meish dot org: life, unfolding

I am not a sport-loving person, but I make one rather large exception every few years for the Olympics and - more specifically - the winter Olympics.

It started in the early eighties.

In 1984, I watched Torvill & Dean’s winning Sarajevo ice dance performance, and was enchanted.

Inspired by their performance, my older brother and I decided to recreate the performance on the slippy tiled floor of our hallway. We swooshed about in socks, and he grabbed my hands and told me to dive through his legs. At no point did he specify that I should attempt this manoevre feet-first, and the resulting broken nose was a humiliating reminder of the universal folly of letting oneself be cajoled into doing stupid things by elder siblings.

Around the same time - and not coincidentally - I started going ice-skating every Saturday at Queensway ice rink in Bayswater, with my friend Jane. If we got there early enough, we could be first to carve up the smooth surface after the Rolba Zamboni had trundled across the ice. For ten minutes of every hour, they would pump out disco music through the rink speakers which we could dance to in a shambolic sort of way. I couldn’t afford lessons, and so taught myself to do wobbly backwards skating and slow, clumsy spins.

But no matter - I had a pinky-purple leotard-like lycra dress with silver glittery raindrops on it and a skirt which flared out when I twizzled around, even if I couldn’t afford the proper thick skaters’ tights, and had to do with Pretty Polly instead. The cafe there served hot chips with vinegar, and I think I even had a birthday party there on year. Maybe my tenth or eleventh?

This was also around the same time that we got a home computer - a Dragon 32, which was terrible for just about everything - but a couple of years later, we finally got a family computer that could do good stuff.

And by good stuff, I mean games.

And by games, I mean more than just text-based adventures (as good as the H2G2 text game was).

Specifically, I mean Winter Games (Epyx, I think), which was the height of computer gaming brilliance at the time, rendered in woeful graphics and required the player to left-right-left-right-left-right to cross country ski or speed skate; leftleftleftleftrightrightrightrightright on the bobsled and luge; time your smacking of the space bar perfectly to hit the targets as your cross-hairs wobbled in the biathlon; mash various combinations of keys to produce camel toe loops and triple salco stunts (whatever they were) in the figure skating, all performed to a jangly 8-bit rendition of “Waltz of the Flowers” from “The Nutcracker Suite”.

[in German, but you get a great sense of the gameplay]

The game(s) also included a ski-jump simulation. You set off from the top of an impossibly steep slope by hitting the space bar, then hit it again at the bottom to “take off”, then once more to land in an upright position. Not exactly tricky, but sort of puzzling. Why would someone even want do do such a thing? Most perplexing.

In the years that followed, I got into the habit of watching Ski Sunday, which my family were completely bemused by - we were not a ski-holiday type of clan - but tolerated nevertheless.

I just liked watching people do technically complicated things in a seemingly effortless way. I liked the fact it was a solo pursuit, not a team thing. It focused the attention - and the performance pressure. There were brilliant interpersonal battles over hundredths of seconds, and occasional spectacular spills and tumbles. Plus it all happened in stunning apline snowy scenery, with spectators bundled in multiple layers of fleece, sounding cowbells. What’s not to like?

In 1988, I watched the winter Olympics from Calgary, mainly for the figure skating and downhill skiing, if I’m honest, but it was the ski-jumping that got me hooked. I hadn’t realised that the slope was so big and the men and women competing her basically flying. How cool! Can anyone have a go? Where do I sign up? Answer: not in west London.

That was the year that Finn Matti Nykänen won gold medals in both ski-jumping events.

I cut out pictures of a man in flight and stuck them on my bedroom wall. What an idol.

I hadn’t kept up with his colourful career since then, but it transpires that he’s become quite the tragic once-successful now-struggling sporting characte - the George Best of ski-jumping, only more so.

This excellent article by Barney Ronay contains a glimpse of the man behind the headlines, and is definitely worth a read, if only because any article with a standfirst like Matti Nykänen was Finland’s greatest sportsman, winner of four Olympic golds. Since then he has stabbed someone in a finger-pulling contest, worked for a sex phoneline – and found God - surely deserves further attention.

