All You Wanted To Know About Open Uni Discos But Were Afraid To Ask

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Nov 052010
 

By George Anderson.

ousa

As a very mature student of the Open University my first encounter with an OU disco was a stark reminder that although youth is wasted on the young, only they have the energy to give it a good airing.

The night started well enough. Anita and Liz were on their third flagon of Pimms Number One by the time I arrived. I was just wondering how far out I should push the boat — would I start with a small Cinzano and work myself up to a pre-bed cocoa around ten or cast caution to the wind and line up thirty quid’s worth of randomly selected shots and let rip?. I was intoxicated by the choice.

Anyway, I must have gone down the ‘Let ‘em Rip’ route because less than an hour later I found myself asking Caroline to marry me by shouting in her ear during a 90 decibel rendering of some nonsense by Justin Trouser-Snake.  She declined of course but she will have to live with that decision for decades after I’ve been fitted with the wooden boiler-suit and chucked into a hole in the ground back in my home village.

To alleviate the pain of Caroline’s refusal I concentrated on Katie and tried to work out where on Earth she was getting her energy from.  She was dancing as if she’d just got out of Pankhurst prison on remand and the wanton abandon with which she now thrashed her arms about was a condition of her bail.  Had she somehow managed to access an energy source known only to the ancients? Was she in possession of a rogue batch of ultra-concentrated Lucozade Sport?

I ran out of hypotheses to explain Katie’s adrenalin levels around the same time I ran out of steam and it was time to go before I asked Caroline to marry me again, just in case she hadn’t understood the question the first time around. I slipped away quietly, as I tend to do on these occasions, knocking over a table of drinks and falling downstairs on my way out.

Sadly, the night came too suddenly to a close. I had waited faithfully for the Disk Johnny, or whatever they call those fellows who crank the handle on the radiogramme at social functions nowadays, to play a long playing record I recognised. When finally he laid hands on ‘Can’t Touch This’ at a quarter to two in the morning, I ran all the way back to my chalet and dug out my special edition MC Hammer dancing trousers. But by the time I got back the dance hall was as empty as a church on a Saturday night.  I skulked back to my chalet and fell into bed. But not before I spent an hour or so trying to take my MC Hammer trousers off over my head.  In Scottish culture, this is a sure sign of a great night out.

Room For One More On Top? Yes, But Is It Safe?

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Oct 222010
 

By George Anderson.

buspic
Have we gone a tad too far with Health and Safety?  The question came to me last week following an upsetting visit to my local DIY store.  I asked the store joiner to saw in half a plank of wood I had just bought to make a couple of shelves.  He turned me down flat.

‘Sorry mate,’ he said, ‘more than me job’s worth to wield a saw in ‘ere.  It’s the sawdust, it’s unsafe.’

It turns out that inhaling sawdust isn’t highly recommended if, in future, you want to get your oxygen supply from Mother Nature rather than a pressurised cylinder.  I accept this.

But if joiners are to be prevented from using the tools of their trade on safety grounds, what else might we look forward to?  Our troops issued with rubber bayonets?  No sex without a safety harness?  Will restaurants insist on cardboard forks and knives?  Will it soon be illegal to walk backwards unless your mother is holding your hand?

But before we get carried away with just how bonkers Health and Safety may appear today, we would be wise to remember how non-existent it was in the past.  By way of illustration we need look no further than the double decker bus of the 1960’s.

Bus depot supremo’s, in an early nod to the rights of non-smokers, prohibited the use of coffin nails on the lower deck of these buses.  However, as if by way of compensating for this wanton act of environmental friendliness, smoking upstairs was in effect, compulsory.  On a single journey from terminus to terminus, the collective puffing of nicotine fiends raised carbon monoxide on the upper deck of the last bus to Scatterburn to levels that would have triggered the evacuation of an anthracite mine.  Bronchitis sufferers were safer outside in the smog.

With regard to Safety, the case was a bit more one sided.  These buses had an open platform at the rear — the only access and egress point for passengers.

Of course, knowing exactly when to disembark was a bit of a black art and not everyone got it right

Because the platform was open, a single stainless steel pole, placed at the edge of the platform for the purposes of hanging on for grim death, was the only thing standing between the fare paying passenger and oblivion.  When a bus was doing sixty miles an hour it was like standing on the edge of a cliff in a gale.

