Reminiscing

On Tuesday morning I entered a real time warp. George and Chris, a school friend and his wife who I see for a couple of hours every couple of years called in on their way home from seeing Chris’s sister who is very poorly. (Thinking of you, Margaret.) Add to that a joint schoolfriend, Paul, who (apart from funerals) I haven’t seen for nearly twenty years. I’m not sure if our parents’ funerals count since they were hardly times for swopping fun stories.


But his morning the three of us – much to the amusement of Chris and Partner-who-loves-tea – took ourselves back forty to fifty years to some of the mischief we got up to in the 1960s. I won’t detail too much of that here – I wouldn’t like to be blackmailed by my children or any future grandchildren!

We reminisced about football matches we’d been to together (all Liverpool supporters, of course) including the wonderful foggy match when we won 9-0 but half the goals were scored at the other end and we couldn’t see them. The banter between the Kop and the Anfield Road end was hilarious – “Tell us who scored?” was responded to by the name of the scorer which then generated a round of “Thank you very much for the information” to the tune of “Thank you very much for the Aintree Iron”.

 I wonder if any of us could have foreseen our futures when we held this mock seance in 1967 - with me taking advantage of my new camera with a ten second timer.

One little gem raised a real laugh on Tuesday - a clockwork mouse. We used to send one down the counter in the chemistry lab until one day the teacher turned just as it had left one person and before the next could hide it. It was confiscated. A few years later I met the teacher and mentioned he still had my clockwork mouse. “Perk of the job”, he laughed. When I saw this one in a shop I couldn’t resist buying it as a memento of good, if mischievous, times.

It was good to see Paul and George and I don’t for one moment believe the two girls when they said they never got up to any mischief? Would you?