It also provides insight into how Nykänen remains a national hero of sorts, in his native Finland.

Nobody in Finland is excusing Nykänen’s worst transgressions; but it is perhaps to their credit that Finns appear willing to forgive this strangely home-made, ne’er-do-well kind of national hero. Finland is fascinated by the turbulence of his decline, but also sympathetic to his plight.

There was even a sense of a Nykänen revival in train before his latest explosion. In the autumn of 2007 he came out of retirement, then won the ski-jumping-for-veterans International Masters Championship the following year. And last year he moved, tentatively, into a new career as a celebrity chef.

[...]

Perhaps it is this wistful quality that has endeared Nykänen to his people: the man-child ex-superstar athlete with his look of rampaging bewilderment, his middle-aged puppy fat, and his inability to engage sensibly with the world beyond the icy slope and the jump ramp.

Fascinating story. Complete character. Unbelievable sport.

So, in short, the summer Olympics are good and everything, but it’s the winter Olympics which really get me excited. It contains so many more sports and disciplines that I’d like to have a go at myself. Curling! Biathlon! Luge FFS! Who wouldn’t want to have a go at the luge, really?

OK, maybe not. But I’ll certainly be watching it and all the other sports on telly when the Vancouver winter Olympics start in a little over a month’s time.

I. Cannot. Wait.

More snow! More crazy sports! More skintight lycra! More cowbell!

When we were young, we had a shoebox, filled with badges - cheap trophies and souvenirs of places visited and events participated in, or illustrating a particular epoch or mood.

From memory, there was:

• at least one Blue Peter badge
• a big one with a picture of a screw on it (the significance of which completely eluded me until I was much older)
• a yellow Guardian one with the slogan “have breakfast with a friend”
• one with the Laxey Wheel on it
• one from the Puffin Club
• a gorilla one from LondonZoo
• a brown one from Beamish, with a silhouette of a coal cart on it
• one from the GLC (I think) which said “I’m a Capital Kid”
• one with tiny print in the middle saying “if you can read this, you’re too close”
• several indicating that bombs and nuclear things in general were bad ideas

and so on.

Every now and again, we’d get the box down from the top of the wardrobe and sift through it, ritualistically rummaging for favourites, the familiar sound of rustling tin, scent of metal and prick of unleashed pins always a slightly painful thing, but adding up to a sense memory which lingers.

Over the years, we gradually gathered more badges, which didn’t make it into the box, but instead were stuck on bags, coats, pinboards, where they communicated our passions, affiliations and personalities to the world around us. We didn’t weat badges and buttons because they were aesthetically pleasing, but because they said something about the person wearing them, acting as a social shorthand.
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Home moves are traumatic - for a month before the big day, you live in a netherworld of boxes and packing tape and realising that you have far, far more books than you thought along with a nagging worry that you should probably take this opportunity to sort through some stuff rather than packing it and having to deal with it at the other end.

You must not succumb to this temptation, however dire the need. Because you know, as we all do, that as soon as you start doing through the contents of that drawer - whether it was stuffed with clothes, papers, or miscellaneous things which you might need some day, like bulldog clips, AAA batteries, dice and broken crayons - in an attempt to determine what needs to go to charity, what needs to be thrown away and what needs to be organised properly, packed away and moved to the new house, you will find yourself distracted and that will be the end of your productive packing for a while. Whole days, even, depending how much you’ve got crammed into the drawer.

Instead, go for the mercenary approach - sweep great armfuls of crap into gaping boxes, then quickly slap them shut and label them. Guerilla tactics. Call it an intervention, if you must. It’s the only way to go.

Years ago, (erk, just realised it was fifteen years ago. I feel old.) when leaving the Canadian college campus that had been my home for the previous two years, and aware of the fact that everything I boxed up would be shipped surface mail back to the UK, I employed a rational method to packing: duvet covers/sheets etc in one box, books and tapes in another, study notes, diaries and photos in another and so on. One by one, with weeks still to go until the end of term, I carefully packed each box, taped it shut, labelled it and took it along to the post office inside the Pharmasave in the nearest town to the college.

