The Nightingale – photo by Ewan Munro from London, UK, CC BY-SA 2.0
Lunch seemed to be the most important part of my working life back then. At least, it was the most recorded item in the diary about my working days.
Wednesday 22 July 1981 – work not too bad – met Caroline [Freeman, now Curtis] for lunch…
…Friday 25 July 1981 – Met Karen [Davies] for lunch…
etc.
Andrea Dean came over on that Saturday.
-> pub etc. Stayed night.
I’ll guess that we met up with several of the Streatham BBYO crowd in that pub. Possibly The Horse & Groom, possibly The Greyhound or possibly The Pied Bull.
I went to see Grandma Anne on that Sunday (26th July) while she was still in Nightingale temporarily on a respite care/check it out basis.
Wednesday 29th July 1981 was Royal Wedding Day – that’s the Charles & Di wedding. I love my diary entry on the matter:
Royal Wedding day – off work. Lazy day not watching wedding.
On Saturday 1 August…
Went to RTE [Record & Tape Exchange] with Paul [Deacon] in day – successful trip…
I have no pictures of such visits to the exchange shops with Paul from those days, but the following picture is a “reconstruction” from Paul’s memory lane visit with me in 2017
I think the following chunk from my RTE listings is the batch I bought that day:
Some stuff that I wouldn’t boast about now and/or that hasn’t dated well in that lot, but two of my all time favourite albums in that batch: Germfree Adolescents by X-Ray Spex…
…and Kimono My House by Sparks.
The diary entry for 2 August contains some mystery and does not adequately report the most memorable story of the day:
Mark Stevens dropped in. Got Grandma out of home – reinstated in flat. Paul [Deacon] popped over in eve.
I don’t remember why Mark Stevens dropped in on a Sunday morning. Perhaps Mark remembers.
There was a story to getting Grandma Anne out of Nightingale, though.
I remember this very clearly. We turned up to collect Grandma but she was nowhere to be found. She’d been staying at Nightingale for a few weeks, so we knew where she tended to hang out and where her room was…no joy.
Dad got quite worried and stressy.
We started asking people at random, until one person casually said, “I think she’s gone down the pub with Sid”.
This did not sound like Grandma Anne.
I doubt if she had ever, in her nearly 90 years by then, been in a pub before.
I scurried to The Nightingale, where indeed Grandma Anne was sitting with her new gentleman friend, quite oblivious to the fact that her respite stay was over and that she had an appointment to return to her flat with us.
Equally, she seemed nonchalant about simply saying goodbye to her new gentleman friend and zimmering slowly back to Nightingale with me.
A couple of weeks later, Grandma Anne was taken ill. She died three weeks after her impromptu pub outing. That event, which might have been her first pub visit, was also her last hurrah.