Travel, Theatre, Music, Cricket, Tennis, Writing, Life
The diaries are pretty consistent on this weekend.
Friday evening, Michael and Elisabeth came over to Sandall Close fot dinner at 8:00 after work.
Janie and I went to the hygenist’s together at lunchtime the next day; I think Dentics in Kensington at that time.
Then I cooked dinner at mine for Janie and Andrea (and possibly Andrea’s then beau).
These are unconnected incidents: dinner-hygenist-dinner – I’m just reporting what the diaries say.
My diary shows me playing bridge with Daniel & Marianne on the Friday evening (probably also with Andrea).
Then it shows spending the day on Saturday with Michael Mainelli writing “Zen Things You Wanted To Know About Business”…which was the working title of the subsequent hit book Clean Business Cuisine...
…what do you mean, haven’t read it?
It’s as topical now as it was when it was written…
…it’s set c500 b.c.e. for goodness sake…
…or better still, buy it here.
Anyway, it looks as though Janie worked all day on the Saturday and there is no sign in the diaries of us seeing each other on the Sunday. There are some electronic signs of me working on my canon of NewsRevue material ahead of the Christmas run, that Sunday.
I went to see this show with Andrea, Maz and Daniel – normally the “three musketeers” of our bridge four.
Not sure whose idea it was to see this show…but I’ll guess that Maz was the ringleader for the trip.
I don’t remember much about it, but the diary says we met at 6:30 so I guess we had a drink before the show and a quick meal afterwards. I’m guessing The Mayflower Chinese, as I have a hint of a memory of dining with those three at that place, but I could be wrong.
Andrea or Maz might remember. Even Daniel might. I’d love to learn of any lingering memories from that evening.
My log simply says “fun”, which I recall it was. A rather silly show, of course, but that’s the idea of it.
Three days later, I met Janie. But that’s another story completely (unabridged).
The Reduced Shakespeare Company has its own website still, would you believe – here is the link.
There is also a Wikipedia entry for this great work – click here.
There is even a YouTube recording of the show – see below:
I can’t find formal reviews of this production but here is an interesting interview with the Reduced Shakeseare lot:
Veronica Lee With The RSC Mon, Mar 6, 2000 – 53 · The Guardian (London, Greater London, England) · Newspapers.com
Forty years ago (he says, writing in March 2024), while I was at Keele, my relationship with the City of London was rather different from the way it is now:
Returning to March 1984 – following the election fever of the previous week…
…the next couple of weeks were relatively sedate.
Sunday, 18 March 1984 – Got up quite early – did very little today – visited people etc. Evening – went union and left late!
Monday, 19 March 1984 – Busyish day – shopped etc. Went union etc. Wrote essay – went to visit Bobbie for a while.
Tuesday, 20 March 1984 – Rose quite early – several visitors (Malcolm [Cornelius], Simon [probably Legg at that time], Bobbie [Scully, to be sure] etc) – sluggish day – shopped, washed, then cooked a big meal in evening. Very pleasant.
Wednesday, 21st of March 1984- Rose quite late – came home in afternoon – lazy eve and spoke to friends etc.
“Came home” meant returned to my parents’ house in Streatham. In order to try and catch up with my preparation for finals, I decided to retreat to London for a few days for private study. How well did that work?
Thursday, 22 March 1984 – Did a little work today – shopped etc. Stayed in evening – did a little work.
Friday, 23 March 1984 – Lazyish day – did a little work etc. Fairly lazy evening in.
Saturday, 24 March 1984 – Easyish day – did some work – Paul came over in afternoon – did some work evening.
Hmm, not bad. What about the next few days?
Sunday, 25 March 1984 – Did little work – rowed with mother – went to Surbiton to see Grandma Jenny and Uncle Louis. Had a Chinese dinner. Met [guess… Jimmy Bateman] in the eve at R&C [Rose & Crown – Jimmy liked that place] – early night.
Monday, 26 March 1984 – Got up quite early – worked hard both day and evening. Little hive of industry.
Tuesday, 27 March 1984 – Busy day – rose early, met Caroline [Freeman, now Curtis] for lunch – went on to Newman Harris in afternoon , and went on to Andrea [Dean]’s for dinner etc – late night.
