Train Of Thought

I'm sure we have all done it, drifted away from whatever we began thinking about, our train of thought meandering down some obscure, reflective branch line, diverted into mental sidings or ending up derailed entirely. On such occasions I often end up wondering, how did I get here? Subsequently picking apart my thought processes and retracing my mental journey leads me to return to whatever I was originally thinking about, marvelling at the leaps from one notion to another.

That isn't to say that any of this is especially profound: we aren't talking about stream of consciousness stuff a la James Joyce or Virginia Woolf here, more the sort of connected ideas that lead from making a mental shopping list to suddenly recalling in vivid detail some embarrassing event from one's schooldays. Have you ever noticed, by the way, that while you may have completely forgotten something that happened yesterday, you can recall in perfect and excruciating detail, an event that occurred thirty or more years ago that causes you to cringe as much today as it did at the time? No? Just me then.

Anyway, I digress. I was lying in bed the other morning, squinting blearily at the curtains, and noticed a pattern in the floral design that reminded me of a woman, in profile, wearing sunglasses.  This, in turn, made me recall the images that appeared in the wallpaper in my bedroom when I was very young. The paper was principally white but covered with random dots. By squinting at them from a certain angle, it was possible to discern shapes and pictures, like the little dog, or the old man bent over a walking stick. There were, however some dots in the wallpaper that the manufacturer was not responsible for, but rather were made by me. Beneath the wallpaper was a layer of Warmaline (for those of you unfamiliar with Warmaline, it is a white polystyrene veneer that provides insulation and reduces condensation: I am amazed it is still available, but apparently you can still buy it). Warmaline is only a couple of millimetres thick, but like popping bubble wrap, there is great pleasure to be had from pushing something pointy against it and feeling the resistance break. The nose cone of my Fireball XL5 toy was a particularly popular tool for performing this task, although I had to undertake this activity quite sparingly and in unobtrusive locations lest I incur the wrath of my parents.

Thinking about Warmaline - something I don't think I've done for four decades or more - led me to consider another popular household product from my childhood, viz Fablon. My Dad was quite keen on Fablon, and that is putting it mildly. The television, the case of which was a dull brown Bakelite, was covered immediately with a fetching oak pattern, as was the kitchen table, and a bookshelf that I made in woodwork at school. Basically, anything in the house that remained stationary for long enough risked being covered in sticky-back plastic.

This isn't it, but our kitchen table looked remarkably similar to this Fablon covered piece of furniture.

That reminds me that the Fablon covered kitchen table was where I was forced to do my homework by candlelight during the three-day week in the winter of 1974 when I huddled with my parents in the kitchen using the gas stove to provide some warmth.  I'm trying to imagine how school children could do that today, given their apparent total reliance on the computers and the internet. The kitchen table was also where I often worked myself up into a frenzy of frustration at my inability to build anything of any note from the Meccano set that my parents bought me. I think that of all the toys, books and games I was given as a child, that Meccano set was the most annoying and I have no doubt it was the one thing my Mum and Dad regretted buying over all others. I was rather more adept with Betta Bilda, however. Betta Bilda was the rival to Lego made by Airfix - probably better known for their construction kits of aeroplanes like the Spitfire, the Mustang and the Stuka - and I was a prolific builder with it; usually L-shaped bungalows for some reason.

The enforced use of the kitchen table to do my homework by candlelight thanks to the three day week reminds me of other random, minor hardships that most of us in Britain endured during the 1970's. There was a potato shortage one year that resulted in mashed and chipped potatoes being replaced on the school lunch menu by crisps: sausage and crisps is a peculiar meal.

Then there was a bread shortage, ameliorated in our household by the purchase of some bread making kits from a health food shop. These produced something that looked like bread, tasted vaguely like bread, but which had the texture of sponge cake; it was almost impossible to butter and disintegrated when you took a bite. When there was a milk shortage, I was immensely pleased with myself when I tracked some down in a shop in the City while I was working there, only to have my pleasure tempered more than somewhat on getting it home to discover that it was UHT milk - my first encounter with it - and despite it being just about tolerable in tea, we decided we would rather go without. It may have been the milk, or it may have been that the cups were never rinsed and dried properly that contributed to the odd taste of the coffee we had after lunch when I was in the sixth form at school. At the time I thought it tasted distinctly of Fairy Liquid, but more likely it was a combination of very cheap coffee and UHT milk, now I think about it again.

In the late 1970's - when I first started commuting to London - I habitually bought a newspaper in the morning to read on the train. At that time newspapers were printed with ink that would dye your hands black within seconds. By the time I arrived at work, I -and thousands of other people like me- looked like one had done a shift down t'pit! Obviously, this ink was immediately transferred to any other object one might come into contact with, so much so that the only other thing that I took to work - a paperback book - would be covered with black finger marks. To avoid this, I bought a plastic book protector from John Menzies in Cheapside. The shop is no longer there, and today, newspaper ink no longer comes off on your hands - well, not to the degree it once did anyway.

I looked for the woman wearing sunglasses in my curtains again this morning. She had gone. There was a small, red bird with a blue beak, though.