1 March 1982

Posted on March 1, 2012 by

Mon Mar I

Camp! Dl sent us to the wrong place to start with + we spend 2 1/2 hours standing about in the rain. Put up the tents – 12 of us in 1 10 man tent. Tea took 1 1/2 hours. Milo is quite nice. One 4Ha beggar called Donaldson is a pain

You can tell how excited I was at the prospect of going away to camp by the fact that it hasn’t been mentioned at any point in the lead up to me going.

From what I recall, this camp was not an optional event. Three or four entire forms were going to camp and that was the end of it. Ending up in entirely the wrong place clearly wasn’t a part of the plan, a situation made all the more amusing by the fact that we were not very far from Auckland and you would really expect the teachers in charge of the trip to have checked the place out before we went there anyway. It put a bit of a dent in Mr D’Almeida’s hitherto impregnable hide, that’s for sure.

I remember Donaldson as a nasty, spiteful piece of work. My descriptions of him as ‘.a beggar’ and being ‘…a pain’ were definitely tempered by the knowledge that my parents might read what I wrote and disappove if I used the epithets that I really wanted to. He was just one of those children who was deeply unpleasant and, frankly, probably still is as an adult. That he must have been quite bright – the ’4Ha’ should have been ’4Wa’ and referred to Mr Walker’s class, which contained the top pupils in our year – just makes it all the worse, really.

The curious thing is that, whilst I remember clearly the kind of person Donaldson was, I can’t remember what it was that he did. Which just goes to show that you never get a second chance to make a first impression, especially when you are doing so to an opinionated fourteen year old who owns a diary!

 

 

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29 February

Posted on February 29, 2012 by

This has nothing to do with the New Zealand diary. Apart from anything else, 1982 wasn’t a leap year. On the other hand, I couldn’t pass up the chance to write something on a day that only occurs once every four years.

My problem is that I can’t remember anything truly interesting happening to me on any 29 February, ever. I did once greatly annoy one of my trainees by entering into her diary that she should propose to her boyfriend on that day; well, how was I to know that she was planning on splitting up with him?

Instead, then, I’ve tried to think back to what I might have been doing on each of the leap days I have lived through:

1968 – Not very much, as I was only a few months old!

1972 – I was still at playgroup two days a week, but I have no way of knowing if this Tuesday was one of them or not.

1976 – In the intervening years we had been to Scotland and back. I was now living in Leamington and as this day was a Sunday there’s a good chance that we had roast beef for dinner. In my mind, Sunday always featured roast beef and Yorkshire puddings. Mum used to make curiously flat and crunchy ‘Yorkies’. Even though it is much easier to just buy them nowadays, I still have fond memories of Mum’s version.

1980 – My final year at Telford Middle School. I was in Miss Spawton’s class, sat next to a boy named John O’Neill. I’ll be writing about this class and teacher later, as it was an odd sort of year for me and one which, in some ways, I have largely chosen to forget.

1984 – The day was a Wednesday and I would have finished school at 2.30pm. The school arranged the timetable so that the fifth year – as we were known in those days – had the weekly two hours of games lessons scheduled back to back. The idea was that you left after the first hour and went home to do some revision. It was a good plan which only broke down if there was a sports fixture scheduled for later that day, and in the fact that there was no way of knowing if any pupil actually did any extra work in that extra hour. I know that I didn’t.

1988 – This was almost certainly a day when I woke up at home in Warwickshire, was driven to the station and got on a train back to university. I did that a lot in those days and I had carefully scheduled my week to avoid Monday morning lectures so that I could travel when it was less busy.

1992 – This was probably a day spent at home as Helen was almost certainly working. In which case it was spent cleaning the house, changing the beds before settling down to an afternoon of sport on our little black and white television.

1996 – An exciting Thursday in the offices of Shoosmith & Harrison.

2000 – An exciting Tuesday in the offices of Rowberry Morris

2004 – This was a Sunday, which means that Helen and I may well have been visiting her parents in Coventry. We often found ourselves headed up there for the weekend for one reason or another. We usually went to a Chinese restaurant in Birmingham for lunch, followed by a trip to the market or a Chinese supermarket and then dashing down the M40 to try and beat the traffic home.

2008 – Another Friday at work, this time in the offices of Seth Lovis & Co. I was bored and anxious to get home to my wife and my lovely baby boy. Nowadays the boy isn’t a baby, the work is more interesting and the location different, but the wife and child are still lovely and I’ll still be anxious to get home.

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28 February 1982

Posted on February 28, 2012 by

Sun Feb XXVIII

Not a lot happened today. The Others went out in the afternoon. Karen returned from Camp. Lisa + Kevin won $1 ea), so miracles do happen!

It wasn’t that much of a miracle really. I am sure that Lisa and Kevin were not that bad at all, it just seemed like it to an older brother who had forgotten what it was like to be five or six years old. And, of course, a surefire way of making sure that they would be biddable in a similar wager again was to make sure that they won the first time. Effectively, they got hustled by their own parents; unfortunately, I was far too naive to understand this at the time.

At least I got some time to myself here. I note that I have not recorded where anyone else went, or what I did with the time, so I can only assume that it was one of those days where I did very little but lie on my bed and read, probably whilst drinking copious cups of coffee. Which is not much different to how I like spending my days nowadays. I really must buy a winning Lottery ticket so that I can have more of those!

