Personal Tastes

I should take a step out of just life ticking along to cover how my own tastes in Music, Film and such developed here.

Most people I have spoken to seem to be most influenced by what Music and Films are made during their Teens. Certainly, that would answer be true of some of my friends who are more into Dance music than I. I seemed to be mostly influenced by stuff from the early eighties (from age 5->11, about 80->86).

Firstly music. Up until the age of 5, most of the music I had listened to was my parents stuff from the 60's and some 70's. Then I started to watch 'Top of the Pops' every week. I really found myself enjoying the pop music of the time. New Romantics, the end of Punk, some rock. This all got into my soul, and I never lost it. It is is considered sad to declare that this is the music you like. The decade that taste forgot, allegedly. However, to me, when I listen to that music, it brings back just good memories of just being a kid. I have since been to Eighties discos, and found that I can remember all the words, which friends both were both amazed at, and shocked at. Hey, they went to the club as well!

Since that time, I find that a lot of music just doesn't have that certain something that you got at the time, and whilst I can enjoy it, it doesn't invoke anything in me that the early Eighties stuff did.

Films: Almost all of my favourite films were either released about that time, or were constantly on telly. Star Wars (Eps 4/5/6 for any people who need the info), Superman 1 & 2, Clash of the Titans, Flash Gordon and the Indiana Jones films. All of these came from the end of the 70's/early eighties (mostly). Even for years my favourite Bond was Roger Moore. Sometimes it the Hammy nature of the film, sometimes the setting or the story. They just had iconic bits that I can watch over and over and over and over again. I think though, it is again, something that takes me back to being a young boy. Flash Gordon generally meant Christmas time, waiting for the extended family to arrive. Clash of the Titans, the first video recorder we had. Star Wars - who didn't want to be Luke Skywalker or Han Solo. Superman is just a great superhero.

Telly: I loved stuff based on books, and SciFi. Doctor Who just has to be down as probably one of my all time favourite shows. I got into StarTrek, Thunderbirds, StarFleet, Terrahawks. These have just stuck with me. I also liked a lot of the kids book adaptations that were on. The Box of Delights and The Chronicles of Narnia were doen fantastically well (although I'm sure by todays CGI standards, they aren't much) but they had the magic that I felt reading them. Also, something I probably shouldn't admit to, I liked some of the Saturday night 'variety' telly. The Paul Daniels Magic Show was just amazing, I loved magic and even had some of his tricks. Noel Edmonds Late Late Breakfast show just had entertaining stuff on it. In fact, I probably watched every incarnation of that until he ditched Mr Blobby on House Party.

This was my era, my time. Most things since have just never quite done it for me.

Going halfway across town to school.

As I said before,I naively thought that I would go to the closes Middle School, and o meet up with Dean and Paul. However, someone decided that my house wasin a catchment area for a school quite some distance away, but of course, close enough that I wouldn't qualify for free transport to it. So, off I set to get across town, almost getting lost on the way there, to my new school, aged 9.

Unfortunately, due to the catchment area, I ended up moving to the school with the kids who bullied me at the previous school, and this did continue.

More kids came to this school, and so I made some new friends, which was nice, although I had my first experience of falling out with friends. That was quite a strange thing, as I felt like no-one liked me at all. Luckily, that was all sorted out though, and whilst I still got bullied by others, I had a set of close friends to hang out with.

This was the school that got me interested in some subjects. We started having defined lessons. The two that seemed to be the biggest focus were English and Humanities. I switched off these quite quickly. English, as I was a very good speller, and still continued to read more interesting books at home, without the need to do the comprehension. My grammar might not be great for it, but I can read and write well.

Humanities was a new subject, and promised to be interesting, however, there is only so much you can do on the Romans, Saxons and Normans over 2 years, so it just got samey.

We started French, and I found this exciting at this time. Learning a new language was different, but I still found other things more interesting.

Science. After a few months, we started having the lessons in a lab, actually doing experiments, and this probably changed my life. I found it great, performing experiments, writing up what happened, trying to predict things. It took me into a world of learning that I loved. Alongside maths, which I seemed to have a bit of a knack with, it was just everything my brain seemed to be tuned to.
I don't think that you are supposed to focus on a particular subject area so young, but I didn't care. Just give me more.

I also very quickly switched off physical excersize, PE. It is a requirement that all schools provide 2 hours of PE for pupils a week. However, to cope with this, schools need to make it quite prescribed, and this I hated. I used to cycle to school most days, so I had a reasonable amount of excersize, and I found that I was pretty rubbish at contact sports, and I hated Rugby. I didn't mind track sports, although not great at them, but most of the year seemed to be contact sports. And because of this, when we had swimming lessons, the teacher just assumed I would be rubbish at that, and so put me in the bottom group, which just made me more disaffected. I was too much of a goody-two-shoes not to be participate, but I did the most I could not to do too much.

