Through the past comically

I was given an unexpected early birthday present last week.  It had been tied up in a gold ribbon and tucked away in a corner in the local charity shop.  Honestly, when Mr SDS pulled it out of the tatty recycled Sainsbury’s bag and I laid eyes on its crumpled edges and yellow age spots (it happens to the best of us)… well, the neighbours would have been within their rights to complain about the noise.

Oohh! Ahh!

That was just at first sight.  Once I’d snipped off the ribbon and excitedly delved into the contents, things just got better and better.

See if you agree...

It was a bundle of familiar children's comics from the late '60s.

As if it wasn't about as good as it gets to include my favourite Pogles, there were The Herbs too...

...and things just carried on getting better with every turn of every page...  Oh Bizzy Lizzy, I wanted to be you.

Better and better!  I was in love with Joe.  I've only ever met one other person who remembers him, though.  Fab illustrations.  Ooh!

Ooh ahh...

Ahh!

And then there's this...  But, aged six, I liked him so much, he was an artist and an animal lover and he could have taught me to swim, I wanted him to be my Dad.  I know, I know.

Let's get back to real heroes!

Ladybird ladybird

I just spent £7.99 at a charity shop on a little job lot of old books packed in a polythene bag.  How could I resist?!  They were 1960s Ladybird books, which everyone who grew up in Britain during their '60s and '70s heyday would surely, like me, find very evocative, and this was the one at the top:

I love that cover.

It looks like they'd all belonged to a boy called Graham.

They are a bit of a boyish selection, with tractors and cars, etc. - if that isn't too much of a gender stereotype - but Graham obviously liked his machines.

In my childhood home with two quite tomboyish girls (my sister had her Hot Wheels and I adored my clockwork train set), we definitely had the Toys And Games To Make book like the one in the picture.  Pretty sure we tried most of the suggestions in it with things we found in the sticky kitchen drawer.  You know the drawer, every household has one, full of bulldog clips, candles and miscellaneous hardware that “might come in handy one day” .  It definitely had corks and matchboxes, so we did alright. Ours smelt of rust and chocolate wafers for some reason too.

Hard to imagine many kids being impressed with the ideas in the book now, though...

I especially remember trying this one below and speaking to my sister in her bedroom, all the way from the bathroom:

What, no smartphone?

I've vivid memories too of owning a Ladybird book on how to tell the time, and another on Marco Polo; they all had that same feel, the illustrations very typical of their era.

From this batch, The Story Of Railways has some particularly charming images:

And is that a young Liam Gallagher making an appearance in the Cub Scouts volume?

Anyway I'm going to keep them for a bit - they're a part of history now.  I might even learn something (I mean, I'd completely forgotten what a 'vulgar fraction' is - Maths not my strong point)

And now I've a tenuous excuse to include this song too!

Nancy Sinatra & Lee Hazlewood:  Ladybird

Blocked

I seem to have a case of writer's block. Think I need the cerebral equivalent of Dyno-Rod to come and plunge my proverbial (verbal, even) pipes. Ideas for things to write about are floating about: the dead mouse, horsehair weaving, deep sea divers, recent forays into Northern Soul and a teenage pregnancy scare, with a bit of music thrown in if possible (I even had Deadmau5 lined up for the first topic, but have yet to decide what could accompany horsehair weaving).  Unfortunately that's all they're doing, though - floating. Maybe I will manage to flush them through at some point but right now I can't seem to.

So, in the meantime, please have a look at some pictures! I found these two ancient 'How To Draw' books in a charity shop. How could I resist?

Drawing Children by Victor Pérard, 1945

Drawing Animals by Victor Pérard, 1951

Here are some of the inside pages...very anachronistic:

I love this guide to facial expressions in particular:

There's even a picture of Buster Bloodvessel...

 but I can't quite bring myself to include Lip Up Fatty as a soundtrack today.

Knit it

Does anyone still knit? The last person I saw knitting regularly was when I briefly worked at a Benefits Office in the 1980s, there was a woman there with a leathery complexion who used to knit and smoke her way through every lunch-hour. The clicking of knitting needles punctuated by cigarette-sucking and her phlegmy cough still sticks with me. Oh and she used to suck boiled sweets too. Tucked them into her cheek whenever she took a drag.