As the time until departure got shorter, and my emotional turmoil at leaving more pronounced, I have to say that my approach to packing became somewhat more haphazard, too, culminating in my realisation the day before I had to leave campus, that my desk was still covered in miscellaneous stuff that I’d been meaning to go through and sort out. With no time left and no desire to go through it all then while there was so much farewelling to be done, and a room-mate who’d just said she was heading over to the post office, I grabbed a box, put my arm across the desk and swept everything on it into the box’s gaping maw. On went the parcel tape. On went the address sticker. Into the waiting arms of my room mate. And it was done.

I got home to London a few weeks later, and a few weeks after that, the surface mailed boxes started trickling in, arriving at periods of a few days.

The first boxes were easy to deal with - having been so organised all those miles and time ago, I just needed to open them up and dispatch the contents to an appropriate corner of my mum’s house. No bother. It was easy to be emotionally detached about them, because they held only stuff.

And then, one morning, a box arrived, one with an address label on all skewy. I opened it up and fell apart. That box, the last box, contained raw memories, in a way that I couldn’t have packaged up, and that I’d forgotten about. That box, a jumble of collected shells and half-burnt incense sticks and notes from friends passed in class, and hard-chewed pens used in exams, and sketches made on beaches, and photos of drunken nights - that box summoned all the memories that I thought I’d left behind when I left the college. The smell of it - it smelt like my college room. The fingertip-rough feel of the heavy sketch-paper my friend had used to leave me a note one day. Even the stupid north american three-hole file paper which didn’t fit any of my binders back in the UK - it all felt very foreign and utterly familiar at once.

Anyway, I digress.

Despite the fact that I’m leaving this job soon, I’ve moved office along with everyone else, this last week. Because I knew I was leaving, it made packing all the easier - I resolved to bring nothing at all to my new desk (apart from laptop), and the giant red-and-grey teacrate provided for my use remained empty. It was quite liberating, actually, emptying the pedestal drawers of years of accumulated branded tschotchkes and important documents (which transpired not to be so important after all).

Against my better judgement and advice above, I waded through the stuff which surrounded me, recycled or gave away as much as I could, took home a small backpack full of things I couldn’t quite get rid of (an award which weighs about as much as a gold brick, some t-shirts, a few CDs, my headphones, phone charger and a stress-ball) and chucked the rest. Empty desk.

I think that alone is going to make leaving much easier. I packed up at the same time everyone else was doing it, and the desk that I’ve been assigned in the new building holds no memory or attachment for me - it’s just another desk in an open-plan office, one which is out of the way because everyone knows I’m going, and one which I’ll be vacating soon.

Of course, there’s some irony - or perhaps kismet? - in the fact that with no time to enjoy it, and nothing to make it feel homely, I’ve now got the best-situated desk I’ve had in nearly 9 years with the same company, with views across the rooftops of West London to Wembley and Trellick Tower and the BBC. Ah well.

In 1989, I made a birthday card for the second red nose day, and ran around collecting signatures and money for it, with visions of being able to present the card live on air - you know, like they do with those big charity cheques.

(In this archive photo, above, you can see me aged 15 - I think Red Nose Day was actually on my birthday that year, which is why the birthday card seemed appropriate), my friend Melissa holding the card, and my sister Anna (who would have been 12), raising money by being sponsored to wear her uniform backwards for the day. As you do…)

After school, a couple of friends and I tramped down to BBC television centre in White City (about 5 minutes away from school) where we hung around the front gate, trying to blag our way in to the telethon/live show/star-studded extravaganza.

It didn’t work, and a chauffeur-driven car containing Rik Mayall nearly ran over my foot.

Eventually, we despondently sloped off home, and I had to persuade my mum to write a cheque for the charity, in exchange for a carrier bag jangling with pound coins and other loose change.