Nowadays, party-pooping do-gooders have ensured that you may disembark from a bus only after it has stopped moving.  In the swinging sixties, however, you could disembark at any time you wanted, no matter how fast the bus was travelling.  The older generation were quite happy to wait until the bus stopped, but no whipper-snapper with a half decent Beatles haircut and a second-hand pair of winkle-pickers would have been caught dead waiting until a bus came to a halt before getting off.  A mathematical relationship was in play here – the faster a bus was travelling when you stepped off the rear platform, the more irresistible you were to the opposite sex.

Of course, knowing exactly when to disembark was a bit of a black art and not everyone got it right. I personally witnessed Derek Sangster step off the number 25 to Tillydrone (via Gordon’s Mills Road) while the bus was travelling at forty-five miles per hour.  Those in possession of an ‘O’ grade in Physics will have calculated that if the bus was travelling at forty-five miles an hour, then so was Derek.  Now, only Fred Flintstone and Barney Rubble can whirl their legs at that speed.  Anyone else is destined to end up face down on the tarmac using their chin as a brake.

Street credibility always comes at a price.  Certainly, Derek managed to avoid a catastrophe by windmilling his arms fast enough to dislocate both shoulders, but he failed to prevent a disaster, unable as he was to remain upright long enough to avoid plunging headlong through the Cooperative Society’s main display window.  Few of us nowadays would be willing to catapult ourselves through a plate-glass window for the off-chance of a snog.  But the past is another country; they do things differently there.

The Whole Two yards

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Oct 152010
 

By George Anderson.

polonyrs
I was shopping in Turriff last week, failing, as usual, to find a low-salt, low-fat, cholesterol-free, high-fibre titbit for my supper. Something healthy enough to turn my doctor’s frown to a smile, but with a hint of indulgence. Something with the life enhancing promise of muesli and the bohemian decadence of a Walnut Whip.

In pursuit of this unlikely product, I circled the supermarket’s food hall until I was light-headed.

I eventually concluded that I could have decadence or health, but not both in the same foodstuff and finally fell to considering a carton of peely-wally looking cottage cheese with a kirn of minced greenery through it.

A note on the side claimed that the carton contained eighty-five percent of the vitamins and minerals needed to survive the day, including folic acid, riboflavin and iron. I was just swithering whether to look for something nearer ninety percent – just to be on the safe side – when I realised I was obsessed with nutrition. “When did this start”, I wondered? Having been an Aberdeen loon in the sixties when the government urged us to eat butter, milk and cheese as if the four minute warning had just sounded, I certainly wasn’t so fussy about what went over my thrapple.

I stuffed my face each morning with a brace of Aberdeen rolls. By the time I entered the Grammar School in 1966 I’d eaten eight times my body weight in dough – and remember, I’m not talking about dough with cholesterol-lowering plant extracts, Omega-3, or bifidus digestivum. I’m talking about dough with saturated fat and enough salt to corrode the tailpipe of a Morris Minor.

lard was so popular that people would spread it on bread if they had to, but get it they must.

Nutritionally speaking, things didn’t improve much at lunchtime. The fear of being force-fed semolina kept me permanently away from school dinners and I largely survived on a diet of Sports Mixtures and sherbet-filled flying saucers.

Supper consisted of polony which Ma bought by the yard from the Home & Colonial in George Street. Cut into slices, polony could be grilled, fried, or used to wedge open doors during flittings. For sheer versatility and taste, no other sausage came close.

When Ma was unable due to weemin’s trouble to make supper, the spurtle of power passed to Da. Da’s generation embraced the concept of ‘Can’t Cook, Won’t Cook’ long before Ainsley Harriott ever shoogled a skillet in earnest.  In those days working class men believed that standing too close to a domestic appliance (close enough to use it) shrivelled the gonads, so Da avoided cooking whenever possible. This often meant pottit heid: scrapings of meat from a cow’s skull, suspended in meat jelly. It was cheap and required no cooking. I wish it had required no eating either but I had no choice. I wanted to start a helpline for those exposed to pottit heid but Da said “No”.

Supper was followed by mugs of tea, neep jam (What else could it be? It wasn’t made from any fruit I’ve ever tasted) and white panned loaf from which all nutrients had been diligently thrashed. Variety was added to our diet by means of the chipper supper. Did this increase our life expectancy? It’s unlikely. These were the days when lard was so popular that people would spread it on bread if they had to, but get it they must.

