…and let’s not even talk about Dr Green chasing me around the room and eventually jabbing me in the buttock under the dining room table in the mid 1960s.
Incredibly efficient, they are, down at CP House in Ealing. Smiling and friendly too.
Three different people asked me if I had shown any Covid-like symptoms in the last 28 days and I am pretty sure I was consistent with my answer; no.
The nurse whose job it was to jab me seemed unfazed by my nervousness and put me at my ease, saying that a great many people respond that way to the thought of jabs.
I know how irrational it is and as always feel like a bit of an idiot afterwards, as usual barely feeling a thing.
Janie was most put out that one of the stewards offered me a chocolate on departure (see purple square) as those were not on offer 10 days earlier when Janie had her jab.
I didn’t want my chocolate so I let Janie have mine, but it was the principle of the thing and woe betide them if there are no chocolates available when we go along for Janie’s second jab.
We don’t get out much any more – our jab outings have been the closest thing to social gatherings we’ve been to for months.
With thanks to Kay Scorah for permission to publish her love letter as a guest piece here on Ogblog:
February 2021
Before we go any further, there’s something I need to tell you.
I’ve never been in love.
Yeah, of course, I’ve been in lust. And I’ve been in-fatuated, in-appropriate, in-secure, in-toxicated.
All those other “ins” made me think I was in love. But I wasn’t.
I can’t believe it’s taken me so long to work this out, but lately love has taught me that I have never been in love.
You see, the love I feel is overwhelming, and year by year it gets more so.
The narcissi, the daffodils, the crocuses are just opening up in Vicky Park. I looked at them the other day and I began to cry.
I love them.
Then there’s those 3 little kids that race their scooters down my street every day after school. There they are now as I write, yelling, screaming and laughing.. my heart is ready to burst with love for their voices.
The café owner up at Dartmouth Park yesterday, she just couldn’t stop talking about the trip she took to South America when she was 21. The sparkle in her eyes when she remembered the fear and the beauty of it all; I can’t get it out of my mind’s eye.
I love it.
The opening bars of “I Heard it Through the Grapevine”; I have a physical love reaction to them. Can’t help but move.
And that’s before I even get started on the love I feel for my son. Looking at a picture of him when he was small or seeing him walk towards me across the park, even writing about him now...
So, the idea of being in love with someone, that I’m supposed to love them more than anyone or anything. Well, that’s too much for me. It’s frightening.
If I were to fall in love with someone, would that mean that my love for them would be bigger than all the love I already have? If so, then we’d both be overwhelmed. We wouldn’t be able to handle it.
On the other hand, if falling in love with one person meant that I had to take my love away from the flowers, the children, the music, my son - I would be so sad, and so dependent on them to give me everything that the rest of the world had provided until then, it just wouldn’t be fair. They could only disappoint me.
My love is such that if I fell in love, in the way I think it’s supposed to be, neither of us could possibly survive the intensity.
So, when your smiling but serious face pops up on the zoom screen, and your soothing voice washes in through my headphones, I love you like a crocus, like a kid on a scooter, like Tamla Motown. And that’s huge.
Victoria ParkSmiling But Serious Faces From December’s ThreadZoomMash
I chose to write and recite an impressionistic memory story, in the form of a love letter, about a night at Keele; 6 March 1981 to be precise.
The ThreadMash brief was simply to write a love letter. The resulting writings from the group were varied to say the least. Here is mine.
Dear Nina
It’s been a while since we met. Forty years, to be precise.
It’s time I wrote to you. Letter writing was my thing back then…but I didn’t write to you…then.
A lot has happened since that night, in March 1981, when Anna encouraged you to spend the night with me.
That was weird.
I wonder what Anna was playing at? Just being playful, probably. The way she’d always be sluttishly playful in the refectory whenever she ate…or more accurately…whenever Anna fellated…and then ate…a banana.
Anna might have set us up for effect, of course. Anyone who roller-skates around the campus all the time, the way Anna used to…is prone to doing weird things for effect.
I don’t think she ever fancied me, Anna. I know she liked me, but I don’t think she fancied me. Actually that evening, while the three of us were sitting in the Union, talking about Bobbie Sands and Troops Out…I thought Anna fancied you, Nina. Perhaps she did. I was a terrible judge of signals back then. Probably still am.