I thought of her today whilst browsing the charity shops because I was irresistibly drawn to some 1970s knitting magazines in a box on the floor in Help The Aged. 'Golden Hands' they were called (and then I couldn't stop thinking of the Klaxons'  'Golden Skans' and I've had that going through my head all day). But the mags were only pence so I bought a couple, just for the pictures. I might have to incorporate them into something ironic and artistic some time. Before I do, though, you've just got to see them...

From the feature: 'Knit him a casual sweater'

 The caption says 'Meet Sacha and her brother Gregor'

This article tells you how to 'Machine knit a glamorous evening dress'

From the feature: 'Romantic party looks for mothers-to-be'

The worst clothes you've ever worn...?

Well, you might look at me now and suggest that the ill-fitting jeans and scruffy black jumper (with holes in the elbows) which I’m currently wearing would be good contenders – and you’d be right – but at least I’m under no illusion that they look any good.  What I’ve been thinking about today, however, is some of those clothes I’ve had and actually believed were decent at the time, but later realised to be the worst things I’ve ever worn. The worst things anyone could have worn.  I know it’s subjective, but I feel sure we can be unanimous about some items.

Maybe the seventies threw up the best (worst?) examples, and I use the phrase ‘threw up’ without irony.  I’m not talking about my punk/DIY clothes – I’ll always look back at them fondly no matter what anyone says.  But there was that time between being a kid and being a punk, and it really was a pubescent fashion wasteland. For instance, I had a pair of white flares.  White.  Flares.  And with my thighs!  I chose to wear these frequently with a fetching, knitted, collared, zip-up cardigan in cream with a black zig-zag pattern.  This woolly monstrosity was loosely based on something I had seen David Starsky wearing in ‘Starsky and Hutch’.  ‘Nuff said.

Then there were those wedgy platform shoes I dared to wear for the walk home from school.  They were too high to be permitted in school (a place where the height of heels was actually measured by a teacher if they looked to be above one and a half inches, and thus a major breach of uniform rules).  So at the 4.15pm bell, I’d change into this pair of brown, lace-up shoes that were attached, somewhat incongruously, to high wedge soles which were covered with some kind of woven, beige, hessian type stuff.  They were like some strange hybrid of footwear and flooring.  The toe area must have been raised off the ground by about two inches and the heel roughly four.  I hobbled and wobbled home in these stupid shoes, and found I had great difficulty getting up hills. This was unfortunate as I lived at the top of quite a steep one.  In order to make it all the way to my front door I had to compensate for the gradient in the shoe with every step, which meant leaning forward from the ankle joint in a most unnatural manner.  Perhaps I should have tried walking backwards? 

Some years later I discovered the joy of buying my clothes from charity shops and I got some wondeful items – big old coats, the occasional fifties dress and little suede ankle boots, all of which were a thrill to find and a bargain too.  I couldn’t believe my eyes one day when I saw a pair of black PVC trousers in my size hanging on the rail in Oxfam.  I’d always wanted some PVC or leather trews, but they just weren’t a viable purchase on a student budget.  So, without any hesitation I bought these second-hand ones and started to wear them at the first opportunity. Only problem was, they were a bit, well, cracked, just where the shiny coating had got a little worn away.  It seemed an obvious solution to simply apply a coating of Kiwi shoe polish and give them a bit of a buff with a cloth until they were nice and shiny again.  Easy. It wasn’t until some time later that I realised the black smudgy marks on the furniture (and the bus seat) corresponded exactly with where I’d been sitting earlier….

Talking of charity shops and second-hand trousers, what about these, though…?

In vivid turquoise cordurouy, complete with a wide plastic multi-coloured belt, these little beauties cost me a mere £2.99 just a few months ago.  How could I possibly resist?  I will admit, though, that I’ve only worn them once, and that was to a fancy dress party.

Pick up a Penguin

I’ve mentioned charity shops on here before as the source of many an interesting and cheap item of clothing in my student years, and whilst they seem no longer to be a treasure-trove of Parisian-print dresses or ‘60s slingbacks, occasionally you can just stumble across something else that’s good for little more than the price of a Mars Bar.  This lovely Penguin paperback is one of them, found recently in Oxfam.

