Image by Nano Banana Lite 2 (Google Flow) on my instruction.
Sunday 2 May 1976 – worked on paper – great. TV Who Do You Do, MASH, QB7.
Monday 3 May 1976 – all ok. TV Star Trek. Lunch [to] records & tapes
Tuesday 4 May 1976 – swimming good, diving. TV Olympiad, Young Scientist Final
Wednesday 5 May 1976 – CCF OK. Tiring day. Great water polo match.
I’d forgotten how much I liked playing water polo at that time. Of course, several of my year’s Alleyn’s pupils bulked up and got seriously good at that sport over the next four years, becoming national champions in 1980. Those guys left me standing…or should I say, those guys left me treading water.
Thursday 6 May 1976 – Drama, The Man Of Destiny, TV $6M Man, Are You Being Served, Burke Special, Call My Bluff
Crickey – two Shaw plays in two weeks. I suspect we were doing a bit of compare and contrast with them.
Friday 7 May 1976 – all OK. Disection [sic] as well as PS [pre school] library. TV Wodehouse Playhouse. Heatwave day so [hot].
My first mention of the heatwave summer of 1976 was Friday 7 May. If I thought that day was hot, I clearly had no idea what was coming.
Saturday 8 May 1976 – got edition 2 [of Shalom] ready to distribute. TV Upstairs Downstairs
Sunday 9 May 1976 – Great Shalom got Edition 3 ready for print. Lloyd’s evening.
Monday 10 May 1976 – Bastard Davies, no more paper. Revision starts! TV Star Trek, R. Sgt [Major came?]
I apologise unequivocally to nice Mr Davies (Jonathan Davies’s dad) for calling him “Bastard Davies” in my diary. He had been exceptionally generous to us budding Shalom magazine publishers, offering to photocopy the pages of our little rag.
He had recently acquired a photocopier for his business and had made a kind offer to us. I don’t suppose Mr Davies had considered what was going to happen, financially, when you multiply several pages by many copies and then want to do that on a fairly regular basis. In those days, photocopying was extremely expensive per page.
Inevitably Mr Davies pulled the plug.
I had no recollection of the angry outburst, although I do remember the sense that my project had been nixed by Mr Davies’s intervention. Apologies once again, Mr Davies.
So was that it?
Was the magazine project in tatters?
You’ll need to wait until the next episode of Ogblog to find out. I’d learnt how to keep my readers wanting more even by May 1976, even when it seemed that I would have no means of sating that craving for more.
Tuesday 11 May 1976 – great cricket. We lost though. TV Olympiad.
Wednesday 12 May 1976 – great water polo. Set up two goals. CCF good. TV Islam & Corry.
Thursday 13 May 1976 – no drama. TV Are You Being Served, Burke Special, Call My Bluff.
Friday 14 May 1976 – came home early – diarrhoea. Worked on [Islam] project planned loads.
Saturday 15 May 1976 – school ok. Subbuteo cricket & soccer – Andrew stayed the night.
Insert your own jokes about the diarrhoea on Friday and whether or not I was in the runs when playing Subbuteo cricket the next day.
It is extraordinary how much schoolboy humour comes out when reviewing schoolboy diaries.
And for those in search of an earworm from that particular hot spring, most people surely had this tune stuck in their heads in the May 1976 heat: