dormouse1953

I was in my bedroom just now when I heard a sound in the street and something made me look out the window.

Stretched out along the grass verge on the main part of St. Johns Road opposite to the entrance of the cul-de-sac in which I live was a line a children on bicycles, all wearing helmets and yellow safety vests. At the front was an adult and at a signal from her they all set off and turned into the crescent at the end of St. Johns Road. Bringing up the rear was another adult.

Presumably some sort of cycling training class. Took me back to the sixties. There was a test you could take called Cycling Proficiency. Never went in for it myself as my only bike was not roadworthy, but our house abutted a school playground and that was where the training took place, with tracks marked out with poles.

I have a scar on left shin.  It's over fifty years old now, and not very visible, but it still irritates me occasionally.

I got it in a PE accident at school back in spring 1965.  Mr Glasper, the games teacher, decided that the class would learn some athletics disciplines, and that day it was throwing the discus.  He lined us up on a tarmac netball court on the school playing fields.  This was on a slight rise and the idea was we'd line up along the edge, looking down the hill, and throw in that direction.

There were drainage holes spaced along that edge of the tarmac and some idiot had removed the drain cover from the one directly in front of me.  I have vague memories that I was bullied by the rest of the class to stand next to that drain, and the inevitable happened.  As I stepped forward to throw the discus, I forgot the hole was there and my leg went down the drain.  The side of the drain gouged deep into my leg.  There was lots of blood.  I was taken to the domestic science room where the teacher had first aid training and got bandaged up.  I think I stayed at school for the rest of the day - there was no easy way for me to get home until the school buses arrived - but I was told that when I got home I had to go to the doctor's to get a tetanus jab.

For I think the rest of that term, I was excused games, especially swimming.

Mr Glasper, I knew, was also a professional wrestler, fighting under the name Ray Diamond.  Just now, thinking about this incident, I did a bit of googling and came up with this news item from 2012:

http://www.thenorthernecho.co.uk/news/9459466.Tributes_paid_to_former_professional_wrestler/?ref=rss

Despite what it says, my memories of him less charitable.  He had a temper.  I remember one occasion when he lashed out and thumped the wall just over my head.  On another occasion, I picked up my gym kit in a hurry at home one morning and accidentally picked up two left gym shoes.  He made me go on a cross-country run wearing two left shoes.

Mind you, by the time I was in the sixth form, he'd let us do what we liked for games.  I played tennis for a year with a friend on an outdoors court - even when it was snowing.

I see from the BBC that Judy Carne has died:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-34184529

That takes me back.  Sometime in early 1969 my parents started telling me about this new comedy show on BBC-2.  But as it went out late on a Sunday night I wasn't allowed to stay up to see it.  This was, of course, Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In.

Finally, during the May half-term holiday they let me stay up to see an episode.  (That was the same week that Apollo 10 returned to Earth and I saw 2001, A Space Odyssey for the first time.)

And then the BBC started showing it at an earlier time - Wednesday nights just after nine according to the Radio Times archive.  It was required viewing in our household, and when we went on holiday to stay with my grandparents in London at the end of July, we insisted on visiting my aunt and uncle on Wednesday evening, as they could get BBC-2 an my grandparents couldn't.

It was one of those shows that everyone was talking about.  Well, there were only three channels then.  I used to memorise the jokes for school the next day and bought the joke book that came out.  Couldn't buy the video of the show back then, of course.

But after a couple of seasons it got very stale and I stopped watching - I was at university by then.  And sometime in the eighties as part of a nostalgia binge, the BBC repeated some episodes and I didn't find it funny at all.  Conversely, this was also the time the Monty Python started, and I still find a lot of that funny.

Saw this on the Independent's website.

http://ind.pn/1QvJYVT

It was a problem involving probability that allegedly stumped a large number of students taking a maths GCSE.

It is things like this that mean I never could be a teacher.  One look at that problem and jotting down a couple of things on paper, and the answer was obvious.  (Except, I was having my breakfast at the time, I wrote the first line of the solution and then when I went back to it I misread a multiplication sign as a plus sign and went down a blind alley.)  I don't think I could explain it any simpler.

Indeed some years ago I was at a family gathering for Christmas and my nephew had some A-level maths questions to do.  (My nephew is now in his forties, so you can probably work out how long ago this was.)  My mother said I could help him.  My sister (his mother) said don't be silly, it was over twenty years since I did A-level maths.  As it happened, the first problem we looked at involved factorising a polynomial.  (I'm sure that was the sort of problem I would have done at O-level, not A-level.)  I immediately wrote down the first line of how to solve this and my nephew didn't understand.  I tried to exlain, but nothing I said made any sense to him.  We stopped the exercise right there and I never helped him with his A-levels again.  (Although, when he was at university, I did get a phonecall from him one night, asking me to explain some physics problem, I think it was Compton scattering.  But I'd been out at a concert and by the time I got home and he was able to phone me, he'd drunk half a bottle of wine and it was difficult to explain this over the phone.)

I do wonder about the polynomial factorisation whether there was a generation problem.  I was of the generation that did not have calculators when at school (except for my trusty slide rule in the sixth form).  I was taught long division at primary school and the method I knew for factorising polynomials was based on that.  Do children get taught long division these days?

But the upshot is, I think if I was trying to teach maths to someone today, my answer to any question would be, "That's obvious".

I see on the news that there has been a fire at Ferrybridge C power station.  That brought back memories.

Some of you may know that I used to work for the Central Electricity Generating Board (CEGB) but my memories go back further.

I grew up in the north-east of England but we had family down in London so we often drove down for holidays and the route my father took went right past the power station when it was being built in the early sixties.  Then, in 1965, a couple of months after we last drove past, if I remember correctly, it was on the news that three of the cooling towers there had collapsed in high winds.  This was a big news item at the time and later it was reported that although the cooling towers were designed to withstand high winds, the layout of the towers created vortices that caused the collapse.

Over ten years later, by which time I was working for the CEGB, I was sent on a course on power generation and distribution and the topic of Ferrybridge came up.  "The manager of that station still has it on his personnel record that he lost his cooling towers."  I don't know if that was actually true.

My family had a large collection of old 78 rpm records, mostly of old popular songs from the thirties and forties - I knew the song Ali Baba's Camel long before the Bonzos recorded it - but one of them, which I knew only as The Jewels of the Madonna, was classical music, although I probably wouldn't have made that distinction at the time.  If it wasn't the first piece of classical music I heard, it was certainly the first piece I obsessed over, listening to it over and over again.  As music is such a large part of my life now, that makes it quite significant in my life.  I can't remember when I first heard it, but I think it was before we moved from London at the very end of 1957, when I was four.

And then, some time in the early sixties, I came home to see the record in pieces.  My sister had dropped it.

Well, at the end of the sixties I discovered Radio 3.  (I often joke that I started listening to classical music in 1968 because popular music was so terrible then.  Getting a pocket radio that got good reception only on Radio 3 may have helped.)  When I was at university in the early seventies I noticed in the Radio 3 listings in the Radio Times the entry "Wolf-Ferrari: Suite from The Jewels of the Madonna".  I still remembered the name and as the piece was being played at a time I could listen - I think it was on the morning concert just before I had to head into the university for my first lecture - I tuned in to see if I recognised it.

I did.  The bit I was fond off was the third of four movements, a serenade.  The record we had was, I think, sides 2 and 3 of a two-disc set.  Multi-disc sets were often set up for use in auto-changers, so you'd put a stack on the spindle and it would play sides 1 to n, turn the stack over and play sides n+1 to 2n.  I never did discover what happened to sides 1 and 4; smashed before I was born, I suspect.

I also had a composer's name to go with the piece, although the musical reference books I had available told me little about him.  Born in Venice in 1876 to a German father and Italian mother, he died in 1948.  I gathered The Jewels of the Madonna was an opera, and the suite was a set of orchestral interludes.