Music was also more formalised now. Again, something I didn't really understand. As I didn't already play an instrument, composition, structure, rythmn were all concepts I didn't really know, and didn't have much wish to. Much like Comprehension in English, I either liked the music or didn't. Why did you need to go more in depth? I tried to learn to play a keyboard, but found the co-ordination hard to maintain the speed the music should be played at. Oh, and I found music completely unreadable.

Whilst at this school, I learnt a lot, and would say that it was an important step in my life, although I do wish that it had been a little more open in some of the subjects, so that I didn't switch off some that I think I could have enjoyed more.

tbc..

We moved...

After having been in the last house for about 4 years, Mum got itchy feet and we moved to the other side of the town. This meant a change of school, and the start of me no longer enjoying school as much.

We moved to a larger house. So this time I actually had a larger room with which to set out all my space Lego. I had quite a large amount, so I had an almost permanent Moonscape set up. (For anyone who knows what this means, it was 7 boards, 4 crater and 3 road/landing pad). This was really all I ever wanted to do in the evening and weekends, since I had left all my friends behind, and we weren't located in a road which was just full of families similar to ours.

I went to the school just down the road, joining a class that again had a split of year groups in it. I made some friends, but also started to get bullied. I don't really know why, but I just seemed to get picked to be bullied. I tried to make friends with them, but it didn't work.

My best friend from my previous school did move close to us, but went to a different school, and I made a new friend at the new Sunday School I started to go to. He also went to the same school as Dean, and I often spent weekends playing with them. I also, rather naively, assumed that as it was the closest Middle School, I would be going to the same one they did.

This was also the time I started to find my sister rather annoying. She made friends in her class, but seemed to start following me around whenever she could. At first I didn't really mind too much, but eventually it got quite annoying, because any time I was playing with my friends, she could sometimes try to join in, even ditching her own friends to do so. This continued well into my teens.

tbc...

My first primary school

I started school in the January I turned 5. I don't think schools do this staggered entry over the year anymore, but they did then. My friend, Dean, had started the term before, and so I already new someone at the school. Except, they put me in a different class.

Also, often classes had more than one year group in them, so, there were boys there who had been at school for over a year, and they tried to play some tricks on me. On my first day, at breaktime, they told me it was time to go home, so I started to try to leave the school grounds, getting stopped by a teacher on the way out. It is difficult when you are only just about 5 to explain why you think it is time to go home to a teacher.

Also, they once pushed me into the girls toilet as I was on the way to the boys one. For some reason though, my teacher wouldn't accept that they had pushed me in, so tried to ridicule me by suggesting that perhaps I wanted to be a girl, and that they could find some girls clothes in lost property for me. After that, I decided I didn't much like school. Well, for a while at least.

On a friday afternoon, all three first year classes got together, and you could choose what you wanted to do. That was my favourite time, as Dean and I could do activities together. That was the best bit of the week.

Mum and Dad didn't teach me to read before I went to school, and it was probably just as well, as the school did the ITA reading system. This had a larger alphabet than the standard 26. I seemed to pick up reading and writing pretty quickly, and by the time I moved on to the next class, I was reading loads. At home, Mum and Dad were taking us to the Library regularly, and Mum also found my Uncle's collection of the Enid Blyton Mystery series (the Five Find Outers and Dog!). Well, I started reading everynight, and finished a book generally in about 3 days.

My other passions at this time were Lego and Dinosaurs. I started Lego with just some blocks that we had which could make a house. With the finishing of the houses on the road we had moved to, this was when I decided what I first wanted to be. A Brick Layer. With Lego it was easy, and looked just the same as what the brickies were doing over the road. However, I quickly discovered Space Lego (or technically Legoland Space), and that sealed it. I was to be an Astronaut. I still want to go into space, as soon as the option is there.

With my friend Dean, we also wanted to be Archeologists. I don't know how we learnt such a long word, but we wanted to find Dinosaur skeletons. This carried on for some time, but it was difficult to try to persuade teachers that we wanted to study these.

I was at my first primary school for another two years. I had interesting discussions with teachers over my reading. There was a system of books which were numbered and coloured. 1->25 Silver, and 1->25 Gold. This was no longer ITA, and I zipped through over half the books, 1 a night, for about 4 weeks, until a teacher asked if I was doing the comprehension work. What comprehension work? My class teacher wasn't doing these, and the moment we did, that put paid to such speedy reading. I understand the purpose of understanding the way our language fits together to create sentences, staements, stories..., But I never understood the point of going in depth to discuss things happening behind the stories in a fixed manner. I enjoyed reading, and understood what was going on in the Enid Blyton books, but I didn't need to discuss it in a committee, and I didn't need to understand it in a prescribed way. Or at least, that is what I thought at the time, and still do. I just realised that ultimately, that doesn't work in schools, where it can't be easily marked if there isn't a definite answer (or at least at that age).