Anyway, we can’t revert to Anna and ask her what was going on. Anna died in in 2012. I don’t suppose you knew that. I didn’t learn that news until a few years after the event. I didn’t keep in touch with Anna. But some of my friends did…or at least reconnected with her before the end. Lung cancer, it was.
In truth, I was a little confused that night. Confused about love.
I had been carrying a torch for Mandy from Manchester for months. One passionate December night. Agreement to progress. Several love letters…from me to Mandy. Nothing in return. I didn’t understand.
I understand more now. I know more now. Letters are not always the medium they are cracked up to be. There’s ample opportunity for delay, for mislay, for tapping, for tampering…
…anyway, some three months after that night in Manchester, still I was, emotionally speaking, bearing that torch, for Mandy.
But the flame was flickering, fizzling by then, so the torch I was still bearing, utterly in vain, for Mandy, was not sufficiently hot for me to resist you. The flame was just warm enough to keep me confused.
As with Anna, I can’t revert to Mandy for her side of the story. She died in 2020, having been ill for some time. Cancer, I believe. I had reconnected with and am still in touch with Mandy’s brother.
Who were you, Nina? Who are you?
At one point, in the early hours, you toddled out of my pokey, student room, down the corridor, to the loo.
You had just a small bag with you. You left the zipper open, with your Irish passport on the top.
I must admit, while you were out of the room, I had a quick nosey at the passport.
The photo didn’t look like you at all…wait a moment, yes it did. It’s just that you had a shock of platinum blond hair in person, whereas the passport photo was a dark-haired version of you.
But the name…I couldn’t begin to discern it.
The forename was one of those bizarre Irish names; I can’t even hazard a guess at what it was. Perhaps it was L-A-O-I-S-E [Laoise], pronounced Lee-sha; or C-A-O-I-L-F-H-I-O-N-N [Caoilfhionn], pronounced Kay-lin. Anyway my young, ignorant eyes merely discerned an unpronounceable, supremely Irish name, the forename being nothing like Nina, the surname seeming like nothing earthly.
When you left, a few hours later, you sweetly but firmly made clear that you were just passing through and that we wouldn’t be keeping in touch or seeing each other again. Just a parting kiss.
No letters. No words. Until now.
Who were you, Nina? Were you simply, as advertised, a visiting political ally of Anna’s; through the student SWP & Troops Out alliance? Or were you Sinn Fein, Nina? Were you IRA, Nina?
And who are you now, Nina?
How are you now, Nina? Are you still alive? I do hope so.
Anna’s gone. Mandy’s gone. But you?
I hope you are alive and well and thriving.
Wherever you are.
Whoever you are.
Whatever you are called.
Moving swiftly on to the night of 4 March 2021, Rohan Candappa curated and introduced the event. We had all sent our letters to another ThreadMasher, drawn at random. One or two people (David and Adrian) had chosen to write fictional love letters to the actual person whose name they had drawn, while the rest of us did not do that.
As it happens, I was first up, which possibly makes me “top billing” or possibly “the warm-up act”…or possibly just “first up”.
Geraldine went next, with a moving paean to spring.
Jill’s love letter was to her husband, telling the tale of their near separation by circumstances.
David’s was to Terry, who he fictionalised as his own former lover Teresa whom he was now stalking, having rediscovered them in the form of Terry.
Jan wrote a letter of devotion to the theatre, which certainly resonated with me, both when I received it through the post and when I heard Jan perform the piece.
Rohan feigned profound hurt at the idea that his wife of 25+ years chose to write her letter of devotion to the theatre rather than to him. During the ensuing interval, Rohan could been be seen trying to sneak out of the Candappa house with a suitcase and a hat to lay elsewhere. Fortunately, he and Jan were reconciled in time for the start of the second half.
Terry’s letter (which Rohan read well in Terry’s work-induced absence) was a testimonial to abstinence and its close relative, addiction.
Flo’s letter appeared to be a confessional love letter about a rollicking love affair, until “the big reveal” that the object of her passion is the London Fields Lido.
Julie’s love letter was very creepy, starting off sounding like a declaration of love but soon turning out to be the ramblings of a stalker to their stalkee.
Ian T’s letter was a eulogy to his former tribe, London cyclists, which evoked Ian’s memories of his regular two-wheeled commute.
Kay’s covered several things she loves, including Victoria Park, Marvin Gaye’s I Heard It Through The Grapevine and her family, concluding deftly that she would struggle to compromise any of those loves for romantic love.
Rohan declared his love for “the wide world”, which I’m sure sparked the desire to travel again in many of us.
