA Milne and Black Comedy by Peter Shaffer. Here is Mrs Wright’s generous review of, as I recall it, a very enjoyable evening of light theatre.
I especially like director Tom Fry’s super-confident quote to “the press”, reported in the penultimate paragraph.
And talking of “the press”, my third obsession at that time, which started to open out as some sort of internalised soap opera in my life that spring, was a magazine project that I initiated along with Lloyd Green at chedar (Sunday School) which we named Shalom.
I am in touch with Lloyd, who has fled to Florida (presumably to avoid any risk of sedition charges arising from his published juvenilia from 1976). Characteristically, Lloyd admits that he remembers us doing this magazine thing, but also confesses to remembering almost nothing about it.
I remember that the conceit of the magazine was based on a publication we were shown at chedar, which was bible stories told in newspaper form – a book named Chronicles.
I wasn’t so interested in the biblical stuff, but was fascinated by the medieval history in the first few hundred years after Christ, starting with the destruction of the temple in AD 70. I was also keen to inject some humour into the project, thus a fair chunk of the material was quite “spoofy”, to a much greater extent than the serious-minded Chronicles – although that publication did push a few boundaries with its headlines and sensationalistic journalistic style.
Actually, the more I think about the Shalom project, the more I realise it had my fingerprints all over it.
Around the same time, I persuaded Mr Jenkins, who was nominally my history teacher, to let me do my history project on The Origins Of Islam, roughly up to the end of the Umayyad caliphate (c AD 750).
I remember seeing these two pieces of research-type writing as complementary, although don’t think I had worked through in my mind how the dual lines of research and writing might eventually join up. Possibly just as well – and in any case neither project was destined to reach a temporal joining up – the Shalom one would have needed to run for a long time to reach the 7th century origins of Islam.
Naturally, the output of both projects was lost in my mother’s vandal-style destruction of my entire collection of juvenilia in the late 1980s. That’s also probably just as well – I can remember them as being much better pieces of writing than no doubt they were, in reality.
Anyway, for the Shalom project, resources needed marshalling. Lloyd Green was – possibly still is – a fixer. I suspect a lot of the logistics came down to him, although he, along with others (I think Andy Levinson and Jonathan Davis) also chipped in with copy. Jonathan Davies’s dad, very kindly, agreed to print the magazine for us. He had recently acquired a photocopying machine for his business and was happy to allow it to be deployed for our educationally-oriented purpose…until he worked out how many pages that would mean, how expensive photocopying was per page back then and the extent to which the magazine was a fun project as much as…or more than…an educational one. Hilariously predictable results will be reported when the sh*t hit the fan around May 1976.
You’ll just start to notice it in my February diary, but my emotional state, especially at the weekend, seems to have been almost entirely dictated by the extent to which the Shalom project was going well or not going well.
Here’s the remainder of the diary from the end of February 1976. SO much telly.
Saturday, 21 February 1976 – all OK went to library. TV, Celebrity Squares, David came [possibly David Aarons to sit].
Sunday 22 February 1976 – lots of work done. TV Now Who Do You Do? MASH.
Monday 23 February 1976 – Tests galore. TV Ask The Family, Hello Cheeky, The Waltons.
Tuesday 24 February 1976 – no games. TV Ellery Queen (X), Pro-celebrity golf my dog trials.
Wednesday 25 February 1976 CCF good. TV Goodies Rule OK? Black Comedy excellent.
Thursday, 26 February 1976 – drama, good. TV World At War, When The Boat Comes In.
Friday, 27 February 1976 – All ok. TV Sale of the Century, Yes honestly, Liver Birds, Steptoe, Open All Hours.
Saturday 28th February 1976. Celebrity Squares, OK Corral, Upstairs Downstairs.
Sunday, 29 February 1976 – Shalom great. Going to come out. TV Peter Pan, no good.