Still, I went on, joined the Bird Watching club and found something else I really enjoyed doing. I learnt about many types of birds, even if most of the ones I got to see were Black-Headed Gulls.

I was also top of the class once for something that seemed just to come naturally to me. Because of all the books I had been reading (which my teacher at the time did suggest were too old for me) I started putting quotation marks around my story characters speech. This was another class which had two year groups in it, and I was in the younger year group, and I was the first person to be doing it. Ok, there were some small errors, I didn't start new lines for each new line of speech, but it made me top of the class for once, and I was excited about that.

Outside of school, I had a few very good friends, one of which I wasn't quite as good too as the others, which I do feel bad about now. I used to go over to Dean's, be told by his Mum that he wouldn't be ready to play for at least half an hour, and then wander over to Mark's just for that half an hour, before going back to Deans, with some excuse that I could only play for half an hour. I suppose, when you are a kid, you don't see anything wrong with that. I remember Mum telling me off for it once, and I stopped doing it, but never understood until I was much older why it was bad.

I also had a friend who was born on the same day as me, had the same name as my dad, and his older brother had the same name as me (including surnames). We did end up in the same class at school, and we used to have joint birthday parties, which was good fun, even if one year I ended up having none of my own birthday cake.

During this time, I can't remember exactly what year, I had my Tonsils out. I had been struggling to eat properly for ages, which unfortunately Dad thought I was being difficult with my dinner, and eventually my Mum took me to the Doctors as I was drastically losing weight. He took one look inside my mouth, and exclaimed that these were some of the largest Tonsils he had ever seen, and quickly had me booked into Hospital. So off I went to hospital, with my Koala bear (called Arla as when I got him, I could pronounce Koala, and it stuck). I went through to the operating theatre, and they insisted that Arla Bear had to be at the foot of the bed before giving me Anesthetic. I have never understood why that should be since I was asleep before I counted to 6, and I was very upset. You wouldn't have thought it would make a difference. The next thing I new was waking up, being sick with blood in the middle of the night, which didn't impress the Nurses. At least they didn't stick me in a bathroom for the rest of the night! The following day I went home, and for the next two weeks ate red and green jelly! Oh yes, and the first day I was allowed outside I went and fell in the nearby pond. I was playing next to it with my sister and another lad, throwing in a toy, and then using the ripples produced from throwing in stones to get it back to the shoreline. I reached out to try to grab it one time and fell in. A neighbour came and got me out, took me home where Mum dumped me in a hot bath to get warm again. Still, at least my appetite came back.

I also started going to Boys Brigade. My Dad was co-running a unit near where I was born, but that was too far away. A neighbour, however, was running one near us, and his son was a friend of mine at school. We started going, and I thoroughlly enjoyed it. Especially when we had a parade once a Month on a Sunday. I felt very proud to march along in my uniform. It might have been a bit square, but I learnt some important things, even how to tie a shoelace. It was good to be part of something like that.

I also started going to Sunday school (apart from Parade days). This was something Mum encouraged and I used to find the stories quite interesting. I never read the Bible as a book, but we did readings and the traditional stories of Jesus (Loaves and Fishes, Water into Wine...) which fascinated me at the time. I don't want to get indepth about this now, but later on things changed with respect to Church. For now, it was something I did, and was proud of.

tbc...

More pre-school stuff

My sister was born when I was 2. Apparently, I wasn't jealous, except when Watch with Mother came on, and that was my time to sit with Mummy. I remember one time, we had got home from shopping and Mum had put us in the lounge. I put all the cushions from the sofa in a circle around my sister, who was sitting up, and threw Wotsits (a cheesey corn snack) at her, as she then ate them. I have never much liked Wotsits, although my sister does.

We moved again before I started school, although this time within the same town. I got the smallest bedroom in the house (something which I did resent, since I was the older child) but I got to choose the colour my parents painted it. For some reason, I chose a golden sand colour, and was quite insistent. So I got it. The next house we moved too, my parents painted it the same colour, of which I wasn't very happy. Still, that is jumping ahead.

I went to playgroup and had a fairly good time. I was silly and found some piece of junk which I played with for ages, put a coin in it, and then tipping it up into my mouth, promptly swallowed the coin - in front of my parents and sister. Dad took me to the hospital and I got to see an X-Ray of my tummy, with the coin plumb in the middle of it. I was fascinated by the picture, but they wouldn't let me keep it.