Adrian concluded the evening with a bravura piece, which I can only describe as an hilarious homoerotic slapstick [did you see what I did there?] fantasy in which he and David were central characters. Most if not all of us were in stitches. Adrian’s performance was a great climax [did you see what else I did there?] to the evening. A real tonic as we start to emerge from this strange and difficult winter.
As always, it’s not just the stories, it is also the company of this wonderful group of people that makes the evening so special. Viva ThreadMash.
With thanks to Rachelle Gryn Brettlerfor snapping us in Rossmore Road, preparing to do our FoodCycle run on a wet winter’s day
We don’t get out much in Lockdown 3.0, other than to buy food and do our charity work.
That is giving me a chance to crack on with my retro-blogging; I’m working through 1995 & 1996 to cover the Ged & Daisy (Ian & Janie) “25 years ago” story. I’m needing to give more thought, though, to the formerly less well-documented, “40 years on” story of my early days at Keele University.
Strangely, 1981 and 2021 seem to have collided, forty years on.
…mentioning the superb tapes Graham Greenglass used to make for me, including quirky numbers such as Rossmore Road by Barry Andrews. I still hum it or sing it more often than not when Daisy and I do FoodCycle from there:
Dreamy use of sax and double bass on that track.
Last week, I wrote up the very weekend during which several visitors descended on Keele and Graham presented me with a few cassettes, including that very track. The piece below is a thumping good read, even if you weren’t there, including an excellent undergraduate recipe for spaghetti bollock-knees:
On Wednesday, before Daisy and I did our FoodCycle run, I did an NHS Responder gig to collect a prescription. Strangely the prescription was to be collected at the Tesco Hoover Factory in Greenford. Strange, because also on that little collection of quirky recordings given to me in February 1981 was the song Hoover Factory by Elvis Costello:
So, by some strange quirk of fate, forty years after being given recordings of those two rather obscure (but wonderful) recordings about lesser-known places in West London, I found myself doing charity gigs from those two very places.
I have already written up the ear worm I got from Hoover Factory a few months after first hearing the song:
But the early 1980s connection this week does not stop there.
While I have been cracking on with the NHS Responder/GoodSAM app as well as FoodCycle, Daisy has been training to become a Samaritan and this week moved on from being a course trainee to becoming a mentee (i.e. doing real sessions with real calls under the supervision of a mentor).
Towards the end of her course, Daisy had been waiting with a little trepidation to find out who her mentor might be. Mentors work closely with their mentees for a few weeks. She knew that it might be one of her course trainers or possibly someone she hadn’t encountered before.
A couple of weeks ago Janie announced that her mentoring instructions had come through and her mentor was a new name to her: Alison Shindler.
GED: Oh, yes, I know Alison Shindler.
DAISY: What do you mean?
GED: She was a leading light in BBYO towards the end of my time there.
DAISY: Might not be the same person…
GED: …Ealing BBYO – bet it is!
Of course it is.
What a pleasant surprise.
Less of a surprise though, after their first session together, is that Alison & Daisy seem to be getting along really well. I’m confident that the mentoring partnership should be a very good one.
Meanwhile Alison has furnished me with a photo from so far back in the day, the biggest surprise is that we were in colour back then:
With thanks to Alison Shindler for this photo
That’s a c17-year-old me turning around, next to me Simon Jacobs who was central to my “going to Keele” story and part of the “cooking weekend”. In the red scarf I thought was Jilly Black (who has remained friends with me, Daisy and Alison throughout those decades – in fact it is a little surprising we haven’t overlapped before now )…but it turns out to be Emma Cohen disguised as Jilly. Opposite Simon is Lauren Sterling plus, slightly upstaged by Simon’s head, Caroline Curtis (then Freeman) who visited me and Simon at Keele the February 1981 weekend following the “cooking” one.
But now, after all that excitement, Daisy and I are in temporary exile at the flat. The replacement of the Noddyland boiler has over-run by a day, making Daisy right and me wrong, as usual.
Stock boiler image: neither the actual old nor the actual new boiler
I’ve been grasping for a quirky early 1980s musical connection for a boiler replacement. So my earworm for the tail end of this tale is by that early 1980s mainstay, The Human League – Being Boiled:
In February 2021 I took a stroll and listened to The Ridiculous Ashes podcast while so doing. I wrote up the “event” in the style of a King Cricket match report.
