Gogglebox

Does anyone remember the TV series in the 70’s called Belle and Sebastien? It was about a boy with a page boy fringe who lived in the mountains with his grandfather and his large white Pyrenean mountain dog called ( unsurprisingly) Belle. Though I can’t remember much about it now except that it was appallingly dubbed from French into English   I loved every minute,  from the theme tune ( which I am humming now) to the feeble storyline where absolutely nothing happened but somehow this didn’t seem to matter and for weeks I imagined that I too was living in a log hut, passing away the evenings in front of the fire whittling wooden spoons and listening to my grandfather playing the penny whistle. 

For a while Belle and Sebastien coincided with the time after school when  I was forced to go to Brownies,  making the whole experience even more of a torture. Instead of being losing myself in the mountains,  I found myself in the local church hall which smelt of bleach and stale cigarettes, having to swear allegiance to the Queen and hopping up a path of skipping ropes lined  with fake  flowers each week to  place a sixpence under the large plastic mushroom. While doing so we had to state whether we had been to church or not. I am not quite sure why this had any relevance to Brownie life whatsoever,  and as we hardly ever went to church I found the whole experience mortifying. There were, I concede,  some things about Brownies that were quite fun. For some bizarre reason I quite enjoyed learning semaphore, a skill which has obviously been invaluable throughout  the years, and dodge ball was always quite a laugh. I loved the cooking sessions when we made currant buns and fudge and I will never forget the smell of my first (and last)  mug of steaming hot bovril that the nurse gave after I hit my head on the bottom of the pool at Forest Hill Baths during the Brownie swimming gala. But to be honest I preferred hanging out in the woods making rope swings and dens and playing knock and run than being regimented into a uniform and could never quite get the enforced jollity of it all, and the songs and terrible rhymes that we used to have to chant every five minutes seemed a bit pointless. We never got as far as doing anything properly outdoorsy which I would have really enjoyed,  but perhaps Dulwich was a little too urban. Somehow singing  round a camp fire made of tissue paper with a torch underneath it in the middle of a hall felt a little tame,  but perhaps this sowed  the seed of my love for real proper camping so I suppose I have them to thank for that

The other programme,  and one I know for a fact I am not alone in my undying love for was ” White horses”. Again, appallingly dubbed and appalling storyline, but we didn’t care. The theme tune would send us into raptures,  and for a while I decided that the only thing I wanted out of life was to be a horse. Yes, dear readers this is true. Me and my friend Sarah would spend hours weaving  macrame reins of different colours which we would then tie to each other, with one of us being the horse and the other having been bullied and coerced enough, having to be the rider. Which was very dull. But as the horse, oh my..you got to whinny and prance and trot about . For about a week I refused to speak and would reply to everything in horse talk, with a loud whinny. I found this highly amusing in the way that you do when you are young, and then when you grow up and your own children start doing such things you realise that it is in fact very very annoying, especially when you are trying to do something that requires speed and precision like getting everyone out of the house in time for school.So conversations would go something like this.”Theresa, where is your homework book?” At which point I would whinny and shake my glorious mane ( for this think yellow cardigan tied round my head ) You can imagine. 

When we were about 15 at boarding school we used to have hair washing on a Saturday. After this we were allowed to go and dry our hair in our house mistresses sitting room where we would watch episodes of ‘Planet of the Apes’ and ‘Fawlty  Towers’ , ‘Tales of the unexpected’ as well as some terrifying horror series on ITV  that usually involved knife wielding madmen escaping from the local asylum  and cavorting  across the moors towards the local hamlet just as the nice couple who lived by the duck pond were settling down for the night, while leaving their bedroom window open. You know the sort of thing, made even more hysterical by a horde of screaming girls. For some reason our house mistress used to cover every inch of her sitting room in thick clear plastic before allowing us to sit anywhere so it wasn’t  exactly welcoming and each movement was accompanied by a lot of squeaking, but as I have said  before we made do with very little in the way of home comforts and this all felt strangely normal. Which probably explains why I have always been quite good at dealing with the cold. Most of our dormitories had creaking ineffective radiators and draughty windows and it wasnt unusual  to wake up to find ice on the inside of the windows. I’m not saying this for a sympathy vote, its just how it was,  and you just put  on another jumper and got on with it. 

While we are on the subject of just getting on with things I was reminded of when I was invited to  lunch with a friends very eccentric godmother. As we struggled with a luke warm slightly congealed chicken pie  , there was the most hideous crunching sound coming from under the table.  When we enquired what it was she snapped ” It’s just the cat eating her kittens, now just get on with eating your lunch”. You really couldn’t make it up.