Happily, since then it’s become much easier to give money to Comic Relief - and this year, you can do it from the comfort of your keyboard, and get a funny book into the bargain.

Pop on over to shaggyblogstories.co.uk and order a special edition book, compiled of 100 funny bits by british bloggers including the great, the good and the gigglesome -people you’ve heard of, people whose blogs you read all the time (including, er, me) and people you haven’t yet met. Compiled in just a week, all profits after Lulu takes its cut go to Comic Relief.

Go on. Do it.

So when I was in primary school, somewhere in multicultural inner West London, every year we had an inclusive end-of-term Christmas play. We didn’t do a nativity, because this was seen as too alienating for the majority of kids, so the teachers used to devise a performance which

a) included all 110 children in the school
b) contained music and
c) made some sort of vague sense while
d) not being about the nativity, specifically (specivity?)

To their credit, they did very well.

I only remember a few of the themes. One year was “Around the World” in which groups of children in vague costume came on and sang different songs or did little skits about different countries and cultures. I was a Mexican, singing “South of the Border”. Make of that what you will.

Another year was All Kinds of Christmas - lots of newish carols and christmas songs in cowboy/calypso/north american indian style, probably from songbooks written by earnest middle-class music teachers - oh yes, like Merrily to Bethlehem (there’s an updated version but it doesn’t ahve to cover I remember from childhood).

My favourite year was, I think, my final one, which took the theme of the Twelve Days of Christmas, I think going on the theory that 1 + 2 + 3 + 4 + 5 + 6 + 7 + 8 + 9 + 10 + 11 + 12 = 78, plus a dozen narrators, a handful of people singing the song in between each act would take it to a hundred, and no-one would notice another ten or so knocking about on stage at various points. I mean, when there are twelve lords a-leaping, who’s going to mind a thirteenth?

Anyway, this was my favourite year because I got to be one of the eleven ladies dancing - and if I recall correctly, we all came on dressed as flapper girls, did the Charleston, and then broke out into some moves to Chaka Khan’s I feel for you - in fact, looking something like the moves in her video for the song, only, you know, dressed as flappers and without as much rhythm and with less body-popping - because no-one wants to see a chubby eleven year old do the wave.

Nice. Well, this was 1985, after all.

So the point of sharing all this is that at the very end of the performance, the entire school would troop onto the stage, one class at a time (oldest at the back, kindergarten at the front) with the whole structure creaking under our combines weight. And as we tramped on, we’d be singing (well, breathily shouting) We wish you a merry christmas, only with the emPHAsis on WISH and CHRIS - We WISH you a merry CHRISmas - and also inserting some line about bringing good tidings to “you and your king”. Didn’t we all?

Anyway, all this nonsense is by way of saying that this blog is my stage, I’m WISHing you a very merry CHRIStmas, and I’m off to spend a few days body-popping to some mid eighties r&bhop while dressed as a cowboy flapper.

Not really about the last bit.

I’m trying (and struggling) to find an image of the poster that haunted municipal swimming pools all over the land in the seventies and eighties. You’d think someone would have done the world a favour and stuck it on tinternet, but no.

It was white, with black line drawings (cartoons) and illustrated various banned activities, some of which we’ve been trying to remember in the office today.

So far we’ve recalled:

• No heavy petting
• No running poolside
• No ducking
• No bombing

…but there must be more. Help!

All my pets:

1. A rabbit, when we lived in Nigeria. Can’t remember what it was called, but I do remember this: we went on holiday once, and asked the neighbour to take care of it while we were away. When we got back, no rabbit. We asked the neighbour and he said “Yes, I took care of it, like you asked. Thank you, it was very tasty.”

2. Another rabbit, this time in London, called Tango, which I think we may have inherited from an elderly neighbour. Old and grumpy (rabbit, not neighbour, though who knows?), he would run around you in rings and then nip your ankles. Gave me my first experience of construction, as he kept breaking out of his hutch, so we had to keep shoring it up with chicken wire and wood. Died at a ripe old age, and was found stretched out and stiff in the garden. I remember being fascinated by how long he was.