With thanks to Ian Theodoreson, I am delighted to host his story entitled The Unexpected Visitor
The estate agent blurb described the house as ‘A substantial Victorian property carefully restored by the present owners, preserving many of the original features. It is located on one of the town’s premier roads overlooking the golf course’.
What the write up didn’t describe was the fact that the basement displayed yet more original features as it hadn’t been subjected to the same ‘careful restoration’ the rest of the house had. Indeed it had not been subject to any restoration as the Browns had run out of steam. They had devoted five years of their lives and all of their savings doing up the main house and had decided that enough was enough. The basement became the repository for all those things that will be incredibly useful one day and, amongst the piles of boxes, crates and a well-stocked wine rack, a family of mice installed itself. On the whole they kept themselves to themselves, only occasionally encroaching upon the main living area, and regular assaults with a variety of mousetraps by Mr Brown helped keep their numbers to manageable levels.
A neighbour down the road, sensing Mr & Mrs Brown needed a new diversion from decorating, suggested he introduce them to the golf club, at which point they hung up their paint brushes and instead attempted to master the art of hitting a small ball in a straight line, without much success. Gary Player once famously said of golf ‘The more I play, the luckier I get’: if he meant that as a generally applicable aphorism then he was wrong with regard to the Browns.
Their efforts at golf were a disappointment both to the Browns themselves and to the more conservative members of the club, who viewed them with some suspicion. Not only did they not master the technical aspects of the sport, but they didn’t really fit in with the social elite who commanded the club house either. The club secretary was a particularly pompous man, Jack Cuthbert who, in his spare time, doubled up as their local Councillor. His wife Heather, by contrast, was a rather timid woman whose presence merely served to amplify her husband’s sense of superiority.
After a number of years the time came to sell their ‘substantial Victorian pile’ and to move to something smaller. Mr Brown had something of a love/hate relationship with older properties – there was a sense of grandeur living in them but it was constantly tempered with the knowledge that at any moment the decorative ceiling might crash down around ones ears. Consequently, once they decided to sell, the need to do so became urgent, before some further defect revealed itself that would take time and energy to address.
A number of prospective buyers looked around but no offers were forthcoming. The Browns decided that the agent wasn’t doing a good enough job at explaining the potential benefits of living in the house so they decided that they would show the next people around themselves: maybe give prospective buyers a sense of the genteel lifestyle Mr Brown felt the house projected.
It was with a heavy heart therefore that they learned from the agent that ‘a lovely couple, a local Councillor and his wife’, had booked to see the house. Jack Cuthbert was every bit as pompous looking round the house as he was propping up the bar in the club house however, not deterred, Mrs Brown had arranged to serve tea and cake in the living room after the ‘tour’.
In actual fact the Cuthberts were showing some interest in the house not least, Mr Brown suspected, because its imposing bulk could be seen from the nineteenth green. It was however, at this moment, that an unexpected visitor made his presence known. During a lull in the conversation Mr Brown heard the unmistakable ‘snap’ of a Little Nipper mousetrap springing into life. It had been hidden beside the log basket, just out of sight and he had completely forgotten it was there.
Generally when a mousetrap activates, the kill is swift and clean. Occasionally however it catches the mouse a glancing blow and traps its victim without finishing it off. This was one such occasion and the unfortunate animal, its head firmly caught but still able to move its hind legs, leaped into the air and onto the carpet directly in front of Mrs Cuthbert’s feet. There was a moment’s silence as everyone contemplated the vision before them, broken by Mrs Cuthbert’s scream as she threw the piece of cake she was holding into the air and rushed out of the room. ‘How dare you’, shouted Jack Cuthbert, his face red with rage, ‘my wife is a vegetarian’.
It was at this moment that Mr Brown’s calm demeanour finally deserted him – all the tension of the sale, his general distaste for the Cuthberts and the preposterousness of the situation overwhelmed him. ‘Well, we were not expecting her to eat it!’ he shouted sarcastically after their retreating forms and watched them storm up the driveway.
‘Well, that went well’ said his wife, calmly. ‘I suspect they won’t be making an offer on the house though’.
‘And you better deal with that’ she said pointing to the writhing body on the floor, still trapped in the Little Nipper, ‘I think it’s got breathing problems’.
The following day the Browns resigned their membership of the golf club.
David Wellbrook curated this edition of ThreadZoomMash. The brief was to write a piece of fiction, 800-1,000 words, entitled "The Unexpected Visitor". I submitted and performed the following piece.