In the seventies and eighties, I started recording works of Radio 3, especially if they were hard to find on disc, and I think in the early eighties I heard the suite again and recorded it, getting to know the piece again.  Finally, I found a CD of the suite, along with music from other operas by Wolf-Ferrari.  I have that CD on my iPod now.

A few months ago I was having a discussion on an opera forum about operatic rarities you'd like to see staged and I mentioned The Jewels of the Madonna.  It's being performed by Holland Park Opera this summer, I was told.  And I went to see it on Saturday night.  Turns out it was the first staging in this country since 1926, which is before my parents were born.  Can't think why, as musically it is a fun piece, but I suppose I'm biased after all these years.  I don't think I've even seen the suite performed in concert.

It's a style of Italian opera called verismo, which means it's all about the common people falling in love and murdering each other, only there isn't actually a murder here.  An orphan girl drives her adoptive brother wild with lust and also comes to the attention of the local crime boss.  The brother, to prove himself, steals the jewels from a statue of the Madonna and then dresses his sister in them and has sex with her.  The crime boss tells him he is now cursed, so he returns the jewels and commits suicide.  I can't help thinking that if my parents knew the plot, they would have been less happy about me listening to it.  The serenade I knew first appears as an actual sung serenade by the crime boss and in this production his henchmen were making rude gestures in the background about their boss's sexual prowess.  (The action was updated to the post-war period, so he turned up riding a Vespa scooter.)

The only downside to the experience is that Holland Park is an open-air theatre in a large tent and there was a huge thunderstorm on Saturday night.  The rain on the roof of the tent drowned out the quiet passages (not that many, as it happened) and there were frequent flashes of lightning and rumbles of thunder.  Even worse, the percussionist was sitting near the edge of the awning and they had to hold an umbrella over him during the performance, and wipe the xylophone dry during the interval.  And the only loos were portaloos out in the park, so it was a dash in the interval.

Still, after over fifty years, it was a joy to hear and see the whole thing.  I hope some other company takes it up.

I heard on Radio 3 this morning that the film star Deanna Durbin has just died aged 91.  I suppose it was partly due to her that I was listening to Radio 3 at all.

In 1937 she made a film called One Hundred Men and a Girl, and it was an extract from the soundtrack of that film they played this morning.  In it, she played the daughter of a musician who helps organise an orchestra of unemployed musicians and then persuades the famous British-born conductor Leopold Stokowski to conduct them.  Stokowski played himself in that film.

It was one of those films that got trotted out on the BBC on Sunday afternoons in the sixties and I saw it several times.  I would guess it was partly what got me interested in classical music in my teens.  Around that time my parents bought me as a Christmas present a recording of Holst's The Planets, conducted by Stokowski.

Stokowski went on to appear with Mickey Mouse in Fantasia and lived into his nineties.  A few months after I moved down to London I saw what proved to be his last public appearance conducting in the UK at the Royal Albert Hall in May 1974.

For some reason, I remember this one better than the other two.

It follows on straight from the end of the previous series.  As the British rocket passes Venus, they pick up a distress call from an American rocket in the vicinity.  He was supposed to be going into Earth orbit, but something went wrong and he ended up in orbit around Venus, the worst case of bad astrogation up till John Crichton.  (The first man went into space during the showing of this series and the first American in orbit was another year away.)

A Russian unmanned rescue mission has been launched with supplies, but that's some weeks away, so the Brits go to give assistance.  However, the devious Harcourt Brown has intercepted a message from the American and edited it to make it sound like he is going in to land, so they have to follow.

It turns out that beneath the Venusian cloud - carbon suboxide, not dioxide they discover (yes that does exist, no I'd never heard of it) - there is a primeval jungle.  And when Captain Wilson, the American, also lands, the children find his rocket has been ransacked by something large.