3. A guinea pig, the first pet I named. I called her Debbie. I must have been 7 or so. Snuffled a lot and once climbed up inside my favourite jumper and got her fat head stuck at the narrow end of my batwing sleeve. Damn, the early eighties were cruel.

4. Gerbils. There were two of them both male, or both female (there was a lot of debate), an albino one which was mine, and a sandy brown one, which was my brother’s. Mine, I called Snow White, D’s was Ghengis Khan, which probably speaks volumes. We got them one saturday afternoon from a pet shop in Shepherd’s Bush, and I remember distinctly being told how to pick them up by the tail. When we got home, I picked Snow White up by the tail, only I only had hold of the very end of the tail, which promptly fell off. I was traumatised. Though not, on reflection, as traumatised as she must have been. They lived happy lives until a friend of the family came to stay, bringing her carcat, Brindle, with her. One day, we got home from school to find carnage. The door ajar, the cage knocked over and gaping emptily, Snow White mauled and bloody underneath the guestroom bed, the cat grooming proudly on the stairs and Ghengis nowhere to be found.

5. A hamster, which I named Daley Thompson after his habit of running, constantly, as well as swinging across the roof of the cage. A natural athlete, Daley did all the cute Hamstery things you might expect, and eventually got old and wobbly, and needed to be put down. In fact, we were in the vet, waiting for it to be done when someone came in saying they’d just found…

6. …another hamster, walking down the Great Western Road, with a limp. Hardy little bugger. The vet said we could take him home, with his broken leg in a splint, but he might not live very long. We named him Sid Vicious after his punk lifestyle, and the fact that he was hard as nails, gnawing away at everything in sight, eating his way through his wheel, cage bars, the plastic bottom of the cage, the water bottle that poked through the bars, his food bowl…everything. Although he lived for much longer than expected, unsurprisingly he died of a stomach ulcer a couple of years later.

7. Two more gerbils, principally my sister’s responsibility, as they’d come from her friend. I think they were called Sugar and Spice, and they were only with us a very short while before turning on each other and one ate the other, and then died him(or her)self. Sugar and Spice, not very nice.

8. A black and white cat, Bobbins, rescued from the local shelter. I think he real name was David, but that’s a silly name for a cat, so Bobbins it was (Bobbins is local North Derbyshire slang for bollocks, which you might say when you drop something, ie “Oh, BOBBINS!” or as a substitute for rubbish “He’s talking a load of bobbins”). He was a tough old sod, adventurous and playful. He got hit by a car, and walked home, collapsing only when he was inside the house. He got his jaw wired and a brain operation, and was never quite the same again (he ran with a list to the side, and couldn’t quite shut his mouth) but still lovable and silly all the same.

9. Another cat, Poppy, black and small and very clingy. She was around for four years or so, before being run over when I was living in Bolivia. Very sad.

10. While all the above were family pets, two years ago, P and I got our own cat, Pickle (because she’s the colours of Branston), rescued from Hounslow Animal Welfare as a stray when she was about 2 years old. She’s a tortie, quite little and neat. She’s very vocal, too, chattering away merrily whenever you enter the room. She was a bit shy at first, but now she’s a total lap cat, often sitting on my knee when I’m at the computer, plus she wanders into the bedroom at dawn and curls up next to my shoulder and rumbles away. Very sweet, and totally gorgeous. I admit, I’m a bit dappy about Pickle, as you may be able to tell.

Addendum: May not count, but for the sake of completeness….

11. When I was in primary school, we (kids) used to spend a big chunk of every summer with friends of the family who lived on a farm in the Yorkshire Dales. They had a dog - Playdy (no idea where the name came from, though for some reason I have the words Play-Dog-Digger in my ehad). So, many happy summers spent yomping through prickly hay fields and tumbling down hills and splashing through freezing becks. I can still remember the very specific smell of wet dog. Not altogether unpleasant…

12. In Bolivia, the flat (well, outhouse) which I rented in Cochabamba came with two canine residents - Oso (trans: bear), a big mean-looking but ultimately dim German Shepherd, and Mili, a tiny little beagle puppy. They spent a lot of time in and around my little shack, and I spent a lot of time with them, feeding them, playing with them and mostly trying to convince them not to bark and wake up the family whose house I lived behind (and who owned them) when I crept in after midnight. Dirty stop-out.

