Bloggers guilty of cynicism, practical jokes, inaccuracy, boasting, intellectual snobbery, phillistinism and ostentation should at least reveal their age, often the reason for these defects. As a regular practitioner of such vices I sought indemnity by including my age in my profile. Blogger has now removed this facility and I feel honour-bound to prove I am of a great age.
● My primary school was lit with gas mantles.
● Corporal punishment (by hand, ruler, cane and curtain-rod) was administered to pupils’ faces, the back of their necks, the front and back of their hands, their backsides and their thighs at my primary and grammar schools.
● Our milk was delivered daily, ladled from a large bucket into my mother’s jug.
● Waste metal was collected by a man with a horse-drawn cart.
● Once a man appeared in our street (eight houses on either side), took off his cap and, without amplification asked us to vote against Sunday cinemas.
● Dead cats abounded in the gutters of the main road.
● Cashiers at Lingards, a one-floor department store in Bradford, sat in a central cage on a raised platform. Cash spent at counters travelled to the cashiers on wire-supported containers.
● Barges used the Leeds-to-Liverpool canal commercially. We swam in it.
● Ever hungry, I could never come to terms with canned snoek.
● My preferred bought-in treat was chips with “a cake” – two discs of potato on either side of a thin slice of fish, deep-fried.
● My father bought large quantities of eggs, illegally, from farmers. My mother preserved them in a gloop based on isinglass.
I feel no nostalgia for any of this.
● My primary school was lit with gas mantles.
● Corporal punishment (by hand, ruler, cane and curtain-rod) was administered to pupils’ faces, the back of their necks, the front and back of their hands, their backsides and their thighs at my primary and grammar schools.
● Our milk was delivered daily, ladled from a large bucket into my mother’s jug.
● Waste metal was collected by a man with a horse-drawn cart.
● Once a man appeared in our street (eight houses on either side), took off his cap and, without amplification asked us to vote against Sunday cinemas.
● Dead cats abounded in the gutters of the main road.
● Cashiers at Lingards, a one-floor department store in Bradford, sat in a central cage on a raised platform. Cash spent at counters travelled to the cashiers on wire-supported containers.
● Barges used the Leeds-to-Liverpool canal commercially. We swam in it.
● Ever hungry, I could never come to terms with canned snoek.
● My preferred bought-in treat was chips with “a cake” – two discs of potato on either side of a thin slice of fish, deep-fried.
● My father bought large quantities of eggs, illegally, from farmers. My mother preserved them in a gloop based on isinglass.
I feel no nostalgia for any of this.