Interestingly, Brown uses the adjective "Cytherean" a word I haven't heard for years.  Margaret, the young girl, is exceedingly bossy.  And the composer of the incidental music has been listening to a lot of Wagner.

Now watching the second part of the Pathfinders trilogy, which starts when Professor Wedgwood is injured in a re-fuelling explosion.  He breaks his arm which means he can't lead the next expedition to the moon.  So Henderson, the science reporter, is roped in to go.  Geoffrey Wedgwood is going again, but his brother and sister are back at school.  There is another kid brought along.  Henderson is looking after his niece, Margaret, so she is allowed to go, too.  They nearly all died last time, and yet everyone thinks this is a good idea.  Added to this, Gerald Flood plays Henderson as the sort of uncle you wouldn't want to leave alone with your children.

Mary, the Canadian scientist from before, is also along.  The other scientist is going to be Professor Hawkins from Australia, except that when one of the team phones Prestwick to see if he's arrived yet, he definitely says "Canada",  TV drama was treated as live back then, even when it was recorded.  One of the episodes of Adam Adamant Lives is set in Japan and has the head of a geisha house (an English actress made up to look Asian) say at one point "Chinese" and then corrects herself to "Japanese".

It turns out that Hawkins has been waylaid at the airport and an imposter has taken his place.  (I remember this as being the first time I ever heard the word "impostor".)  He is really Harcourt Brown, author of the controversial book People from Other Planets, and he hijacks the rocket to take it to Mars.  Well, the title of the series sort of gave that away.

Brown is played by the veteran British actor George Colouris who was in Citizen Kane playing Kane's guardian, Thatcher.  Curiously, the real Professor Hawkins is played by Bernard Horsfall, another veteran British actor who, among many other roles, played Chancellor Goth in the Doctor Who series The Deadly Assassin.

Just been watching a BBC documentary about the big freeze of 1963.  Basically this was a repeat of a Tonight programme special shown towards the end of the freeze, fronted by Cliff Michelmore , Derek Hart and Kenneth Alsop (and with designer Ridley Scott and director Anthony Jay).

I am old enough to remember the big freeze.  I was nine and a half at the time.  But I was young enough then not to realise that that year was anything special.  The family had moved to the north-east five years earlier, which is about when my earliest memories start.  It had snowed most winters - probably every winter - since we moved, and when you're nine, a week seems as long as a month anyway.  So I didn't know it was unusual for the snow to be on the ground for over two months.

And, at that age, I had none of the problems that I have with cold now.  I enjoyed playing in the snow, making snowmen and snow castles.  (Take a seaside plastic bucket, fill it with snow and turn it over.)  I remember about ten years ago my father telling me that he'd found a photograph of me and my sisters playing in the snow probably that year.  I was wearing short trousers (and I guess my sisters were wearing dresses or skirts).  No nine-year old boy would wear long trousers back then.  (I never found that photograph when we were clearing out my father's house.  I don't know if any of my siblings have it.)

I don't even remember having problems with school.  My primary school was literally at the bottom of the street, so I had no trouble getting there - one of the teachers lived next door to us - and I don't think the school was ever closed.

I do remember that my brother was less than a year old then and that my mother used to wash his nappies, put them out on the line to dry and when she brought them in, they were as stiff as boards and she had to stand them in front of the fire to thaw.  (The BBC programme mentioned  a shortage of disposable nappies, but we had the old washable kind.)

And I remember the disruption to sport but only peripherally.  The pools panel was introduced, and my parents were keen pools players - at one time my father had a part-time job collecting for Littlewoods.  Saturday afternoon's Grandstand on the BBC was replaced by old films.

I do remember clearing the snow off the pavement outside our house and realising that it was coming up in big frozen slabs on which the lines in the paving stones were imprinted.

And I remember a few months later, the weather had become warm enough that the teacher had decided to take us outside for a lesson in the sunshine.  I was sitting on the grass and looking at it and remembering how this had all been deep under snow.