Cocktails and Records

I couldn’t get to sleep the other night. Even Mondo’s trusty old method of counting down an A-Z of some boring topic like ‘indie bands from 1991′ wasn’t working. I just remained frustratingly wide awake. So I went to the book shelves to see what I could find to soothe my sleepless misery and my hand seemed to be drawn to a book I haven’t read since 1986: Mary Norton’s The Borrowers.

And boy, it was good.

It’s odd re-reading a dimly remembered book from your childhood. Of course I remembered the vague outline of the plot, but the details were long lost so the story was relatively fresh. I probably enjoyed reading it as much as I did when I was 11.

However, it didn’t feel the same. I seem to remember that once upon a time I became absolutely immersed in a book, I couldn’t put it down, I lived in there with the characters and wanted it to go on and on and on.

I spent hours reading. I read before school, I read in the car and I read under the bed clothes at night. I read my way through the shelves of both my school library and the local library. I read everything from the classics like What Katy Did and Anne of Green Gables, to every fad series going, from the Bobbsey Twins and Nancy Drew to Sweet Valley High and Choose Your Own Adventure. I read my Grandma’s girls’ boarding school books from the 40s and the 70s/80s teen equivalents by Judy Blume and Cynthia Voigt. I read trash fantasy series by David Eddings and distressing sci-fi by Kurt Vonnegut. I just read. All the time.

But not any more. I rarely read any fiction these days. I’m not sure why. It’s not that I couldn’t make the time if I wanted to. I think it might be that a precarious combination of cynicism, a long neglected imagination, the stress of everyday life and a seriously limited attention span means that I just can’t sit there and be properly lost in anything any more. It’s not the same as when I was 13 and pathetic as it may seem, I’m kind of sad about that.

My mother called on the weekend. After the usual ‘what have you been doing?’ type updates she informed me that my father had been cleaning out the garage. I knew immediately what this meant.

‘No’ I shouted ‘You can’t throw them out!’

She sighed. ‘Well, we can’t keep them forever. You did move out of home [pause, counts] 17 years ago.’

‘But it’s history, social history! I can’t get rid of them, they’ve been around this long so it would be absolutely criminal to throw them out! And I will come and collect them at some point.’

‘Yes, I know… [sigh]… I’ll go and talk to your Dad.’

We are referring to my magazine collection. I’m not usually a hoarder, but when it comes to magazines it’s a whole other area. Scarred from an early brush with ‘decluttering’ where I stupidly, foolishly, terribly chucked out some old Smash Hits magazines, I’ve practically clung onto everything ever since.

This means that tucked away in a tiny, tiny corner of my parents absolutely massive garage is a rather fine collection of magazines I acquired when I lived in Australia: Girl, Jackie, Dolly, Just 17,  Countdown, Number One, Smash Hits, Jukebox, NME, Melody Maker, Select, Vox, Q, Rolling Stone, Mojo, Uncut, Cinema Papers, Sight and Sound… And as if this journalistic account of 80s and 90s pop culture wasn’t enough (which it wasn’t), I had also saturated myself in the past, scouring garage sales and antique shops for ’women’s interest’, music and movie magazines going back several decades.

So if you looking for 1930s knitting patterns, live reviews of The Senseless Things, photo stories about the tragedies of falling out with your best friend over a boy,  articles about how smoking can help with weight loss, scandals about Morrissey, blow-by-blow accounts of the Queen’s 1954 tour of Australia, pin-ups of Herman’s Hermits, quizzes testing whether you really are a Brosette, tips on how to make the most out of powdered egg, exclusives on the new Stackridge album and advice on how to get Doris Day’s new look then you know where to go. My parents’ garage.

I tell my partner that my parents are hassling me about the magazines again. He is unsympathetic: ‘Are you ever really going to read those boring interviews with Neds Atomic Dustbin and Chapterhouse again? And how long are you planning on keeping all those Q and Word magazines that are in our loft anyway? And what about those 3-year old copies of The Economist over there in the magazine rack?’

