Bob Rivers sadly passed away earlier this year, I first came across a CD of his when I was in the HMV store in London, I had a long service award and took it as HMV vouchers, I had a couple of pounds remaining, I saw a Bob Rivers Christmas CD at £1 so I brought that and another cheap CD, I went on to acquire most of the Bob Rivers CD's.
I live just outside London in West Ewell, though we have London telephone numbers, near Epsom Hospital there is a road with a similar name, this would not normally be a problem however the person who lived at the same number as me ran an Elvis Appreciation Society, I'm not sure what happened whether he moved house, gave up or died, people were getting no response from the person we started getting people turning up at our house asking about the Elvis Society, we had to explain that it was based in Sunnyside Road in Epsom, this was some time before I started the blog. When packages and parcels fail to arrive I often wonder if the Post Office have delivered them to that address.
Our land line telephone number was one digit different from one of the local Old Peoples Homes, one person always seemed to dial the wrong number, he would then tell us off for answering the homes number, not that he had dialled the wrong number, we have had caller number identification since the late 80's, when he called we just ignored the call.
I lived in Greenford before we moved to West Ewell, in the 1980's the Model Engineering Exhibition and A Major Model Railway Exhibition were held in the Wembley Conference Center, great for us a short bus ride and we were there, I was at the Model Railway Exhibition and the way it had been set up you had to go through the entrance area to get between the two areas the show was located in, the reception area also had the Ticket Office where you could buy tickets for future events, as I was going between the two halves was packed with people dressed as 'Cowboys', I'm looking at my ticket and program was there a discount if you dressed as a cowboy, no there was a Country & Western Festival in the future, the tickets went on sale that day, they had all dressed up to go any buy their tickets.
One of the buildings we dealt with was in Shaftesbury Avenue, in one corner of the building had some Social Housing incorporated, we had nothing to do with the housing, it overlooked one of the flat roofs, the roof was the responsibility of the Landlord, one of the families living their regarded the roof as their own personal rubbish dump tins bottles and general refuse was thrown on to the roof, in their wisdom the senior management had decided not to renew the window cleaning contract, we had a job issued that there was human excrement on the windows, the little sh1ts that lived there had taken their excrement wrapped it in toilet paper and thrown it against the windows, as a workaround to remove the excrement we used the fire hoses to blast the stuff off, on another front actions were started to evict the family.
A couple of weeks later a child was murdered in the Seven Dials area (part of Covent Garden), it turned out the little sh1t worked as a Rent Boy and he had been murdered by one of his customers, there was a memorial set up for him, reading the letters form his classmates 'he was such a wonderful person', are we talking about the same little sh1t, the family dissapeared, the Landlords cleaners cleared the rubbish from the roof, we had no problems from that area again.
Be careful what you wish for sometimes wishes do come true.
Released 30th November 1962, the last single by Paddy Roberts, and a bit prophetic as Christmas seemed to start earlier each year in the UK it is was not hemmed in by Thanksgiving, the start of Christmas was when Father Christmas arrived at Bentalls in Kingston usually late October, we would be taken to see him mid December, my mothers thinking was if the Christmas decorations have to come down on twelfth night they go up twelve days before Christmas, some shops were selling Christmas cards in June, another indication the Christmas was approaching was the advert for Timex watches on television, on Christmas Day the adverts extolling you to but this or that ended and changed to ones to book your Summer Holidays, though these start well before Christmas now.
PADDY ROBERTS - 'Merry Christmas You suckers' - 1962 45rpm - YouTube
Yesterday I went to the Toy-fair at Kempton Park, it was very busy possibly due to the date being close to Christmas, the Toy-fairs tend to be either model car oriented where there are more people selling model cars or ones where Model Trains are in the ascendance, yesterday's was one where model car's were more prominent, the queue to get in was the longest I had ever see it, one of the things I do is buy the old Triang mineral wagons and replace the chassis with a Bachmann one from either the China Clay wagon or the Salt wagon, they both use the same underframe, there were plenty of the triang mineral wagons there, most were priced at £5 or more and by the time you have acquired the Bachmann wagon the cheapest I have found was £4 but prices normally start at £7.50, I decided it was project not viable at present, I had spent most of my money and was having a last look around before I left, I noticed a bov under one of the stalls that I had missed on my initial walk round, the box contained a large number of Bachmann 16ton Mineral wagons all with coal loads, unboxed at £6.50, I ended up buying 16 perhaps I should have brought the lot, I rejected the odd ones that were damaged, mainly missing brake parts and some were from a later period than I model, one stall had a box of pigs they were a bit large for most scales.
The 'B' side of this 1980 release, this record was issued on 2 different labels.
I Should Have Left the Light On for Santa