“What the blithering fuck are you doing here?” said Martin, in a daze-like state, having been disturbed from his intense concentration, staring at nothing much, on his remarkably cluttered coffee table.
“I thought I’d surprise you”, said Mary. “You knew I’d be back”.
“Did I fuck”, exclaimed Martin. “This is totally unexpected. The last thing you said to me, as you left, was that you were never, ever, ever, ever…EVER going to come back.”
“But that was months ago”, Mary whispered, coquettishly, “and it was hardly the first time I walked out on you swearing that I was walking out for the last time.”
“Months! At least 18 months. I thought I was shot of you. I thought I was over you. I mean, I am over you. It’s too late. I’ve moved on. I’ve got a new life. I’ve got a new relationship….”
Mary smiled and chided Martin gently. “No you haven’t Martin. I know you haven’t. You’ve been waiting for my return. And now I am back.”
Mary surveyed all around her in the living room of the pokey Deptford flat that had, for several years, been her home. Martin had lived there for many more years than Mary. Before Mary came on the scene, Martin had been with a woman named Peggy for years. Peggy had broken his heart. That’s all Martin would say about Peggy.
It was impossible to believe that Martin had, in any way, moved on. Apart from an increased amount of dust and general untidiness, the place looked entirely unchanged.
Mary smiled. “Let me tidy up and clean up a bit…”
“…oh no you don’t”, yelled Martin, “you can’t just stroll in as if you’d never been away and take over my life again. Leave me alone!”
Tenderly, Mary coaxed him, as she started to tidy up, “you can’t carry on living like this Martin. Look at the place.”
Mary tidied for a while, then took out a dress from the chest of drawers, admiring and imagining herself wearing it. “It’s that second hand Versace dress you bought me. I’d forgotten…it’s so beautiful.”
“Cost me a bloody fortune, that did”, grumbled Martin, “hundreds…”
“…but they cost thousands new, Martin. You were so thrilled when you found it and ordered it on-line. And I was so excited when it arrived. Do you remember?”
“Of course. You looked lovely in it.” Martin’s anger was subsiding.
“Shall I try it on?” asked Mary.
“I suppose so. If you like”, said Martin, quelled. Once Mary had put on the dress, Martin added, “give us a twirl”,
“Let me see if I can find some suitable shoes,” said Mary, rummaging at the bottom of the wardrobe, turning out pairs of shoes, “I don’t think I ever had a pair that quite went with this dress…I don’t suppose you could find a pair of second hand Jimmy Choos on-line to go with my second hand Versace, Martin?”
“Fucking hell, don’t start all that again”, said Martin, the anger welling up inside him once again, “that’s what we rowed over the last time. I was always shelling out money I don’t have, on clothes that you don’t need. I can’t afford you, Mary. I can’t fucking afford you”.
“Oh don’t be like that, Martin”, said Mary in her girlie voice, likely to make Martin even more angry. “I’ll pay towards them if you like”.
“Stop talking rot, Mary. You’ve got no fucking money. We’ve neither of us got any money. You’ve got all these clothes and now you’re talking about buying a pair of Jimmy Frigging Choos. You make me so angry. You always do this. I want to fucking murder you and then kill myself.”
Martin was really wild with anger now. He started hurling clothes around, stomping around the flat and continuously threatening and hurling abuse at Mary. Mary, for her part, was soon reduced merely to sobbing and pleading with Martin to calm down.
Many minutes into the row, came a knock at the door. “Open up! It’s the police! What’s going on in there? Open up!”
“Now look what you’ve done”, said Martin, “the neighbours have set the police on me. This is all I bloody need.”
Martin opened the door. “Good evening officer…officers”.
Two policemen. One looked about fifteen. The other a bit older.
“May we come in please? The neighbours have reported a domestic incident in this flat and we’d like your co-operation.”
“Yeh, whatever”, said Martin.
“Shall I search for the victim, Boss?”, said the younger cop.
“No, wait a bit, Dan…now, what’s been going on, Mr…”
“Martin…”, blurted Martin, before he started weeping uncontrollably.
The flat was strewn with women’s clothes. Martin was on his hands and knees, wearing a Versace dress, leaving blue mascara tear pools on the formerly oatmeal-coloured carpet.
“You’d better sort yourself out, Martin”, said the older policeman, “because if we get called out here again, we’ll have to charge you and you’ll likely end up with a CBO. This is an informal warning, not a formal caution, but you take it seriously, mate”.
