Back Then

Street names are often changed over the years and often there is a rational reason. But sometimes it is difficult to find. In Wapping there are two prewar blocks of flats on Greenbank. Willoughby house and Vancouver house and there was a road running between them from Greenbank to Wapping high Street named Red lion street.  This road is now called Reardons Path. Of course it is not a path it is still a vehicular road. And even more strangely there was already a Reardons Path,still there, which is actually a path. It runs from Greenbank to Watt Street. All very strange. Just as odd as the local council replacing tarmac covered roads with ancient cobbles.  This all in the name of progress or am I being cynical in thinking it is more to do with a sop to property developers. The cobbles of course did not bring the old dockside atmosphere back: a bit difficult with land rovers and porsches being parked on them. In Red Lion street there was old  warehousing  being develope...

When I was a lad every boy that I knew owned a penknife or pocketknife.  Essential equipment for boys activities. Not for the original use which gave the penknife it's name,of course, sharpening quill pens,but necessary for pencils. There were few pencil sharpeners about then. And then there were all those other uses. Making Bows and arrows. Removing broken football studs Whittling tree branches Carving bones into strange shapes Hoof cleaners if you ever came across a lame horse and were game enough to give it a try. Making Boy scout woggles from broken belts or other odd bits of leather The list was endless. Swiss army knives were just making an appearance and were objects of envy. It's a shame that these innocent activities have given way to being offensive weapons in the hands of children.

The first time I heard the melody of O Sole Mio was a slightly bawdy song my grandmother used to sing which went something like: Old Mother Riley She bought a cow But to milk it She didn't know how She pulled its tail,instead of its tit Old mother Riley got covered in snow. My cousin Vicki, who lived in the same house as my grandmother as a girl refused to accept this.  She had never heard our grandmother sing and in any case would not of have sang a song like that.  Well this is not a false memory and anyway I could not have made up words like this at the age of ten. When one of my older brothers returned from serving in Italy during WW2 he had learned quite a bit of Italian and lots of Italian and Neapolitan songs. One of his favourites was O S ole Mio which he would play on the piano and any other instrument he could get his hands on, which included a mandolin which I had bought out of curiosity in a second hand shop. It was only much later that...

Primary school children have always brought home notes from school with messages about upcoming events or rules which could not be trusted to those fallible young memories.  These days they are printed out in the school office on laser or inkjet printers, after having been typed up on a computer. It wasn't always so. Before these very handy and efficient printers there were duplicators, Roneo or Gestetner, bulky and often messy machines which used paper stencils which had been typed on a manual typewriter with the ribbon removed so that the keys would cut through the stencil. Before that there were the various types of gel copier. This is difficult to describe to anyone who has not seen them.  Essentially messages were written on to coated paper with special inks.  The paper was then pressed into a pad of gelatin like material to which the ink transferred.  A sheet of paper was then pressed very carefully into the gel thus producing a copy.  One copy at a...

The plight of the Beluga whale sighted in the Thames this week is another reminder of  what is happening to the environment and no part of the planet is immune. When we used to sail our 28ft boat on the river Medway many years ago we had to be vigilant to avoid the floating debris which could have damaged our hull.  Wooden pallets and other large pieces of timber were regular hazards as well as partially submerged objects of unknown size and construction. In strong winds, even the moored large iron buoys became a hazard. More than thirty years on the situation must be worse and the waters between the Thames estuary and Iceland will contain many tons of hard material as well as the plastic which is more frequently mentioned.  This whale will not have been on a sightseeing tour, it is clearly disorientated and its natural navigation system is not function.  One would not need to be a scientist to deduce that all this debris could be a contributory factor....

When Jim finished his National Service he said that he wanted to get seven suits-one for each day of the week as he was fed up with wearing the same suit every day as he had to do whilst in uniform. I had no great aspirations as a suit wearer myself so on finishing my army stint I just reverted to sports jacket and slacks (not even smart casual). The uniform wearing bit had never bothered me either not being a very smart soldier may well have been the reason. Being in the Suez Canal Zone was not a great help either, khaki drill uniform was not easy to keep smart with sweat stains showing under your armpits within half an hour of getting dressed, and the white blanco being transferred from the webbing belt and cross straps to the shirt so I was always a lot more comfortable in the sloppy fatigue gear. No one expected that to be smart whilst you were going around picking up rubbish or whitewashing stones around the compound. The KD uniform was not just a pain to wear and keep sm...