13. Next door’s cat. Come on, we’ve all done it, don’t look at me in that disapproving way. Our next door neighbours for a year or so had two cats, one of which was very adventurous. They had stupid names, though - Jazz and Mambo, IIRC. Anyway, Jazz (who we ended up calling Beardy, because, well, you can guess) took to breaking in through open windows and availing himself of our hospitality on a regular basis. You know, just hanging out in the kitchen and so on. This was possibly because the neighbours (identikit SW Londoners called Sam and Alex or something) didn’t have a catflap, so left their food out for them all day. And when it rained, well…. you can see where this is going. Plus the food was often nicked by other cats and foxes etc, plus Lucy and James (or whatever) were out a lot, plus we were naturally touched when little Beardy eyed us up as surrogate parents food-providers. So yeah, eventually we broke down and bought a small box of dry cat food - only a small one, I swear - and gave him the odd one or two. But no more. And we were just trying not to be cruel, I swear. We weren’t at all trying to steal him. Honest. Ahem.

(Originally posted a chunk of this on Vox)

Or at least, that’s what we called it in 1983.

Over on her site, Anna writes about our musical youth (that’s our youthful exposure to music, not these guys specifically, though we did have the album, IIRC)

Ah, Now That’s What I Call Music. The one with the pig in sunglasses on the cover. I must confess that I actually have our copy of this tape, though no way to listen to it these days.

The other one she mentions wasn’t called Hits of 83, it was a two volume effort called Superchart 83, one with a yellow cover, and one with a neon pink cover. I have the yellow one.

The tracklisting to the one I have - the yellow one - is:

A.
1. I don’t want to dance - Eddie Grant
2. Buffalo Soldier - Bob Marley and the Wailers
3. The Crown - Gary Byrd (12″ version)
4. Rockit - Herbie Hancock
5. Waiting for a train - Flash and the pan
6. Can Can - Bad Manners
7. War Baby - Tom Robinson
B
1. Blue hat for a blue day - Nick Heyward
2. 68 Guns - The Alarm
3. Kissing with Confidence - Will Powers
4. Steppin out - Joe Jackson
5. You don’t need someone new - The Lotus Eaters
6. Never gonna give you up - Musical Youth
7. No Answers - Debbie Aimee
8. Love in itself - Depeche Mode
9. Superman - Black Lace

The tracklisting to the pink one definitely included Men at Work (Down Under), Paul Young, Joboxers , Galaxy, Yazoo (Only You - or maybe Diary), Ryan Paris (Words), Toto (Africa), Freeez, KC and the Sunshine Band and Bonnie Tyler (Total Eclipse of the Heart)

The tracklisting to NTWICM, had some duplication with the above (hey, it was 1983, there wasn’t much music around) and is:

1. You Can’t Hurry Love - Phil Collins
2. Is There Something I Should Know? - Duran Duran
3. Red Red Wine - UB40
4. Only For Love - Limahl
5. Temptation - Heaven 17
6. Give It Up - K.C. and the Sunshine Band
7. Double Dutch - Malcolm McClaren
8. Total Eclipse Of The Heart - Bonnie Tyler
9. Karma Chameleon - Culture Club
10. The Safety Dance - Men Without Hats
11. Too Shy - Kajagoogoo
12. Moonlight Shadow - Mike Oldfield
13. Down Under - Men At Work
14. Hey You (Rock Steady Crew)- Rock Steady Crew
15. Baby Jane - Rod Stewart
16. Wherever I Lay My Hat - Paul Young
17. Candy Girl - New Edition
18. Big Apple - Kajagoogoo
19. Let’s Stay Together - Tina Turner
20. Fascination Human League
21. New Song - Howard Jones
22. Please Don’t Make Me Cry - UB40
23. Tonight I Celebrate My Love - Peabo Bryson and Roberta Flack
24. They Don’t Know - Tracy Ullman
25. Kissing With Confidence - Will Powers
26. That’s All - Genesis
27. The Love Cats - The Cure
28. Waterfront - Simple Minds
29. The Sun And The Rain - Madness
30. Victims - Culture Club

Future retro-music-querying-search-engine-arivees: this is my gift to you.