“What about the victim, Boss, the woman?” persevered the inexperienced young copper.
“Martin’s on his own here, Dan. Look at him. What a state. Let’s go.”
“I need help”, said Martin.
Review Of the Evening
There were eleven of us reading on the night. David Wellbrook, ever the soccer football fan, liked the idea of associating us all with members of the recently successful England World Cup winning side (1966). This triggered a memory wave from me earlier in the day, as I know what I was up to on that auspicious day:
My memory piece also elicited a memory from Kay, which I felt upstaged my story in drama and brevity:
Your delicious Ogblog has reminded me that Uncle Bob came to watch the match at our house. Drink was taken. Bob was holding my baby brother on his lap for that last 30 minutes. The goal was scored. Bob leapt to his feet and threw baby brother in the air. Luckily, dad caught him.
For his part, David allocated roles to each of us, in diagram form, which indicated the running order.
I was delighted to be cast as the controversial, hat-trick scoring No 10. Wikipedia introduced me to the juicier elements of that goal-scoring, but it wasn’t my new-found knowledge that amazed most of the group but fact that I didn’t know every detail of those controversial goals in the first place.
Jill, who might be forgiven for not knowing anything about the topic at all given her relative youth and the fact that she was raised in China, turns out to be one of the world’s leading experts on Bobby Moore. OK, I exaggerate for effect, but she had learnt about him as part of her UK citizenship programme, which is clearly oriented towards the really important stuff. Rohan should really write a book about that sort of thing.
Jill’s story appeared also to have a mouse, but it turned out to be a visitor from four-dimensional space who figured that a small talking mouse-like manifestation might be less scary to humans than the alternatives.
There were several stories that revolved around death, including a murder and one story which included a birth. Covid was only mentioned a couple of times in the evening.
We went into extra time to arrange the next event, which includes a slightly convoluted “shuffling of the pack” which seemed to be confounding everyone until Jill turned out to be an expert on Google Docs as well a leading authority on Bobby Moore and four-dimensional space.
When I reviewed last week’s virtual gathering, I forgot to mention Paul Driscoll’s anecdote about the optional “prefect’s blazer” available to those of us who attained such giddy heights at Alleyn’s School. The blazer was emblazoned (pun intended) with the school crest and motto.
That motto was God’s Gift. Edward Alleyn no doubt meant that motto to symbolise education. But the phrase has a sarcastic meaning in modern parlance; e.g. “he think’s he’s God’s gift.” And as Rohan Candappa so ably puts it, “We are Alleyn’s. If you cut us we bleed sarcasm.”
Unsurprisingly, very few of us took up the offer of this optional, distinguishing garment. Beyond the sarcasm, such an emblem had every chance to land us in a heap near North Dulwich railway station, where the Billy Biros (pupils from William Penn School) needed little excuse to isolate an outlier from the Alleyn’s herd, taking severe retribution for invented sleights and offenses.
The main senior school uniform was a two-piece or three-piece suit. I have only one picture of myself wearing mine:
Me And Wendy Robbins, Autumn 1979, Westminster Bridge
In the late 1980s, just a few years after a left Keele, when Guinness had a particular advertising slogan on the go, some fine folk in the University of Keele Students’ Union produced the following tee-shirt.
It dawned on me that I am a very rare example of someone eligible to wear not only the Alleyn’s God’s Gift blazer but also the Keele Pure Genius tee-shirt underneath the blazer.
In the dying moments of the Trump US presidency, this suitably modest mental image should be shared with the world and saved for posterity.
It’s just a shame I was unable to model the two garments together back then. I would have looked magnificent; indeed it would have been the best look ever, anywhere, for anyone.
This lockdown business is nobody’s idea of fun, but Rohan Candappa has been putting in some hard yards in setting up some meaningful distractions and social interactions.
It wouldn’t be Alleyn’s School without homework. For this third session, Rohan (egged on by Nick Wahla) asked some exam questions:
Nick Wahla’s suggested a question to ponder: “What advice would you give to someone about to leave Alleyn’s?”
It’s a good question, and one which I am obviously going to claim credit for. But I’d also like to twist it around a bit. My question is: “What advice would you give yourself if you could go back and talk to yourself on the day you left Alleyn’s?
Anyway, loads of people turned up again…but not Nick Wahla – he of the exam question. Typical.
I took the headline screen grab more than an hour into the event, so several people had already come and gone by then.