I’m developing a bit of a weakness for these forty-plus-year-old Penguin paperbacks with their orange spines and well-thumbed pages.  You know they’ve been loved before, indulged and enjoyed.  Sometimes there’s an inscription, in faded blue fountain pen ink perhaps, that teases you to wonder more about their previous lives on bookshelves you’ll never know.  As with my beautiful early copy of ‘Absolute Beginners’ which I wrote about in a previous post, this rather wonderfully worn and jaundiced 1966 edition of ‘Exile and The Kingdom’ just has that certain something (that certain ‘je ne sais quoi’…)  So much has been published about Albert Camus -  journalist, author, philosopher, pacifist, Nobel Prize winner for Literature, and a good deal more - it seems extraneous for me to write a lot here but I have to say that on starting this collection of his short stories I am hooked, and keen to read the rest of his work.

I especially like the theme of exile in these stories, the plight of those who feel alone or that they don't fit in some way, be it physically, psychologically or spiritually.  In these short and fairly simple tales, Camus depicts, amongst others,  a French woman in Algeria feeling isolated not only by her surroundings but also by her passionless marriage, an Arab prisoner who has been transferred to a desert outpost before his delivery to prison, and a group of men returning to their factory after being on strike.  Camus satisfyingly and skilfully evokes both emotion and environment with great power; I’m looking forward to reading them all.

I’ve enjoyed finding out more about Camus and his life.  There are some rock’n’roll connections which tickle my fancy too - The Manic Street Preachers were open about his influence (and Nicky Wire dedicated the song ‘Motorcycle Emptiness’ to him), Mark E Smith named his band The Fall after a Camus novel, the Cure’s song ‘Killing An Arab’ was described by Robert Smith as being “…a short poetic attempt at condensing my impression of the key moments in ‘L'Étranger’”.  And, as was pointed out to me recently, the philosopher does bear a bit of a resemblance to Joe Strummer…

Oh, I love how 50p spent in a charity shop can take you down a little road of cultural education – an even better way to help you work, rest and play than any piece of chocolate confectionary.

And if you can spot the rather tenuous connection to this, award yourself a Mars Bar (you could even make it a king-size one).

"In the depth of winter I finally learned that there was in me an invincible summer" Albert Camus

Shoes and handbags?

I’m not a shoes and handbags kinda woman at all, in spite of having a bit of a fetish for nice boots (as posted earlier), but I was going through my old portfolio again and came across these pictures I’d drawn in 1981 which reminded me of just what kind of shoes and handbags I possessed at the time.  So I’m just going to indulge that memory for a moment. 

The shoes were unearthed in a charity shop (naturally) and were possibly ‘60s.  Very uncomfortable of course (probably the wrong size to be honest but how we suffer for our art…)  And the handbag I remember well for being fabulously tacky with its silky leopard-print panel and the rest in shiny black patent  (clearly something of a penchant for shiny black patent has stayed with me since.)  Note the cigarette box poking out – Silk Cut by the look of it – I didn’t smoke for long but it was one of those things that so many students in my year seemed to do.  We even had a pet name for them:-  ‘oolies’ (not ‘oilies’ as in ‘oily rags: fags’ but definitely ‘oolies’ for some reason).  The college stairwells and lobbies used to stink of our Silk Cut and Rothmans, and occasionally something stronger too. (In the studios themselves, the smell of fixative spray and cow gum was enough to give you more than any nicotine or herbal high.)

Fashion-wise this was a great era for an impoverished student (though I was fortunate to be undertaking further education at a time when grants were the norm. Yes, we were actually given money to study and we didn't have to pay it back...)  I’d moved on from being predominantly punk by that time (and the patience it takes to put egg-white in your hair every day runs out eventually) - enjoying a wider range of music and clothes, the latter mostly being hunted out from charity shops which at that time were a fantastic and exceptionally cheap source of unusual old items, because so few people were interested in anything vaguely vintage or anti-fashion, it seemed.  And they didn’t have that overpowering smell of industrial-strength washing powder then, either…  I remember finding a black and pink dress with a  scenes of Paris print on it (oh, how I’d love that now) and with hair up in a Pebbles-type top-knot, (minus the bone – although chicken bones did feature a short while later during the tribal/goth/Southern Death Cult years, to be expanded on another time perhaps), lacy tights, the snakeskin slingbacks, plenty of black eye make-up, a plastic ring from a Christmas cracker and an old man’s cardigan to top it all off, the overall look must have been not unlike one of Diane Arbus’ photographic subjects or an extra from 'Summer Holiday' who'd got dressed in the dark.   Great escapism in a year remembered for (amongst many other unsavoury things) Peter Sutcliffe, the inauguration of Ronald Reagan, and Bucks Fizz winning the Eurovision Song Contest…

I was probably listening to this at the time too…