Monday memories: Christmas 1986

I’d been going out with Not Yet Husband for about two months. Notions of husbands couldn’t be further from my mind because my first term at university had finished and we were meeting for the first time on fresh turf: Covent Garden. Just us. Would we still like each other away from university?

(I just went to ask Husband if he had any fond memories of this trip. Readers, he had no memory of the momentous occasion. He looked hazy and said, ‘was it a big meet up in the Punch and Judy?’ ‘No,’ I said, ‘it was just us.’ ‘Oh. Did we have lunch in that place in the middle?’ I said, ‘you’re guessing aren’t you?’ He said, ‘well I have lots of memories of Covent Garden…’ I said, ‘but not this special one?’)

To be fair to the old bloke his faculties are probably going. He got glasses for the first time yesterday: reading glasses. At last I’m not the only one… When he got home from the glasses trip he did a bit of tidying. He ventured into the button box where he found a number of treasures. A tie pin (aw gawd, did I really fall for a man who wore a tie pin?); an ARP badge (air raid patrol) and a single earring of mine.

He remembered (vaguely) that these earrings had been purchased by him in our dating days (though he couldn’t put an exact date on it) during a trip to Covent Garden (where we might or might not have been with other people) and was distressed that he had only found one. (The other one was in my jewellery box; I had kept it for sentimental reasons in spite of its singleton status.)

We had wandered about Covent Garden market and saw these gorgeous earrings. They were expensive and we were students but Not Yet Husband told the girl he wanted them. To our horror, the expensive price tag was for a single earring only (damn that trendy Covent Garden) but by this time NYH was unable to back out.

Regular readers will know how much I like lizards. I have blogged about all sorts – monitor lizards here and here; a blue crested lizard here; various gecko visitors here and a skink here. But I thought the lizard fascination grew while I was in Thailand; apparently not.

I wonder what those two young people wandering around Covent Garden in Christmas 1986 would have thought if they’d been told what life had in store for them.

For scale these are about 1cm tall and wide. They are inserted from the back of the ear lobe.

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As a public humiliation tactic, each day I will show my progress (or otherwise) on my edit: page 31.

Memories

I didn’t go to the cinema as a child. Well, not much. I went once with a friend and her mother to see Bambi but I was very nervous because my friend had told me it would make me cry and I didn’t really know what this cinema thing was about and I didn’t want to be crying in public. (I wonder if this is why I’m as tough as old boots when it comes to sobbing through movies and books.)

I didn’t go to the cinema with my family until I was ten or eleven. I don’t know why. We went to the theatre but not the cinema.  It wasn’t as though it was banned; we just didn’t go. It means that I have vivid memories for the films I did see.

When I did finally go with my family we were on holiday, camping in Somerset. My memory tells me that we went to see Journey to the Centre of the Earth but research suggests it might have been The Land that Time Forgot or At the Earth’s Core, which came out in 1975 and 1976 respectively.  Anyway, we might as well have called it Journey to the Core where Time Forgot for the interest it held for me. This was not a film chosen for my benefit. I am the youngest of three; I had no delusions about my importance (not) in the family.

Then in 1978, at 12, I went to see Grease because I no longer had to be accompanied. The following year, four months before my fourteenth birthday I went to see Escape from Alcatraz. This was memorable for me as it had a certificate of AA - no one under 14 and I was terrified of getting caught.

We have always taken our children to the cinema. The first thing I took them to was the Barney film. Daughter didn’t make it past the sound test. And Son only made it past with fingers in his ears and his face in my arm.

When we first got to Thailand there were no film ratings. In October 2005 I took the children and a friend to see Wallace & Gromit in The Curse of the Were-Rabbit. The children were 9, 10 and 11. We had to sit through all sorts of horror trailers and just as I thought it was all over, the trailer for 40 year old Virgin came on.

In 2009 film ratings came into effect in Thailand but I can’t say I’ve seen much difference. Trailers seem to be just as unsuitable as ever. In fact Husband and Daughter came back from the dental surgery yesterday with reports that a vampire horror had been playing in the waiting room, complete with gory decapitations. Small children roamed oblivious.

Perhaps they haven’t quite got the hang of it yet.