Wednesday, 28 March 1984– left Teddington quite early – had lunch – left London – rotten journey (no LT) to Keele, went Thorns and union to sort out tomorrow
“Rowed with mother” would undoubtedly have been about the sabbatical. We hadn’t been on the best of terms since “Liza-gate” the previous year…
… and now mum had become convinced that I was hell-bent on becoming a perpetual student who would never, in her terms, start earning a proper living. Worse yet, I was going to turn into a “union man”, like her brother Harry, whom she considered to be a person who would always choose armchair-agitating over actually working. (I paraphrase).
“Went to Newman Harris” would have been a simple and satisfactory expedient to explain what I was doing and keep my job offer there open for an additional 12 months, which they were more than happy to do.
Not only a City of London connection across forty years, but also a National Physical Laboratory (NPL) in Teddington connection. Andrea lived in Bushy House at that time, as her dad, Paul, was Director of the NPL. Forty years later, I was hoity-toitying with the NPL crowd in Horizon 22:
Returning to late March 1984:
Thursday, 29 March 1984 – Got up at 7 am – went to Silverdale for Stop The City lines – played Risk and Scrabble, and got pissed on home brew! Got home pretty late.
I remember this day very clearly. “Silverdale” meant Simon [Legg] and Theo’s place. I was drafted in to help them act as logistics co-ordinators and a helpline for those students who went to London to join in the Stop the City protest – this being, I believe the second of them.
I was asked to help because I was studying civil liberties law and there was a train of thought that the police might over-exert their authority and be open to challenge during the protest.
In practice, especially in those days without mobile phones, the reality was that the protesters were “on their own” down in London, with insufficient access to phones to enable any co-ordination or requests for on-the-fly legal advice.
I don’t think Simon & Theo’s phone rang once during the whole day. Hence, despite the crack of dawn start, all we did was play Risk and Scrabble while ploughing through a fair chunk of Simon’s most recent batch of home brewed beer.
Simon’s theory was that his home brew did not give you a hangover, however much of it you drank, because it entirely lacked the hangover-inducing additives that come with the deal in mass produced beer. In my case, only up to a point, Mr Legg. But then we did drink rather a lot of home brew that day.
Despite my more-or-less-non-existent involvement, it is quite possible that I remain guilty of a capital crime in the City of London for even offering to assist such a protest from afar. Cruel, unusual and bizarre medieval laws have a dreadful tendency to crawl out of the woodwork in the square mile. Whether or not the Lord Mayor could or would grant me clemency in such circumstances I have no idea, but, as I am Freeman of the City, I am entitled to be hanged with a silken rope rather than a cheap and scratchy one, which is a very reassuring thought.
Returning to the end of March 1984 – the rest of that week was tame:
Friday, 30 March 1984 – Got up quite early – went union – and library. Bobbie arrived – cooked meal for B, Malc. and Ruth – early night.
Saturday, 31 March 1984 – Lazy day – Rose late – shopped. Lazed around – had nice meal in eve after quick visit to union.
Not exactly finals overdrive then. I don’t think I ever made it to overdrive, to be honest, as the next few weeks of diaries will attest.
Ticket image borrowed from The Fall Gigography
It’s hard to imagine a week getting more exciting after the “Truda Smith incident” on the Monday, reported last time…
…and indeed the rest of that week has little worthy of report in it.
The diary suggests a fairly settled pattern of work, spending time with Bobbie and spending time in the Union, mostly around elections and such matters. The Chair of Constitutional Committee also chaired Election Appeals Committee and it seems there were elections that week.
I found a stray voting slip some years ago, when rummaging through a file for something else – it might well have been for the election that week.
The other thing that is clear from my diary that week is that I became good friends with Vivian Robinson around that time. She was SU Secretary (and therefore also returning officer) that year – so we were thrown together ex officio in terms of running elections.
Fortunately we got on well and I think the elections that year ran smoothly – even the one that I ran in…just about. Viv and I remained friends after Keele, not least when she lived on Bedford Hill in the late 1980s, about 10 minutes walk from my parents house. Watch this space for future tales.
Anyway, that week, it seems, Viv cooked me dinner one night and I made her lunch a couple of days later.