Again we had participation from across the globe:
Neal “Mr” Townley in Sydney,
Andrew Sullivan in Phnom Penh,
Richard Hollingshead in Washington (desperately trying to convince us and himself that Washington State is a long, long way from security-alert-ridden Washington DC),
Mark Rathbone, claiming to be in Purley, then Purely and eventually confessing to living in Kenley, a totally different place noted for famous current and former residents such as Des O’Connor, Peter Cushing, Harry Worth, Karl Popper (ironically, given this empirical falsification of the “Mark Rathbone lives in Purley” theory) and Douglas Bader – all together now – Da, da-da, da-da-da-da, da-da, da-da, da-da-da-da…or do I mean da-da, da-da-da-da-da, da-da, da-da-da-da-da-da-da…?
…I digress.
It is hard to summarise the answers to the exam questions, not least because everyone had a slightly different take on them. One theme that ran through the answers is learning quickly post school how to be yourself and follow your heart/instincts in what you want to become. Many of us suspect that we had more freedom to “find our own way” back in 1980 than pupils finishing their ‘A’ levels have now – as the route from school to career via university seems to be a more defined path now.
Some raised the matter of careers advice (it’s lack or paucity), others the more informal aspects such as teachers instilling us with confidence, arrogance or in some cases diffidence.
Naturally this led the conversation on to discussion about memorable teachers, good, bad or indifferent. Mr Jones got off pretty lightly considering he wasn’t there…
…which is more than can be said for David Wellbrook, who should have known better than to defy the wishes of Rohan Candappa by going AWOL, if Rohan’s opening remarks were anything to go by. Rohan’s willingness to turn on a loyal follower for the slightest slight is almost Trumpian in its intensity.
But then, as Rohan pointed out when the conversation turned to the vexed question of teasing, banting or bullying, we weren’t saints back then and we are hopefully a bit more grown up about it now. Well it was easy for him to say that AFTER the invective of his opening remarks.
Heck, I’m kidding. It was fun again and it seemed astonishing when Rohan pointed out that those of us who were around for the whole event had been gassing and listening for two hours.
Dumbo The Suzuki Jimny is an occasional writer, here on Ogblog and also at King Cricket. Dumbo’s writings are more widely read than those of most automobiles. Dumbo only ever refers to me as Ged and to Janie as Daisy. Why Dumbo has chosen to write a “review of the year” public message is a mystery, but 2020 was a strange year in so many ways.
2020 started badly for me. I acquired a squeak that would not go away. It was incredibly loud and hugely embarrassing – heads would turn in the street at the sound of me coming and going.
A huge team at my car hospital struggled to get to the bottom of it. Ged and Daisy started dropping hints about my possible retirement. It got as bad as that.
Eventually, just before lockdown, thank goodness Derek, Colin, & Marlon performed a pioneering operation on my viscera, which solved my problem.
Just as well I got better in mid March, because within a few weeks I was being called upon to do voluntary work.
In theory I was on call for NHS Volunteer Responders from early in the pandemic, but no gigs were coming through at first. So Ged and Daisy signed us up to do FoodCycle gigs once or twice a week, which we have continued to do throughout the pandemic.
My copious rear (as Ged describes it) comes in pretty handy, especially for the FoodCycle gigs.
It wasn’t long before the NHS Volunteer Responder gigs started to come through as well. That and FoodCycle kept us really busy through spring, summer and into the autumn.
Just occasionally, it got a bit much; like the time the NHS Volunteer Responder app went into overdrive…
Ged was busy with work the last few weeks of the year, so we did a bit less volunteering in the run up to Christmas, but during that time the pandemic got a lot worse again and the need out there started to rocket up, so we started NHS Volunteer Responding again on Christmas Day and have done lots of gigs since.
My proudest moment of the year was just a few days ago, when Ged and I went to the Co-op on Hanger Hill to get some shopping for a person who is having to isolate. (There seem to be a lot of those at the moment.)
Three young fellas from the Tesla Show Room & Shop around the corner came out of the Co-op just before Ged came out with the shopping. The young fellas stopped to admire me and one of them said, “I think these cars are pretty cool”. Ged overheard him and said, “seriously cool, not just pretty cool”.
So I don’t think Ged & Daisy will be dropping hints about my retirement again any time soon. I think we’re going to be pretty busy with NHS Volunteer Responding & FoodCycle for the next few months at least.
