Number Thirteen, high level cisterns and SPAM

I discovered an odd, very odd, coincidence today. While verifying my princely UK Lottery win of £10.00 (I'm off to the Bahamas next week to start my retirement:), I decided to look at the frequency with which individual balls (49 of them) come out of the drum. Guess which one has the lowest score, ie appears least frequently? Yep, thirteen! Spooky, no? And don't mock! I don't generally gamble but..........I'm only doing what banks do :) And I, at least for now, can afford to lose! Unlike BoA, Citicorp, Lehman Brothers et al.

"You can write magnificent books to teach children like mine about a better day-- well, at least it sounds better."

It does doesn't it? Childhood seen through the rose tinted spectacles of nostalgia now and innocence then. Most people, unless they were abused or subject to real poverty or hardship of the 'going hungry all the time' variety generally have fond memories of their childhood. In some ways it's to be expected, we all have a habit of screening off, conveniently forgetting, the bad bits unless they were bad enough to traumatise at the time and even then, the resilience of the child's mind can often, over time, come to terms with what would be much more difficult for an adult to deal with. Less introspection and to a large degree responsibility at the time and the high degree of plasticity in the developing brain allow the child to abandon 'painful' neural pathways and create new ones in a way which seems much easier for them than for an adult.

Even the minor hardships don't seem quite so bad when I look back on them. Getting up at 2am in the morning, wrapping your overcoat around you, creeping downstairs, out of the back door, down the little side return and taking a leak behind a door that was (deliberately) six inches too short at the top and bottom, while the wind howled and (in 1963) the snow lay thick on the ground and you had to stand on tip toe to reach the chain, which you pulled, to flush the high level cistern. It was a rotten inconvenience, it took ages to get warm again, but as a small child, everyone I knew did the same thing. It was only later when I joined the ranks of middle class kids, did I realise that you could actually have the toilet inside the house! And some people did!

So ubiquitous were the high level cisterns and their chain operated levers that even to this day 'pulling the chain' is the accepted term for flushing a toilet in these parts, even though 99% of cisterns are now lever or button operated. In a way it's funny because ever since I moved into my little Edwardian flat, built only a few years after the house I lived in as a child, I have wanted a high level cistern with a chain to pull. It just seems so right! However as they want 3 times the price of a low level cistern for a china high level one (the only kind they now make) I guess I'll stick with my water efficient low level one. Greener, anyhow.

And SPAM? Or worse, brawn! Little chopped up pieces of un-named parts of a pig suspended in some gelatinous substance that tasted even worse than the bits of chopped up pig unmentionables but was cheaper than SPAM (which was just more finely ground pig unmentionables without the jelly) and so was generally in the tea-time sandwiches on the day before pay day. It was SPAM the rest of the time, unless for a treat we got banana sandwiches. Corned beef for 'high tea' on Sunday and real ham, generally only at Christmas! The British working class was eating processed 'muck' long before the Big Mac or KFC arrived on these shores. Why do you think we were so susceptible? It was further compounded by the great British tradition of over boiling vegetables, passed down the generations from mother to daughter, of ensuring that what came out of the pot was as soft and nutrient free as it was possible for a cabbage or a carrot to be. Even peas were processed out of a tin! No wonder I'm stunted! I wasn't fed properly!

Just kidding, ma!

And heating? I have become so accustomed to central heating over the years that is an effort to remember what it was like to be cold most the time, night time trips to the toilet notwithstanding. In the early days, we had one coal fire, in the back room and that was it. Play in your bedroom? Not in bloody winter, you didn't, unless you wanted frostbite. We migrated to a single gas fire by the time I was about 8 years old I think but it was trying to heat 224 cubic metres of air in the face of enormous competition from single glazed, ill fitting, Victorian, sash windows along one wall. Even the curtains at the windows didn't help, they'd billow out at the bottom in the airstream and the foot above the floor would like as not be 20 degrees colder than the upper part of the room. No, the only way to keep warm was to lie in front of the fire on your stomach and then get moaned at for the red marks adorning your legs :)

But then there were compensations. No constant parental worrying about abduction or abuse when the kids went off to the park with their mates. A simple "don't talk to strangers" was all that was needed to ensure compliance. I well remember the early evening a car pulled alongside me, I was ten or so, no doubt they wanted to ask directions. I did not stop to find out, I ran so fast home (about a mile and a half) that I practically collapsed on the doorstep.

No worrying about gangs of 8 year olds, high on glue, roaming the streets, disembowelling your first born for the fun of it. No off licences selling alcohol to the way under aged.

No worrying about whether little Pauline in the next street was going to get 'knocked up' playing doctors and nurses because your idiot of a son had finally worked out what the drawings in the public lavatories were all about. Actually, my mother never had to worry on that score; I was seventeen before a friend told me that you didn't stick your finger in their ear to make babies, although since he didn't actually tell me what you did do, I was really none the wiser and it was some years before I realised that God had equipped me with a true multi-function device, a natural Swiss Army Knife.

But in truth, the best of all? We had hope! Forged in the heat of Harold Wilson's technological revolution, accustomed to relatively full employment, a rapidly changing society, we could look forward to a productive, modestly affluent existence where all we had to do was work hard and the things our parents never enjoyed would be ours, even the under achievers. I think I detect that dwindling among large chunks of the population in recent years. No wonder we're nostalgic. Don't they deserve the same chances we were given?