I like the reference to going to an “anarchist bonfire party” after dinner with Viv on 11 November. Ashley and/or Sally Hyman might remember some details about that event, but I must admit I don’t remember much about it.
Perhaps it was part of a trend at that time to perceive Guy Fawkes as a radical hero, which, frankly, he wasn’t. Or perhaps it was more an excuse to have a bonfire party a week or so after the conventional Guy-effigy-burning occasion and avoid the unpleasant connotations of all that, by simply having a lively bonfire party, which I’m sure it was.
This was a pretty memorable Keele gig in my book, as much for the buzz there was around The Fall at that time as the sound itself, which was only sort-of to my taste.
The Stockholm Monsters were a more than half-decent support act, well suited to support The Fall. In 1983 they sounded like this:
The Fall appeared on The Tube just over a week after our Keele gig. Their set on The Tube looked like this:
By the end of that week I was writing in red ink, reporting on a trip to London. I love the fact that I note that I had a haircut on the Saturday morning. I’m guessing that my mum would have strongly suggested I needed a haircut, probably because of the location of the party I was going to that night.
My friend Andrea Dean was living in Bushy House, Teddington at that time. Her father had become Director of the National Physical Laboratory and a rather sprauncy apartment came with that job.
Bushy House is a former residence of King William IV, although I suspect he made use of the whole house.
I remember more than one entertaining party/gathering at Bushy House when it was Andrea’s place. This November 1983 one was especially memorable.
I rather like the juxtaposition of an anarchist bonfire party one weekend and a party in a formerly royal residence the next in November 1983.
Forty years on, both of those parties were good training for the week that I have just been through:
Stephen Williams / Bushy House, Bushy Park – – aka “Andrea’s New Mansion” – via Wikimedia Commons
Following the theft of Paul Deacon’s car from outside our house in Woodfield avenue, reported in the preceding piece…
…one might have expected the week to have become less exciting as it went on – not a bit of it:
Here follow transcriptions and explanations of the highlights:
Wednesday 17 August 1983 – …Chinese meal for lunch – met Jim [Bateman]after work in Bloomsbury – quite pleasant. [This was no doubt similar to after work “meetings” reported previously]
Thursday 18 August 1983 – Lotsa work to do today – went to Daquise with Ashley [Michaels] after work in evening.
Ashley had an approved, private evening job arrangement with one of the firm’s client’s, Daquise Restaurant, to keep the books of account in good order ahead of audit. Over the years I went there with Ashley after work a few times – a symbiotic combination of mentoring and helping him to get his tasks done.
The things that made this arrangement interesting were the historic clientele of the restaurant (see blurb on the home page of the Daquise website), which had been going since just after the second world war, plus the original owners of the place, who had been adagio acrobats in the 1930s as part of a then famous act, The Ganjou Brothers And Juanita.
The following wonderful video shows more, for those who like this sort of thing. Very slow start (the first two minutes is very dull) but after that the acrobatics is simply stunning and the “interview” hilarious:
Serge Ganjou was ever present at Daquise in those days, so I got to know him quite well on the back of my visits with Ashley. Serge’s wife, Juanita, was also there in the restaurant sometimes. Ashley and I were always fed on those occasions – I already had a taste for that sort of Central/Eastern European food.
Friday 19 August 1983 – Work OK – Chinese lunch – quick drink after -> [then on to] Andrea’s New Mansion – stayed over.
Andrea’s dad Paul headed the National Physical Laboratory, which resulted, around that time, in the family taking up rather grand residence within Bushy House.
I love the casual mention of it in my diary at that time, “->Andrea’s new mansion” as if I thought I’d get used to visiting folk in mansions. Mind you, forty years later, in the autumn of 2023, for one reason…
…I guess I am now getting rather used to it.
I remember a good few fun parties and sleepovers at Andrea’s grand place – no doubt they will come up in future diary notes.
Saturday 20 August 1983 – …got back lunchtime. Lazyish afternoon – Mays [George and Winifred] came over in evening for dinner
Sunday 21 August 1983 – …Angela & Vivienne [Kessler] came to tea…
I have no idea why (or whether) John wasn’t there. My diary squiggles are almost illegible, but I think he was away on business on that occasion.
