Year meme: 1979
Jan. 26th, 2008 08:28 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
purplecatI've accepted a challenge/tag meme from ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
parrot_knight to write about the year of his choice. It must be said I was a little alarmed to get given 1979, my memory that far back isn't so accurate that I can be sure what happened in 1979 and what happened in the surrounding years.
1979 was, I believe, before I cut my hair short for the first time, so I will have looked something like this
I was eight. The cat in the photo is the family cat, Blake, so-called because the cleaning lady said she wouldn't feed him if he was called Avon. This was also before I became short-sighted.
Some back of the envelope calculation tells me I started the year in form 4 of Greycotes School and ended the year in lower 5. Mrs Plummer was the lower 5 form teacher of whom I recall being fond, but I don't recall the form 4 teacher except that she may have had long black hair. Further memory dredging reminds me that we did a "red" project and I chose to do it all on red indians, getting quite engrossed in their legends and history about which I now recall nothing. I suspect nowadays a child wouldn't be allowed to choose red indians as her "red" project. I think we also did a project on castles and we started having french lessons for the first time from the school headmistress.
As a family I would guess that my sister and I were in the midst of a phase where we fought tooth and nail over everything (I remember arguing about who would get into the car first!) and were united only in our love of Star Wars. We both collected Star Wars figures, S had a Millenium Falcon and I had a Death Star (which IIRC we both furnished with dolls' house furniture - clearly somewhere along the line we were receiving mixed signals about something). The summer holiday was probably at the Gower peninsula in Wales where we camped for several years before my parents (re)discovered Scotland. This was the year before we went to France where somebody stole my Luke Skywalker and Han Solo and we got to see The Empire Strikes Back in French.
1979 was Graham Williams' last year as producer of Dr Who, and was the year in which Dr Who Weekly (now Dr Who Magazine) first appeared and I wonder if that is whyparrot_knight chose it. But in fact I didn't really discover DWM, and via that a love of Dr Who for another couple of years. My best friend, who I shall call Mot after his favourite toy hippo, and I played games dominated by Star Wars (I was Luke and he was Han, if we were feeling generous his little sister got to play Leia) and Blakes' 7. But of course, we also played Dr Who, though I don't think we were religious about watching it. I have, of course, a house full of Dr Who reference books but, thanks to the state of the DIY the only one I can find is Peter Haining's Key to Time which is, nowadays, not the most reliable of sources. I remember trying to record The Armageddon Factor on audio tape off air which it tells me was shown in January. I also remember bits of the new season that debuted that September which suggests I was watching most of it: Davros' return in Desting of the Daleks; the unmasking of Scaroth of the Jaggaroth from City of Death; Mandrells and drug addition from Nightmare of Eden and the sudden discovery that there were, in fact, lots of Nimon from The Horns of Nimon. But I remember nothing from The Creature from the Pit and rewatching it a few years back didn't jog anything loose, so I suspect I missed most of it.
I think, for Mot and I, the most significant event of 1979 was the Jackanory dramatisation of the Hobbit which introduced both of us to Tolkien. I believe this has never been released on video or DVD which is possibly a shame, or possibly a blessing, since I recall it as a magical performance, especially Bernard Cribbins as Bilbo and whichever of the narrators read Gollum (David Wood I suspect, though I can't be sure). We certainly both went away and avidly read the book following the show. I remember us making "Chocolate Cram" with Mot's mother and that Mot foolishly expressed sufficient interest that his Russian practice was dominated by Hobbit reading for some time forward. Mot's father was Russian and his mother German, I suspect they were both second or third generation since they spoke flawless unaccented English. The family was Jewish so I have always assumed his parents' families had emigrated here as a result of WWII but I never inquired about them because, of course, when you're eight you simply accept the fact that your best friend gets Russian and Hebrew reading practice every weekend as perfectly normal and unremarkable. Mot would eventually also introduce me to roleplaying, but that hadn't happened yet either. Mot and I eventually lost touch in our teens. There is a Mot on facebook (well obviously not actually called Mot) which could be him, but the picture is pixelated out and he works at the BBC so I feel a little, well, stalkerish about friending him out of the blue on the off-chance.