I start to sigh now. What am I going to do with my magazines? Spread over two countries, neglected and lying unloved in garages and lofts,  I just can’t part with them. They are social history, the social history that people so often throw away (or used to anyway). And more than that, so many of them are my history as well. Call me mad, call me selfish but my parents are going to have to hang on to them for a bit longer and well, our ceiling is not about to collapse just yet.

A recent episode of the radio programme This American Life featured an item about a guy who had the misfortune to watch the movie The Shining at age 6. The film, also about a young boy he could all too readily identify with, terrified him so much that he internalised the drama and spent the next two years fearing everybody and everything, particularly unshaven Jack Nicholson types I imagine.

While I didn’t quite suffer from two long years of Shining related nightmares, I did endure my own minor fiction-related trauma as a child thanks to the school librarian.

I still remember the very moment, at aged 5 or 6, sitting crosslegged on the itchy green carpet of our primary school library, anxiously waiting for our weekly storytelling session to begin. Usually, the tales  were nice stories about happy children, mischevious koalas and helpful elves so I was full of anticipation and excitment – perhaps we might hear more about the exciting adventures of Snugglepot and Cuddlepie this week! Sadly, I was to be disappointed.

Instead the teacher decided to tell, perhaps she would say, a more ‘mature’ story – the Greek myth of Medusa, the beautiful, but nasty woman who had writhing vicious snakes for hair, turned innocent people into stone if they even dared glance in her direction and had winged horses and giants leaping from her bloody neck after she was decapitated.

Our school librarian didn’t bother to illustrate this tale with glossy large-format pictures of Greek beauties cursed by bad hair, and she didn’t need to – my imagination was more than adequate. For months after my nights were overrun by women who, from a distance looked like they had ordinary curly hair, but upon closer inspection turned out to have heads more reminiscent of reptile houses. And of course, just at the moment I’d discover this, I could feel my body slowly turning into stone. First my toes, then my feet, legs, knees… arghhhhh…

I’d like to think that the whole class was effected in this way, but sadly not. It was me and me alone. I found this out 20 years later when talking with my mother. She informed me that after I had failed to sleep easily for too many nights running and had been found drenched in sweat one too many times, she had finally prised the trauma that was Medusa out of me. After my parents’ reassurances that ‘it was just a story’ (yeah, right) failed to soothe, my mother actually went to see my teacher about the problem. Apparently no one else had been in the least bit fazed by Medusa. Clearly I was a freak (the teacher didn’t say that, but I bet she was thinking it).

I eventually got over the Medusa-inspired nightmares, but the fear still lingers. In university I had a text book which a clearly insane cover designer had decided to decorate with Rubens’ depiction of Medusa* – I always had to keep the book face down. And I still would.

*you can google that one yourselves. I’m not.

Last week, thanks to some work colleagues, I had a nasty flashback to my youth. Back, back I went to the dark, dingey dive that constituted the one nightclub in our country town. Think painted up young women dancing around handbags, blokes leering over lager, blaringly distorted top 40 music, couples snogging in darkened corners, people passing out on sticky floors by 10pm and 2-for-1 offers on the sort of cocktails where you go straight from a sugar high to feeling strangely queasy as soon as you stand up, and you’ll know the sort of place I mean.

If I was being cruel I might describe this as a typical Australian night out for people of a certain age. It was definitely something I hadn’t experienced in quite some time.

So it was with bemusement that I witnessed this same scenario taking place again just last week. This time the location was a  dark, dingey bar in the City of London (known as ‘the financial centre of the world’ until last year), and my town’s shop girls and army jerks were replaced by corporate lawyers and management accountants. And as I sipped on my 2-for-1 Pina Colada, which tasted more like sugar than rum, and watched my 19 year old colleague get her bum pinched to Beyonce whilst a man did ‘amusing’ things with his tie, I reflected on the universality of horrible bars and nightclubs.