The following week was very quiet by comparison:
Tuesday 23 August 1983 – …went over to Jilly’s for evening – most pleasant
Friday 26 August 1983 – drinks at lunch – went home – lazy evening [those were the days, eh? Half holiday ahead of a bank holiday]
Sunday 28 August 1983 – birthday – went to Inn On the Park for lunch – v nice.
All that ahead of a significant change in work pattern after the bank holiday, as I was then assigned to Laurie Krieger’s Harlequin, Pricebuster & Leisureplay empires. All will be explained in the next instalment.
That holiday weekend, my head was probably still full of adagio acrobats and mansions.
Following the embarrassing visit from my folks on the Sunday…
…it was time for me to settle in to my fourth term at Keele. The first term of my actual degree studies, Economics and Law, as I had taken the Foundation Year (FY) the previous academic year.
I seem to have steeled myself to the task a bit more at the start of my P1 year. Phrases such as “hectic day”, “quite a full day”, “busy day” and even “work” appear.
Tuesday 13 October: …Went to see Flash in evening.
I’m pretty sure that means Flash Gordon, which came out the previous year, so would have been ready (i.e. available) for Film Society by October 1981.
The following day Andrea Dean arrived and stayed for a few days:
…Andrea arrived in evening-> Simon [Jacobs]’s & Sneyd…
I don’t remember much about that particular evening. The Freshers’ Ball was on that night with Gary Glitter supported by The Chefs. Dave Lee’s book The Keele Gigs! has a laugh-out-loud review of that concert.
I know that I did see Gary Glitter at Keele and Dave Lee’s words coincide with my recollections of Glitter on that Keele Ballroom stage, but I have a feeling I saw Glitter at Keele a year or two (or three) later.
I have a feeling that we (as in Simon Jacobs & I) were displaying deliberate indifference to Freshers’ Week activities, including the ball. After all, we were not freshers, we were 19 years old, for goodness sake, far too adult for the fresh stuff.
Thursday 15 October: Rose quite late. Went round lakes in afternoon. J-Soc party in evening.
Going around the lakes with visitors was one of those “must do” things at Keele, especially when the weather was favourable. The J-Soc party would have been a relatively low-key affair…relative to some of the other evening activities Andrea enjoyed with us on her visit.
Friday 16 October – Work OK today – took it fairly easy. Went to film in evening – The Kids Are Alright -> Lindsay disco etc.
I’m not too sure what Andrea did while I worked that day – I doubt if she remembers either.
Saturday 17 October – Rose late – shopped – did some work – dinner early evening – went to David [Perrins] & Amanda’s in evening.
Not sure where David lived that year, but i have a feeling he’d moved into a Barnes or Hawthorns flat…presumably sharing with said Amanda. Simon might remember – I’ll update/amend if he has any intelligence on that matter. I think it would have been a relatively small-scale party.
Sunday 18 October – Andrea went home in morning – worked in afternoon – Marriage of Maria Braun -> David & Amanda – came back, early night.
Monday 19 October – Busy day – preparing tutorial etc. UGM in evening – v good.
Tuesday 20 October – Hard day – went to see The 39 Steps in evening.
Fassbender and Hitchcock could be mistaken for euphemisms to describe activities in the aftermath of Freshers’ Week. But in reality I genuinely was, at that time, steeping myself in movies by great film directors, thanks to the excellent Keele Film Society.
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.
The Perseverance, then named The Sun, Edwardx, CC BY-SA 4.0
My working life that Easter vacation seemed to revolve around lunching and spending evenings with friends. I have already remarked on that in the preceding piece, which culminated in a wonderful Elvis Costello concert which was a highlight of my 1981 concert-going:
Prior to returning to work, lunches and occasional boozy evenings:
Saturday 28 March – went to David [Wendy’s brother] Robbins’s barmitzvah in morning and Ivor’s [Heller] in afternoon. Mays [neighbours George and Winifred] came in evening.
Sunday 29 March – Lazy day. Went to Barmitzvah party in evening.
In truth I don’t remember too much about that weekend – others (e.g. Wendy) might have stronger memories of it. The hospitality will for sure have been warm.
Back to work on Monday:
Monday 30 March – Work OK, Lazyish evening.
Tuesday 31 March – Work OK. Spoke to people in eve etc.