So that is what I can recall of 1979. Or at least what I can recall which, with the aid of Wikipedia, I'm fairly certain happened in 1979. The deal now is that you can ask me to nominate a year for you in the comments...
parrot_knight to write about the year of his choice. It must be said I was a little alarmed to get given 1979, my memory that far back isn't so accurate that I can be sure what happened in 1979 and what happened in the surrounding years.1979 was, I believe, before I cut my hair short for the first time, so I will have looked something like this
I was eight. The cat in the photo is the family cat, Blake, so-called because the cleaning lady said she wouldn't feed him if he was called Avon. This was also before I became short-sighted.
Some back of the envelope calculation tells me I started the year in form 4 of Greycotes School and ended the year in lower 5. Mrs Plummer was the lower 5 form teacher of whom I recall being fond, but I don't recall the form 4 teacher except that she may have had long black hair. Further memory dredging reminds me that we did a "red" project and I chose to do it all on red indians, getting quite engrossed in their legends and history about which I now recall nothing. I suspect nowadays a child wouldn't be allowed to choose red indians as her "red" project. I think we also did a project on castles and we started having french lessons for the first time from the school headmistress.
As a family I would guess that my sister and I were in the midst of a phase where we fought tooth and nail over everything (I remember arguing about who would get into the car first!) and were united only in our love of Star Wars. We both collected Star Wars figures, S had a Millenium Falcon and I had a Death Star (which IIRC we both furnished with dolls' house furniture - clearly somewhere along the line we were receiving mixed signals about something). The summer holiday was probably at the Gower peninsula in Wales where we camped for several years before my parents (re)discovered Scotland. This was the year before we went to France where somebody stole my Luke Skywalker and Han Solo and we got to see The Empire Strikes Back in French.
1979 was Graham Williams' last year as producer of Dr Who, and was the year in which Dr Who Weekly (now Dr Who Magazine) first appeared and I wonder if that is why
parrot_knight chose it. But in fact I didn't really discover DWM, and via that a love of Dr Who for another couple of years. My best friend, who I shall call Mot after his favourite toy hippo, and I played games dominated by Star Wars (I was Luke and he was Han, if we were feeling generous his little sister got to play Leia) and Blakes' 7. But of course, we also played Dr Who, though I don't think we were religious about watching it. I have, of course, a house full of Dr Who reference books but, thanks to the state of the DIY the only one I can find is Peter Haining's Key to Time which is, nowadays, not the most reliable of sources. I remember trying to record The Armageddon Factor on audio tape off air which it tells me was shown in January. I also remember bits of the new season that debuted that September which suggests I was watching most of it: Davros' return in Desting of the Daleks; the unmasking of Scaroth of the Jaggaroth from City of Death; Mandrells and drug addition from Nightmare of Eden and the sudden discovery that there were, in fact, lots of Nimon from The Horns of Nimon. But I remember nothing from The Creature from the Pit and rewatching it a few years back didn't jog anything loose, so I suspect I missed most of it.I think, for Mot and I, the most significant event of 1979 was the Jackanory dramatisation of the Hobbit which introduced both of us to Tolkien. I believe this has never been released on video or DVD which is possibly a shame, or possibly a blessing, since I recall it as a magical performance, especially Bernard Cribbins as Bilbo and whichever of the narrators read Gollum (David Wood I suspect, though I can't be sure). We certainly both went away and avidly read the book following the show. I remember us making "Chocolate Cram" with Mot's mother and that Mot foolishly expressed sufficient interest that his Russian practice was dominated by Hobbit reading for some time forward. Mot's father was Russian and his mother German, I suspect they were both second or third generation since they spoke flawless unaccented English. The family was Jewish so I have always assumed his parents' families had emigrated here as a result of WWII but I never inquired about them because, of course, when you're eight you simply accept the fact that your best friend gets Russian and Hebrew reading practice every weekend as perfectly normal and unremarkable. Mot would eventually also introduce me to roleplaying, but that hadn't happened yet either. Mot and I eventually lost touch in our teens. There is a Mot on facebook (well obviously not actually called Mot) which could be him, but the picture is pixelated out and he works at the BBC so I feel a little, well, stalkerish about friending him out of the blue on the off-chance.
So that is what I can recall of 1979. Or at least what I can recall which, with the aid of Wikipedia, I'm fairly certain happened in 1979. The deal now is that you can ask me to nominate a year for you in the comments...