Now no one loves a bit of nostalgia more than me! Our band has made a career recently of writing songs about the good old days. However, it wasn't all quite so good. I would rather have been born in the early 1960's than any other time, as it meant I was a teenager during the punk/new wave era, but when I look back on it, there was a really dark underbelly and to me, things are infinitely better. Here are ten things I have no nostalgia for at all. Now it would be really easy to list things like Jimmy Saville, the Biafra war and powercuts, but as a kid, none of that really bothered me. These are the things that did. The real word.
1. Casual racism at school. When I was at school, there were very few black people. In our class at Primary school, we had one lad. He was popular and we are still friends, but I can recall many instances of casual racism towards him. Most of these I didn't even realise were racist at the time. I recall him answering a question and a nun saying "Well done, give yourself a banana". Oddly, I recall it for the wrong reasons. I liked banana's and she'd never said that to me and I felt indignant. It is strange how sometimes you remember these things. My son recently did something good, and I randomly said the same thing to him. He said "What do you mean Dad?". It was only then that I realised what had been going on. I don't think I've ever used the phrase before and I won't be using it again. As he also went to St Vincents, he was horrified when I explained. I realised that when you are a kid, your teachers and parents actually program you like a computer and all sorts of odd stuff lurks there.
2. Horrible school dinners. Some things still terrify me. The smell of boiled cabbage and smelly fish is one of them. Most of the time, I liked school dinners at St Vinnies, but some dishes were disgusting. On a Friday, we'd often have boiled cabbage and smelly fish. It was disgusting and the nuns would lame sure we ate every last bit. Being forced to eat stomach churning mush is a strange and difficult form of child abuse.
3. Nuns and teachers clobbering you for minor infractions. At both primary and secondary school, I was always getting clobbered. I was hit on the knuckles by Miss Munich at age six for spelling the word TRAIN incorrectly. I'm dyslexic, although I was only diagnosed when I was thirty three. The teachers were much better at clobbering me than they were at helping me with my learning difficulties. I still have my old schoolbooks as Mum kept them. I've shown them to a couple of teachers, who tell me it is obvious I was dyslexic. They are horrified that I could be clobbered for such things.
4. Violence at Football matches. Yes, I know that this still goes on, but it is not at the level that it was. I well remember the first time I went to Maine Road to watch Man City play Spurs in 1977, with my mate Brian, who was a Spurs fan. The terraces were like a battlefield and the Spurs fans were persued to the station by hundreds of fans. Although I was a City fan, I came up with the Spurs fan. It wasn't pleasant.
5. No central heating. Until Mum and Dad got central heating in 1977, our house was always freezing in winter. Dad was an Aussie from the semi tropical area of Queensland and hated the cold. We had a wood burning stove in the kitchen and he'd load that up and we'd sit in the kitchen just enjoying the warmth. Because electricity was so expensive, we'd only put the heater on in the front room when we were in there. Dad would go mental if we didn't shut doors or turn lights off. He had an eletric blanket to keep him warm in bed. We got hot water bottles that would warm the bed. You'd wake up frozen though.
6. Junior showtime. Now there were many brilliant kids programmes on TV. I especially loved cartoon such as Top Cat, Yogi Bear and The Flintstones. However most British made kids TV was patronising, boring and awful. Worst of all was "Junior Showtime". When I found this clip, I watched it and it is even worse than I remember. It is actually really creepy. I'm not surprised I hated it!
7. Sunday Mass. My parents were staunch Roman Catholics and going to mass was compulsory. The Old Sacred Heart was a cold, damp and grim place. When I was small, all masses were in Latin and I had no clue what it was all about. We'd just get dragged along, have to observe the strange rituals in silence and it seemed to go on for hours. When I was very small, the Priest would say mass with his back to the congregation. I really didn't get it and just assumed I was stupid. Oddly, now I love a Latin mass, I actually prefer it when I don't know what they were talking about. I love the creed and the Lords prayer sung in Latin. Being thick, I only recently realised that "PATER NOSTER, qui es in caelis" actually meant something and wasn't just a lovely sounding chant! In truth, I'd not actually given it much thought.
One of the oddest things I remember is a Nun saying that God only understood prayers in Latin and they didn't count if they were in English, which was why the Church of England was not a proper church. As I said above, you actually get programmed to believe suc things, and I find it hard not to have an aversion to the C of E for that reason. When the Pope commanded that all masses were in English, a lot of nuns must have been very confused indeed.
7. Scratchy clothes. When I was a kid, it seemed that just about every item of clothing my parents bought for me was itchy. I don't really understand why this was. If you moaned, you were simply told that you looked very smart and to shut up. School clothes were the worst. I can remember the first time I got a pair of jeans and they weren't itchy. I felt I'd gone to heaven.
8. Beetles in our bedroom. Something I don't really understand is that as a kid, it seemed that our bedrooms were overrun with beetles, earwigs and daddy longlegs. For some reason we don't seem to have them in the house at all these days. I do wonder whether my eldest brother Laurie would put them in our beds to wind us up?
9. Little Jimmy Osmond. I saw Jimmy Osmond on a TV chat show a few years ago, and he seemed like a really nice bloke and a good laugh. However when he was number one with Long Haired Lover from Liverpool, it was stomach churning. It was beyond belief that anyone could buy such rubbish. Oddly, my female cousins all seemed to love it. God only knows why!
10. Miserable, grumpy neighbours. These days, most people hardly know their neighbours. Back in the day though, us pesky kids would all play in the street and we'd know all of the neighbours. Most were lovely, but some hated us. They'd come out raging at us for making noise, not give us footballs back when they went in their gardens and swearing at us when we bashed into them when we were having go-kart races. We had nick names for the worst such as po face, and witch face (not very original). I never really understood why they moaned when we snuck into their gardens to scrump apples or nick their loganberries. The worst bit of all was when they caught you and came around to your parents to complain. My Dad was pretty hilarious in such circumstances. Being an Aussie, he very much approved of scrumping and annoying neighbours. He'd put on a massive act, saying he'd give us a good clobbering. As soon as they'd gone he'd burst out laughing and say "Oh, you really upset Bumface there. Why did you let him catch you?" My Dad was a firm believer that if you got caught you were a mug. There was one particularly miserable lady, who lived down the road. She had Ginger hair, a ginger cat and a scowl that could freeze the Sahara desert. I did something that really upset her just before Xmas and she moaned at Dad. He instructed me to spend my pocket money on a box of chocolates for her and to write a nice card. He then told me to go around and give it to her. I was terrified. I thought she'd clobber me with her broomstick. I knocked on her door and presented the gift. She looked at them and burst into tears. She said it was the nicest thing anyone had done for years. I was totally shocked. When I went home, Dad asked what happened, I told him. I thought he'd be cross at me for upsetting her. He said "Her husband died and her son was killed in the war. You did a good thing there son". After that, she wasn't as grumpy with me. I'd always give her a Christmas card.
I recalled some of this in the False Dots 2022 video release, Sunday in the 70's
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