During this time, I was diagnosed with Asthma. Unlike today, where the doctors seem very quick to hand out an inhaler, it was not that common to actually get this diagnosis. But the Doctor was one of two brothers who both picked that as a speciality during training, and I'm glad they did.

My first inhaler was an Intal Spinhaler. It was very tricky for me at 4 to use this properly. I kept blowing instead of sucking, so never got any of it. My mum had made a friend, whose son was the same age as me, and had been using one for a while. We went over one afternoon, he showed me how to use it, and gave me a whistle attachement, which whistled only if you sucked in. I picked it up in no time. Dean went on to become my best friend for quite a few years, even though we didn't end up in the same class at school.

We had moved to a new build, in a cul-de-sac, where many families like ours moved to. This was great. We had the couple of older kids who led us all, and had the fancy stuff to play with. A few younger kids who followed us around, and then a few my age. We did everything. Skateboards, football, go-karts, hide and seek. As it was a new build, some bits weren't quite finished, and we once destroyed an edging slab between the what was to be a pavement and a grass verge, in order to have a tunnel to drive our cars through. Happy times.

I remember the first time I truly scared myself. It came over really black and the rain absolutely pelted down. The next door neighbours cousin and I decided we were going to stay out in the rain (everyone else had gone inside). After a few minutes, we had some thunder, which slowly got louder and louder. Then, CRASH. A bolt of streak lightening came out of the sky, not very close to us, but when you are 5, it seems worse than it probably was, and we jumped out of our skins, and ran inside our houses.
I've never deliberately stayed out in the rain again, but thunder and lightening have never bothered me.

Then I went to school.

tbc...

a disjointed look at my pre-school years

My parents were quite upset about that. But an 11 month old child does what it wants, and so I suppose it should have been expected.

I have a few vague recollections of my pre-school years, so I'll list them now in as much a chronological order as I can gather.

We moved from where I lived after I was born to the larger town up the coast. My dad having been posted there. The place was pretty ordinary. We lived near a bank of shops, and that was about it.

Once, when some friends had come to visit, I took myself off on my pedal tractor to the shop. I was probably 3. It was a hot summer day, and I wanted an icecream. I thought that I had sussed out this buying sweets lark, so off I pedalled to the shop, crossing a couple of roads. Parked up, and went inside. Got a mini-milk (a vanilla milk base icecream lollipop) from the freezer, queued up, showed it to the shopkeeper and then left. Opened it up and started eating it.

Luckily, I suppose, Mum arrived. I got punished, probably a clip around the ear, and she paid for the ice-lolly.

I think that Christmas was the first time I had ever woken early, and started going through my sack of presents whilst it was still dark. My cousins were staying, and they also had a sack, and they had started, so I did. Mum came in, screamed at us took the presents away until it was time to get up (i.e. post 7am). It wasn't the last time this happened at Christmas.

Also, I think my dad's next birthday, I had a present of a new chess set for him. However, at some point during the night, I woke up, and decided to try it out. I was there, with my reading lamp on, trying to balance the board on the pillow, putting out all the pieces. I don't remember if I knew what the pieces were, or where they should go. I just remember it was Dad who came in, helped me put it away, and told me that I shouldn't have done it, but no real harm had occured. Much better than being shouted out, but whenever I look back at the incident, I always feel that somehow I learnt more than with the Christmas presents.

tbc..

And so it begins...

So I ordaned to bless the world with my presence. How cliched is that? I was born 3 weeks late in order to ensure I was an Aquarius, at 11.30 at night.

Oh yes, and I spent the first night in a bathroom.

Apparently, the hospital I was born in didn't care that I was born so late at night, after a brief time with mum, I was whisked away to the nursery, to sleep with all the other babies. However, I was hungry, so I cried. As it was the policy of the hospital to have a strict regime to feeding times, and I was waking other babies, they shut me away in a bathroom to scream as much as I liked. So I went hungry. Some have said I've been making up for it ever since.

My dad got half an hour off work. He was a Police Constable and his Sargeant had so many officers off that night, that he wouldn't let dad off the rest of his shift. So, it wasn't until the following daytime that I finally saw my daddy, and the world finally saw a contented me.

I can't say I have the biggest affinity with Bathrooms. I shower every day, but I'm as quick as possible. I wonder if that has anything to do with it?

Anyway, the next thing I know about was Christmas that year. Having been born in January, and my parents not having a great deal of money, it was 11 months before they had a reason to shower me with gifts. They had spent what they could afford and brought me lots to unwrap. However, my Aunt had come to spend Christmas with us, and had left her glasses case on the arm of the sofa.
It probably doesn't take a genius to work out what came next. Being a little inquisitive, instead of opening all my presents and getting excited about that, I spent an hour opening an closing my Aunt's glasses case.

tbc...