Our nearest chipper was Archie’s in John Street. The ten o’clock shout of “Last orders” in Cooper’s Bar across the street from Archie’s heralded a nightly stampede for all things deep fried that made the customer’s side of Archie’s counter look like the floor of the Tokyo stock exchange. If elbowing your way through this stramash for a single mock chop wasn’t worth the inevitable black eye, you could stick your nose in the air and follow the whiff of over-used fat all the way to the White Rose chipper in Mounthooly. Here you could buy a tanner special: a shovel of chips and a fragment of deep fried sea-life that might be coalfish, starfish or seahorse depending on the by-catch landed at the fish market that morning.

“Fit kind o’ fish is this, mister?”

“Fit kind wi’d ye like it tae be, loon?”

“Huddock?”

‘It’s huddock then. Now, dee ye wint salt an’ vinegar or no?’

There were times when I tried to improve my diet by making stuff for myself. Like the day I was foolish enough to rustle up a batch of black sugar ale from a recipe my grunny gave me. Black sugar ale: The very phrase was as romantic as a Barbara Cartland novel. It sounded like something Long John Silver might have drunk. If he did he was a gype. Only a qualified chemist could supply the main ingredient: a bullet of liquorice so concentrated I had to sign a book before the pharmacist would hand it over.

When I got home I removed the slug of liquorice from the bag using the coal tongs, dropped it into a Hay’s Dazzle bottle filled with water and hastily screwed the top back on. The concoction was to be left undisturbed in a dark place for at least six weeks, so I stuck it on a shelf in the coal cellar. I reclaimed the cobwebbed bottle two months later by which time the contents had transformed themselves into an anthracite coloured sludge of extraordinary laxative power.  I opened the bottle and took an exploratory whiff of the fumes lurking in the neck of the bottle and ……..well, let’s just say they were sliding polony under the lavvy door for days.

Why didn’t we all come down with scurvy and double rickets?  Probably because every Saturday Ma bought a tea-chest of ‘chippit fruit’ from The Orchard in Upperkirkgate. Chippit fruit. Nowadays I suppose it would be called ‘distressed’ fruit — was a generic term for all the fruit the fruiterer couldn’t palm off on anybody sober: oranges that had been knelt on, terminally bruised bananas or melons the shop assistant had been playing keepie-up with during the week. This weekly super-boosting of our immune systems most likely kept us all out of hospital.

I returned to the present to find myself still clutching the cottage cheese. I intended to head straight for the checkout with it but an unseen hand guided my trolley to the cold meats section of the store, where I stood gazing at a yard of pre-packed polony with a nostalgic eye. Maybe, just maybe, polony was as packed with vitamins and minerals as my reluctantly chosen cottage cheese. I examined the food label to see.

The main ingredients were listed as pork and bacon. Then came the phrase: ‘Other Meats’. Which other meats I thought? Badger? Three‑banded armadillo? Rusk followed that. Rusk is a variety of edible sawdust the government allows butchers to mix with meat while the customer roots distractedly in the veggie basket for a decent neep. Further down the list where the tiniest of writing strained my prescription glasses to their limit, I found E450K (Wasn’t this the stuff they put in wallpaper paste to kill fungus?); Colour 128 (I Googled it when I got home. It’s in the Dulux range as Fencepost); and anti‑oxidant 301 (an early rocket fuel used by Wernher von Braun if I wasn’t mistaken). No mention of folic acid, riboflavin or iron.

I stood there for some time looking from cottage cheese to polony and back again. I know our sixties diet would be enough to make today’s nutritional boffins at the Rowett Institute cowk on their Special K, but don’t they say that a little of what you fancy does you good?  It just depends on your definition of ‘little’ I suppose.

“Dee ye ken the polony sassidge is buy-een-get-een-for-nithing jist noo?” the lassie at the checkout asked,

“Dee ye wint tae rin back and get anither een?” I took the lassie up on her offer, put the cottage cheese back where I found it and set off home.

Over the next few days I managed to eat the whole two yards. Guilt free. Or so I thought. The night I scoffed the last of it I fell asleep with a contented smile but looking like I’d swallowed a fully inflated beach ball. At two in the morning, I sprang bolt upright out of a nightmare, peching like a ploughman’s horse at lowsin’-time. I was back in the Aberdeen tenement where I grew up. A gang of vitamins had infiltrated our house through a crack in the pointing. Armed with a tattie-masher, Ma pursued the intruders from room to room, clambering over furniture and twice falling down the back of the radiogram before driving them out.

Before I fell sleep again I promised myself that in the morning I’d devote my life to Ryvita and green tea. I should be fine so long as I stay well away from the cold meats section of the supermarket in Turriff.

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