Wednesday 1 April – not bad day. Went to [The] Sun [latterly renamed The Perseverance] with Jimmy in evening.
I’m not sure whether Jimmy was also doing a holiday job that Easter, but I think he probably was. For sure he spent several summer holidays working for the UCL Bubble Chamber Group at the main UCL campus in Bloomsbury. Just in case there is anyone reading this who doesn’t have a comprehensive grasp of what a bubble chamber group might do, allow me to deconstruct by saying “high energy physics” and linking to this piece about the UCL Bubble Chamber Group.
What I do know for sure is that the scientists with whom Jimmy was working had no truck with bubbly beer – they were a real ale crowd and I would be invited to join Jimmy and the team for a drink or two in their UCL bar until the early closure there led us to trek for 15 minutes or so to The Sun, which sold a vast array of real ales at any one time.
“Stop wasting valuable drinking time – let’s go to The Sun!” would be the cry from one or two of the bearded researchers with a central casting look and tone if anyone dared to drink up too slowly at the UCL bar.
Thursday 2 April – Work not bad. Lunched with Andrea [Dean]. Easy evening.
You’re probably getting the gist of this now. The diary is depicted above. I’ll pick up the translation story again the following Wednesday:
Wednesday 8 April – Went out with Caroline [Freeman, now Curtis] for lunch. Went on the booze with Jimmy in the evening.
Thursday 9 April – Met Jilly [Black] for lunch. Paul [Deacon] popped in, in evening with records etc.
Friday 10 April – Busy day at work. Relaxed in evening.
By the end of this fortnight was clearly focussed on producing mix tapes for Paul Deacon, while he was clearly hard at work doing the same for me. 11 April 1981 was a big mix taping day for both of us, as my archive will reveal in the next posting.
OK, so it seems that I somehow managed to blag my way in to Keele University…with a little help from my friends (in particular Simon Jacobs) and teachers (in particular Colin Page).
I returned alone from a week in Bournemouth with my parents (a one anecdote story about that trip will appear on Ogblog in the fullness of time), while my parents went on to explore the South-West of England for a week.
So, I had the run of Woodfield Avenue for my second and last week of holiday before steeling myself to the arduous task of student life.
I needed to do some training to get fit for the specific Herculean labours that the early part of my student life was likely to involve.
Fortunately I had plenty of friends to help me. Here, with just a little shame as well as pride, is my diary of that week.
Sunday 28 September. Left [Bournemouth] for London with [Dina? Nina?]. Advisors doobrie. Simon & Caroline came back. Went out for food. Drank.
Out for food in Streatham in those days probably meant Italian at Il Caretto or Chinese at the Blue Whatnot. I’ll guess Il Caretto.
29 September 1980. Simon & Caroline left. Went to Grandmas. Easy evening.
Not sure if there is an apostrophe catastrophe there, as it is quite possible…even likely…that I did a round trip of both Grandmas; Anne and Jenny.
Tuesday 30 September 1980. Went to office. Helped Jay [Marks]. Came home., read, slept.
A relatively gentle start to my training. One evening on, two evenings off. A bit feeble, actually. Then, mercifully, my friends rallied around and matters got serious.
Wednesday 1 October 1980. Easyish day. Simon came over early evening, stayed over, drank.
Thank you, Simon.
Thursday 2 October 1980. Simon left. Easy day. Lewis [Sykes, I assume] came over – stayed over, drank.
Friday 3 October 1980. Lewis remained. Anil came over. Anil & Lewis stayed. Drank.
Saturday 4 October 1980. Anil & Lewis left. Simon, Caroline, Richard [Marks, I assume], A.N. Other [I can only apologise to this forgotten person], Melisa [yes, I remember Melisa, Hendon BBYO I think, but I shall need to do some more archaeology on my archive], came over, & Andrea & Wendy who stayed. Drank.
I am wondering what we drank. My dad usually had a handy stock of more than half-decent Bulgarian red wines in those days, as he was friendly with his importer neighbour near the shop on St John’s Hill, Battersea. I’m guessing that dad left me a case for that week with a nod and a wink. He was that kind of dad.
Forty years later, I’m still in touch with most of the people who helped me train that week. Thank you so much, folks, for helping me prepare for University. So kind and the kindness is not forgotten.
