LIFE NOTES: 1969

I omitted the most important event of my 1968 from the previous post because I'm not a computer. That Christmas I received a Petite typewriter as my present. For about three-and-a-half years I loved that machine and its pale blue typing ribbons and used both almost constantly. By the time I'd learned enough about the world to consider writing stories of my own, a new, upgraded typewriter was on its way but that story's for 1972.

The principal event of importance in my 1969 was my first holiday to France and Italy - it lasted a month, most of July in fact. Train from Glasgow Central to Euston, then a cab across town to Victoria; the experience was necessarily rather hallucinatory but I do recall the taxi moving down the Mall and swerving in front of Buckingham Palace. It didn't feel real; it felt as though I were dreaming it. There was a hideous full English breakfast at some scratch café across the street from Victoria Station which nearly made me sick. Then we boarded another train to Dover, followed by a ferry to Calais (I don't recall the cliffs). From the latter we got a third train, this time to Paris, and stayed with my aunt's family in a pretty luxurious apartment in St Denis. We went up the Eiffel Tower and I still have the plastic-masquerading-as-gold model of same. It was the only thing from the past that I shared with my parents which I took when we took a final look at my mother's house in Bothwell in May 2017.

This was all followed by a very long train journey to Rome. After a spell of sightseeing there it was back on the train and off to Naples, then a fairly long taxi ride to the tiny mountain village of Filignano where my maternal grandmother lived. I watched the moon landing, live, on RAI on my grandmother's tiny monochrome television set at some godforsaken hour of the early morning. Storms soon followed and my mother always maintained from that point that this was where humanity had gone wrong. My grandmother had a fully-functioning farm complete with chicken coop and smelly cowshed. I rode on my uncle Arnaldo's donkey, which was fun. At some stage I developed a combination of acid reflux and mild nausea which peed me off considerably; there is a photograph of me grumpily wearing a straw hat to corroborate this. We went to the seaside, at Scauri. The stew we ate in some restaurant there was something else.

After that we undertook the same journey home in reverse, staying once again at St Denis but this time crossing the Channel from Boulogne to Folkestone. Then back to Victoria etc. etc. By the time we returned to Uddingston, nothing and nobody had seemed to change, which I found slightly disappointing. The only news I remember being directly reported at that time concerned the death of Judy Garland.

Musically, it was mostly my lying on my bed of a Sunday teatime listening to Alan Freeman's Pick Of The Pops, the sun streaming in through the windows. For some reason I particularly remember him playing Sinatra's "My Way" in that setting. I liked the notion of pop charts, of everything being placed in some sort of comprehensible and assimilable order, so much so that I began typing them out and making a small diary out of them.

My parents noticed that and arranged with the newsagents across the street - R.S. McColl's, no less - who at the time had a little record section right at the back of the main shop. The people there arranged for me to have the weekly music industry trade paper Record Retailer, as Music Week was then known, one week in arrears, together with the red-and-white BRITAIN'S TOP 50 poster which I promptly pinned on my bedroom wall. This I found especially fascinating as Radio 1 at the time only went down as far as the Top 30. The chart on the poster was framed by advertisements for obscure singles on labels such as Beacon, Pye and B&C. In addition, Record Retailer carried several album charts - albums; what are those, these big records that my parents have? - which didn't get mentioned on the radio at all.

By year's end, I had nagged my father into purchasing an actual pop single, and he did so from a long-gone shop on St Vincent Street whose name I cannot recall. It was RCA 1872, "Sugar Sugar" by The Archies, over which I went mad when I saw them on Top Of The Pops and found them to be cartoon characters. Cartoon comics! I loved those, especially from American publishers such as Gold Key and Harvey (Marvel I would discover in 1973). Anything with Disney or Warner Brothers characters was fine by me.

But my parents also took out subscriptions for several regular music papers and magazines, since they'd noticed how keenly I was taking to the whole musical thing - Melody Maker, NME, Disc (and, eventually, Music Echo), Record Mirror and Music Now. I read all of them from cover to cover and memorised every name and song I found. I was five. I had the gift.

Finally, for that Christmas, I was given a Dansette record player of my very own. Wow! I lifted up its black lid and discovered pristine copies of Abbey Road and Let It Bleed. I think I drove everyone mad with my unending renditions of "Octopus's Garden." At around the same time I was also presented with a copy of the British edition of The Archies' Sugar Sugar LP, complete with its dully prosaic cover. It may all have signified destiny. But where on earth would the destination be?