I remember # 8

The British Museum reading room
The British Museum reading room

225. I remember walking past the anti-apartheid protesters outside South Africa House, day after day after day

226. I remember hide-and-seek

227. I remember Mary Hopkin

228. I remember Ilie Nastase, tennis rebel

229. I remember struggling over seven times eight when learning my times tables

230. I remember Disney Time

231. I remember (can this possibly be true?) that my primary school class held a Miss World competition. A girl named Angela won.

232. I remember Chicory Tip

233. I remember the Harlem Globetrotters

234. I remember abacuses (or should that be abaci?)

235. I remember crouching with work colleagues in a corridor away from windows because it was thought a bomb might be nearby

236. I remember listening to the cheerful propaganda from Radio Tirana on my short-wave radio

237. I remember the astronaut who sang ‘I was walking on the Moon one day, in the merry merry month of May’

238. I remember inventing the standing triple jump as a sport (at least I was fairly sure no one else had come up with it)

239. I remember when you banged on the top of the television set to make it work

240. I remember my brothers and I push-starting our father’s car on cold mornings

241. I remember limbo dancing

242. I remember Mary Wilson’s poetry

243. I remember the Fairs Cup (so named because originally the competing football teams had to come from cities that hosted trade fairs)

244. I remember Leonard Sachs

245. I remember The Singing Ringing Tree

246. I remember Blue Peter annuals, guaranteed in every Christmas stocking

247. I remember Christmas stockings

248. I remember power cuts and eating meals by candlelight

249. I remember marvelling at French hypermarkets because nothing on such a scale existed back in the UK

250. I remember Charlie Chaplin films being shown regularly on British television, eagerly catching each title that was new to me, never once questioning the absence of dialogue

251. I remember exactly where I was when I suddenly felt terribly good about the world and my place in it, and then the moment passed

252. I remember Grandstand, and not knowing what a grandstand was

253. I remember the round reading room at the British Museum and the proud day when I first had a reader’s ticket. I picked a seat and decided that this would be the seat I always used, just liked Karl Marx. The next time I came someone was sitting there already.

254. I remember Bod

255. I remember feedback (on guitars)

220. I remember the sobering day when I realised I was older than anyone in the England cricket team

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