Mostly, however, I was snobbishly greatful that I now knew that there was life beyond drinking Sex on the Beaches and Slow Comfortable Screws to bad over-loud music.

The next evening, safely installed at home, I made us our own garish pink cocktails (but ones which actually tasted like alcohol), switched on Frank Sinatra (at a reasonable volume), got out the olives and sighed contentedly. Like Five-Centres says, it’s called ‘getting older’.

The Pink Lady

1/4 oz lemon juice
1 egg white
1 -2 dashes of grenadine
1 1/2 oz gin

Shake well over ice cubes in a shaker.
Strain into glass and enjoy.

‘Our first memory is a key that unlocks the adult persona’ says the article about earliest memories in the current issue of The Economist’s ‘lifestyle’ magazine Intelligent Life.

The piece goes on to detail the first memories of a random bunch of people – comedian Bill Bailey, racing driver Stirling Moss, Mike Skinner (i.e. The Streets), poet Blake Morrison   etc. Of course, all of them have have very meaninful first memories.

Rent-a-philosopher Alain de Botton’s earliest memory is of a dream where the rails that he is leaning on give way, forcing him to tumble into the water. The memory ‘captures my life-long anxiety about how things are going to turn out… I have become a writer in a semi-conscious attempt to increase the number of psychological railings around me. Books are my safety-nets.’

Professor Susan Greenfield, now a neuroscientist, claims that one of her earliest memories was realising that different people had different perceptions of the colour red.  Explorer Ranulph Fiennes remembers having to find his way home from school one day in South Africa by himself, a distance of 5 miles.

Yeah right, these are people’s first memories! They all sound suspiciously convenient don’t you think?

Here’s my first memory:

I am sitting in the back of the car with our old English sheep dog, Dougal. We live in Melbourne and Dad is driving us up into the Dandenongs, a nearbye mountain range, to take Dougal to the kennels because we are going away on holidays. I don’t seem to feel sad about this though – I am enjoying watching the tops of the tall trees whizz by and ‘Those Were the Days’ by Mary Hopkin is playing on the car radio and I rather like it.

What does this say about me? Well, I don’t own a dog, I don’t drive, I don’t own a copy of ‘Those Were the Days’ and I don’t make whimiscal car adverts with annoying soundtracks, but umm… I still like looking at views out of windows whilst listening to music. Sadly, I’ve yet to make a career out of this.

We were in York for a long weekend. I have spent quality time in this fine city in the past and it was nice to be back. Although the architecture, fabulous City walls and Minster continue to attract flocks of tourists from all over the world, this time I noticed York’s real appeal for the domestic market – nostalgia.

York has got peddling nostalgia down to an artform. There is something for everyone:

1. Nostalgia for the mythical golden age of Middle England. York has more twee-themed museums and gift shops, ye-olde-worlde tea shops and pubs proudly declaring that they are ‘traditional’ than I have seen in quite some time.
2. Nostalgia for the steam age. Remember when the trains ran on time and you didn’t feel degraded travelling in one at the excellent National Railway Museum.
3. Nostalgia for rose-tinted childhood. Every second hand book shop had a ‘nostalgia’ section filled with Enid Blyton books and old Beano annuals. York even has a shop dedicated to selling dolls houses and doll house furniture. No children were sighted near either.
4. Nostalgia for the 70s. There is a branch of 70s theme bar Flares and at least one 70s themed kareoke nights.
5. Nostalgia for the 80s. Represented by a branch of 80s theme bar The Reflex and local paper over-enthusiam for Spandau Ballet.
6. Nostalgia for the 90s. See picture above. This is probably going too far.

The Charlatans
The Only One I Know

When I was 17 I had a Saturday job in a record shop. It was the local branch of a typical high street chain and I fitted in like a fish out of water.