Just once.

I was six. We lived in an Edwardian semi on a leafy avenue in North Kensington, two stories at the front, three at the back, with a cherry tree facing the street and a long garden wild with bramble and butterfly bushes to the rear.

Our bedroom was at the back, my sister and I. It was square, with enormous blue seventies flowers on the wallpaper, and although the end of the decade was fast approaching, the flowers remained well into the eighties, after I’d moved to my own room at the front of the house, a room which itself featured a glaring orange and gold intertwining vines print. What was it about the seventies and gigantic, garish nature?

Our bedroom was the scene of plentiful creativity - we were forever dressing up, putting on plays for each other and anyone who would watch, inventing and telling and enacting elaborate sagas involving various rag dolls, “souvenir of…” culturally-attired dolls (brought by well-meaning visitors from overseas) and ancient, homemade wonky-limbed knitted stuffed bears.

Once, in summertime, I made it snow indoors by sending plumes of talcum powder into the air, coating the entire room with a thin layer of scented powder and turning the air thick and misty as my little sister sat in the middle of the room with white eyelashes, alternately laughing and coughing. It took us ages to get the last of the powder from the cracks in the floorboards, and for months afterwards, every time we took the dressing-up clothes out for a play, there’d be a cloud of scented mist hanging over us.

There was a big sash window in the back wall, overlooking the garden, three storeys below, and beyond the peach and crabapple trees that marked the end of the brambles, the seven foot wall over which we used to vault to gain access to the magical, unexpected half-acre meadow which lay beyond. Imagine that: in the middle of London, a meadow, wild with thistles and long grass and flowers, with a family of escaped rabbits running wild and an area of grass just big enough for a decent game of rounders. Imagine how perfect, how magical.

When standing at the window, and looking straight ahead, I could see between the roofs of two houses across the meadow a glimpse of the Westway, in the distance. As I backed away from the window, in the direction of the door, the framed picture of the Westway across the rooftops appeared to increase in size. As I walked towards the window again, it shrank: my first introduction to perspective.

One day, in summer, the family was sitting out in the back garden. My sister was probably splashing in a paddling pool. My brother was probably climbing the peach tree. I was probably alternating between the two, or tunnelling into the prickly brambles to create a hidden, leafy cave. My mum was with someone, I remember - a friend, or one of her sisters - sat on a picnic blanket and watching us play.

For some reason, I decided to go inside - running along the side passage, up the stairs by the back door into the kitchen, through the hall, up the main stairs and into our bedroom. I don’t remember what I was doing, or why, but I hauled open the sash window in the bedroom, and pushed at the windowbox on the ledge, trying to make room enough for me to be able to sit on the windowsill alongside it, so I could dangle my legs over the edge and wave at my family below.

The windowbox went tumbling down three storeys, and crashed in an earthy, pottery, flowery mess in the garden below, mere feet from where my mother was sitting. She looked up, horrified to see me on the second floor, frozen with one leg out of the window and a guilty look on my face.

I have never known how she managed to do it, but within a second she was behind me in the bedroom, hauling me back in through the window and onto her knee, her hand swift and smart on my bum.

Thwack. One. Don’t ever.

Thwack. Two. Do that.

Thwack. Three. Again.

Then I burst into tears. And so did she.

And she never did it again. And neither did I.

CBBC reports on the potential demise of Britain’s most inappropriately named teengirlfun magazine.

What will all the 12 year olds do for reading matter now?

Or don’t they read these days?

Or can’t they read these days?

Related: how Just Seventeen helped me develop a girly crush.