Nostalgia

Slim Summer Saturday The author Geoff Dyer has written a memoir of his 60s/70s childhood in Cheltenham, specifically what it was like to grow up in a working class suburb, go to an average primary school and be changed by a grammar school education. Born in 1958, Geoff was the only child of a dinner lady and a sheet metal worker, and although he's seven years older than me I still found his account extraordinarily evocative. It's called Homework and these are 100 of the things he mentioned, in no particular order and with none of Geoff's authorial flair. Playing out with mates on wasteland, cap guns, grazed knees, never using the front room, creosote, the Football Pools, John West salmon sandwiches, barely-opened spirits in a drinks cabinet, snotty handkerchiefs, calling people mental, Aeros, packaged pastilles, skewering conkers, "got got got NEED!", Dinky cars, shallow footbaths at swimming pools, borrowing LPs, queuing to see the doctor, chain-smoking, bubblegum, Airfix kits, Green…