The Times They Are A-Changin Part 2

Things are changing so fast. My childhood took place before the onset of central heating. In winter, condensation would freeze on the inside of the bedroom window. You could not move under the weight of the many blankets in a winter before duvets. You would race downstairs in the morning, slippered feet, to dress hurriedly in front of the lounge bar-heater. True you could have risked the bathroom with the old circular light and heater combined, the one with the pull down switch. But, these things buzzed like a disturbed hive, threw out heat like a napalm incendiary, and smelled of smouldering dust and the polystyrene tiles which adorned the bathroom ceiling. And, the combination of electricity, condensation dripping from polystyrene tiles, and little wet hands never struck me as the safest of combinations. I never did feel safe. It was always the lounge bar-heater for me.

Whenever I meet up with my mates’ families or see my nephews, I am just reminded of how different things were when I was a child. All the kids today have mobiles. I n my day, only babies were lucky enough to have those. I was lucky if I even had change for a phone box. Phone boxes – tall, square, red, glazed and proud. You still see them sometimes in posh hotels as trendy shower cubicles, or, in architectural salvage yards. The home telephone didn’t arrive in our house until way into the 80s. It arrived at about the same time as the colour TV, Breakfast Television, and long before the central heating was installed and the front room wall was knocked down to create a through room. In my day we still had front rooms. Vistied only ever on special occasions. Indeed, my grandma’s generation still had parlours and outside loos. My family were not exactly “early adopters”. We couldn’t afford to be.

These were the years of strikes. Winters of discontent. Rubbish piled up in the street as wine lakes and butter mountains formed in Europe. Many a weekend viewing of the Black and White Minstrels, or Morecambe and Wise was ruined by a power cut, with the family huddled around the emergency candles and a pack of cards. Many a Saturday morning was spent queuing for bread or some other staple. My childhood was like modern Russia at times.

Today, my nephews’ bedrooms are like multi-media palaces. Mine was a place you slept in during the night, or where you were banished to as a punishment during the day. They have TVs, DVDs, CDs, PCs, videos, PS2s, GameBoys, IPOds, mobiles (WAP-enabled, of course) hamsters and a tropical fish tank! In my day, I didn’t even have privacy. If you even attempted to seek solace in the refuge of your own room you would be hunted down. Shouts of “what are you doing up there” would climb the stairs. The door would be knocked: “Are you feeling OK?”. No privacy. No time alone. I think they assumed that there was only one thing a teenage boy could be doing on his own in the waking hours. They were probably right! After all, I did, for a brief time, have pictures of the “Bionic Woman” (Lindsay Wagner, sigh!) and “Charlie’s’ Angels” on the wall of my bedroom – the originals with Farah Fawcett not Lucy Lui (but I could be persuaded).

By about 14 I had a top-loading cassette player. The kind that you recorded with by placing next to the radio and turning the volume up. Later I progressed to a tape-to-tape, but seeing as I only had my mom and dad’s music to tape from the choice was somewhat limited. While Abba’s Greatest Hits have become a bit more retro-chic, I doubt that James Last’s Orchestra or Klaus Wunderlicht and his amazing bontempi will ever be considered cool.

Most kids today probably have access to free porn (being far more technically astute than their parents). I had to make do with a vivid imagination. I never could work out which out of the blonde and the brunette in “Abba” I would do first. I fancied most of the assistants on “the Generation Game” and “Dr Who”, especially Sarah Jane Smith who has recently played roles in the latest versions. Of course I never fancied Bonnie Langford. She is a two-bagger (you make her wear a bag to hide her face and you wear one yourself, just in case her’s falls off). S arah Greene was on Blue Peter in those days performing the sexiest thing ever seen on TV - demonstrating how to pull on skin-tight jeans using a coat hanger. Not to be missed. Never to be forgotten.

I also tended to like the female presenters on Saturday morning kids’ TV. I still do. Sally James off “Tizwas”, Sarah Greene from “the Saturday Morning Picture Show” on the other side, Emma Forbes who cooked. Emma was the Nigella Lawson of the 1980s but even sexier and of better parentage. She is Nanette Newman’s daughter, which conjures up a whole new “mother and daughter” fantasy which we shall not go into. I was also very partial to most of the female cast of ”Dallas”, especially Victoria Principal (a truly well-put-together woman), and Charlene Tilton. These were the Kat Deely, Anthea Turner, Carol Vordeman, Carole Smiley, and Kylie of my later years. My bed sheets must have fairly crackled, if only with the amount of static electricity I was generating (polyester was a very dangerous invention). Sorry mom.

Incidentally, Kylie Mynogue is sex on a stick. I have a get-out clause in my marriage if I ever get it together with Kylie. C has a similar one involving Sting. Our worst-case scenario is if Sting and Kylie ever get it together. Unlikely I know, but, unfortunately, more likely than Kylie and myself.

The lingerie section of mom’s Great Universal mail-order catalogue was about the most pornographic material in the house other than my dad’s H&E (Health and Education) magazines. He thought he had so carefully hidden these in the brown paper bag in the ottoman on the landing. In my experience it is always wise to take a peak into any brown paper bag that you may find. Unless you know that Bonnie Langford lies beneath. Oh, and the pictures of African tribal ladies grinding flour with their baps out in some of granddad’s old encyclopaedias. How times change…….