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27 February 1982

Posted on February 27, 2012 by

Sat Feb XXVII

Cricket Cancelled again – Onehunga could not get up a team! Went for a swim p.m. Jigsaw nearly finished after 33 days.

[MUM HAS THEN ADDED] Jigsaw is finished!!!!! Wouldn’t go to bed & Mum wrote it in my diary. Naughty boy.

The jigsaw was one that Mum and Dad bought early in our stay, before we were loaned a television. As I recall it sat on the dining table and we ate our meals by putting a table protector and a cloth over it. Of course, the time that they could devote to it was still limited, perhaps even more so as their children grew older and showed an increasing reluctance to go to bed!

I am not sure what my usual bed time was in these days. I tend to think that it was around 9pm, but it may have been 9.30. Of course, there was a little more leeway on a Friday and Saturday night, when we did not have to get up for school in the morning.

It was, I hope I am correct in recalling, relatively rare for me not to go to bed when told to by my parents. I didn’t mind going to bed too much, as I had a light above the bed that I was allowed to read by for as long as I wanted. Nowadays, reading in bed sends me to sleep within a matter of pages, but back then I could read for hours if I really got into a book.

If, on the other hand, it was a babysitter sending me to bed, I had a litany of tricks up my sleeve to squeeze out an extra few minutes, usually involving making them a drink, or myself a snack, about five minutes before the scheduled time. Eventually Mum and Dad got wise to these and began warning people about them, but I could usually find a dodge that would work. Nowadays, it just seems an awful lot of effort to go to over five minutes!

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26 February 1982

Posted on February 26, 2012 by

Fri Feb XXVI

Nice Hot day. Went for a* swim. Karen went to camp with the Rossgrove Wierdos. Played catch with dad.

*The letter ‘a’ is the word ‘final’ with four of the letters carefully redacted

Ah, the Rossgrove Weirdos. You’ll see that there is a bit of a volte face on that one, not the first time in my life or the last that my biggest little sister has forced me to admit that I was wrong about something.

There’s a big temptation, as the oldest sibling, to assume that the younger one(s) know nothing about anything. As I grew older, I learned the folly of this and this was one of the early lessons.

A very small number of streets away from our road was a road named Rossgrove Terrace. It was a fairly unassuming kind of road and the only things I can remember about it are that it had some kind of car repair place and a small chapel, to which was attached a hall.

Ordinarily I would have had little problem with this, but the chapel ran a rather active couple of youth groups. Karen was for some reason encouraged to join the group for younger members, called ‘Team Scene’. I wholeheartedly disapproved of this, because the chapel itself was devoted to a branch of Christianity which I had not heard of before and therefore automatically feared. It shows you how much of a difference all of this made to my life if I tell you that I can’t remember the name at all, but my 14 year old self clearly felt that my sister becoming involved with this somehow heralded the coming of the end of the world.

As a result, I am rather rude about the poor people in the coming weeks. It passes.

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25 February 1982

Posted on February 25, 2012 by

Thur Feb XXV

Surprise Cricket practice. Tony was supposed to tell Mum where I was but didn’t. I didn’t get in until 6.15 and so Mum was wetting herself! Batted for 1 hr and was out around 20x. Went to the library.

One of the benefits that our trip to New Zealand had was that, to some extent, it relaxed Mum and Dad’s attitude to my timekeeping. Yes, I still got yelled at for being home late, but I realised that if I made the effort to tell them where I was they at least understood that I had made the effort. This was a far cry from before we went. I still remember the trouble I got into for being 15 minutes late home from Jonny Grimes’ house one evening, even though it was only on the other side of the playing field behind our house.

In fact, I realise now that the school had a very strange attitude to timekeeping indeed. Every daywas a precisely ordered one of bells ringing to move us from one place to another, but often the morning assembly would feature an announcement that that day was ending early, or the following one beginning late, for some reason that schools back in England would not even have contemplated as a reason to shorten the school day. We, of course, loved it, but it must have been difficult for parents, who never quite knew when their children would return home.

 

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24 February 1982

Posted on February 24, 2012 by

Wed Feb XXIV

Poured with rain nearly all day. Finaly ate the Ravioli I bought on Jan XVI. Really quite a dull day. Finished the 39 Steps short edition which was nothing like the film. I’ll take out 1 of the other 3 versions I think.

Aah, tinned ravioli. When we went to the corner shop on the day after we arrived in Auckland we were each allowed to choose something that we would like, a sort of comforting reminder of home. I am pretty sure that the others chose something sensible, such as a bag of sweets. Me, I had to go and choose a tin of pasta. Which I then didn’t get around to eating for over a month.

That’s not to say that I didn’t appreciate it. I did. I still make sure there are a couple of tins of ravioli around the house, even now. It is the ultimate quick lunch in my book, combining ease of cocking with lengthy shelf life. It has been my ‘before game’ meal for years, long before it was realised that pasta before a game was good for you.

Before anyone recoils too far in horror, the tinned stuff is not, of course, a patch on fresh pasta and I’ll take that as my last meal any day. Especially lasagna. I love lasagna to a degree that makes Garfield look like he is only slightly interested in it.

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