Like all stories, I suppose there are two sides:

Mine
I was probably the best Saturday girl they ever had. I tried to encourage diversity in our customers music tastes and the kind of cultured environment that thrived in superior record stores in Melbourne and Sydney.* I strived to educate the punters, not to mention my colleagues, with repeated plays of choice cuts by Queen (Innuendo!), Pink Floyd, The Clash, The Charlatans, The Stone Roses and EMF.

Theirs
I was probably the worst Saturday girl they ever had. I shamelessly encouraged spotty boys to hang around at the end of the counter listening to records they would never buy and wasted too much time chatting when I should have been filing things away. I repeatedly removed perfectly fine records by the likes of 2Unlimited, Roxette, Jimmy Barnes and INXS from the shop stereo and threatened to empty the store with my tiresome music taste.

This song takes me right back to those heady days. Those heady days before they told me not to bother coming back to work after my holidays.

‘The Only One I Know’, The Charlatans, 1991

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*Like Au Go Go, Gas Light (RIP) and Red Eye for those who know Melbourne and Sydney.

BTLP warned that this site – www.ladybirdprints.com - had a touch of the Proustian rush about it, but how could I have forgotten how fabulous the illustrations were too? And how much the four year old me liked the look of that toy shop…

So here are some of my favourite images of 70s Peter, Jane and the ever-faithful Pat the dog from 1a: Play with us.

Work’s a nuisance at the best of times, but it has been more irritating than usual recently. This is because it is starting to make me feel old. You see, I have been working with some younger colleagues on a writing project for our organisation. And to put it bluntly, although they can formulate sentences, their grammar and punctuation are woeful. I find myself tutting over their work and wondering how they got through the education system with their impoverished use of commas. Most dangerously, the phrase ‘I would never have got away with not knowing this in my day’ has crept into my mind. I’m not nearly old enough to be thinking this way.

Or perhaps I am.

Because it was with a slight pang that I read in the Guardian obituaries on the weekend that Douglas Keen has passed away. Mr Keen was the Editorial Director of Ladybird books and the man who commissioned educationalist William Murray to put together the Ladybird Key Words Reading Scheme, otherwise known as the Peter and Jane books. 

I learnt to read with Peter and Jane in the 70s. Mum and Dad dutifully bought the entire series and went through them with me every evening. I remember enjoying them and innocently allowing the aspirational middle class Englishness that the series has been criticised for wash over me. Having said that, I only discovered recently that I actually grew up with a revised 70s version – in the original 60s series Peter and Jane quaffed sweets and Jane clutched a doll, but in the 70s they enjoyed apples and Jane was the proud owner of a pair of rollerskates.

So here’s to you Douglas Keen for helping me learn to read. Even if the thought of Peter and Jane, like certain young people’s command of the comma, does make me feel unnecessarily old.

It is Mickey Mouse’s 80th birthday today.

Now I was never a huge fan of Mickey. He’s always been just a bit too much of a goody-two-shoes for my taste. Donald Duck was always my favourite in the ‘Disney family’. If there was anyone who could be relied on to completely screw up everything and respond in the most extreme and stupidly funny way possible it was Donald. Mickey is just too reliable, predictable and dull. Watching a Mickey Mouse cartoon is kind of like what it would be like watching a cartoon about me. i.e. boring.

Still I have a soft spot for Mickey, mainly because for me he symbolises a mystical mid-century America that I’ve long been entranced with. I grew up watching repeats of Disney cartoons from the 40s and 50s and fell in love with that land of neat template houses, wirelesses playing Rosemary Clooney, big beautifully polished cars, cheeky talking squirrels and domestic bliss. Everything was neat, orderly and nice in Disney cartoons.

Some might say this was just unrealistic and dull, but I loved this mythical world of mid-period Disney. That’s my Mickey Mouse and my Disney. I find most Disney cartoons since 1970’s The Aristocats insipid and sickly (except for Toy Story). Nothing compares to childhood illusions, eh?