SkyDiving for Myeloma

Bit of a sales pitch blog this time, as a one – off!

On Saturday May 21st this year I am doing a charity skydive for my longtime friend Pepita-Louise Brooks.

I met Pepi when we were about 9 years old (back in the eclectic 80's) and we had loads of fun playing together in the woods near my parents’ home in Portslade, East Sussex. And if you like your minutiae, it was often Indiana Jones based!

As is often the case, we lost contact over the years growing up, but since the turn of the century we've never been more than an eMail or a Facebook status away.

Like many of her close friends and family, I was extremely sad to hear that Pepi had been diagnosed with Myeloma – an incurable cancer that so few people seem to know much about. But what admiration we've all had for her spirit and incredibly optimistic approach to this burden she's had to bear and fight. 

Pepi is truly an inspiration to anyone who has had this form of cancer, and I know she has offered support to many others along the way.

The least I can do, as one of her oldest friends, is to help raise some awareness and funds for this worthy charity. I hope you can help me achieve this goal!

Any donations would be gratefully received at:

Just Giving link 

Not So Sweet 16

This coming springtime my step daughter turns 16 and recently we had the inevitable request put to us:

“Can I have a party please!?”

Oh how the memories came flooding back about my own 16^th birthday party…

There will likely be a few people reading this who were present and will also remember that Saturday night back in October 1991.

I was on a swing in Easthill Park, Portslade late one summer’s evening, when I first thought that having a party would be the greatest idea ever. This of course was back in the days when mid teens actually went to the park to speak to their friends and hang out rather than have a relationship with them via their phone. In fact I don’t think I knew anyone who owned a mobile phone in 1991 apart from Derek Trotter.

So I sat there swinging away (in my shellsuit), mulling it over with a few mates at dusk and mentally working out a guest list. I recall one of the girls present stating that the main ‘rules’ ought to be a ‘ban on jelly and ice-cream’ and ‘no parents allowed’, because after all, we didn’t want it to be a kids party. So I slept on it before asking my parents the next day about what my chances were.

Amazingly they agreed to it! The only proviso being that the maximum amount of guests didn’t exceed 40 people.

I genuinely couldn’t believe my luck and knocked up my invite list, which was actually quite hard to do as I ended up having to omit some decent people, but I didn’t want to push my luck with the numbers, so out of fairness I stuck with the 40 allowed.

Ahead of the event, my Dad made the calligraphic invites, and as I was working on the day of the party, my Mum decorated the house with photos of the younger me and banners etc as well as laying out a brilliant spread of party food (no jelly and ice cream)

And true to their word, my parents and younger brother left me to it at about 630pm and toodled round to my grandparents on the other side of the Valley in Portslade and said they’d be back at approximately 1am.

I waited in great anticipation, in my new one-size-too-small red panel Chipie jeans… 

 …naively thinking that if 30 people showed up it would be pretty good going.

When I did a head count at 10pm, there were well over one hundred people!

In my genuine ignorance, I clearly hadn’t considered at all that there would be ANY gate crashers, let alone literally dozens of extra people turning up. Thankfully I knew most of them, but there were plenty of new faces too – including a Brighton & Hove Albion youth team footballer briefly.

Basically I got scared. I couldn’t control any of it and spent the night praying that the house didn’t get destroyed or set fire to! As it happened I suppose it wasn’t TOO bad really, but it felt terrifying right in the middle of it, and I guess in the era now of ‘Armageddon Facebook parties’ it could have been a lot, lot worse. Some events of note that caused me angst on the night stick in the memory though:

• The downstairs toilet getting blocked – so a neighbours pathway was used as an alternative
• The garden got flattened
• The vacuum cleaner being hurled down the stairs (and skilfully caught)
• The settee being completely caved in
• Various spots of blood
• Cigarette butts embedded in the carpets
• Dozens of beer bottles hurled into the neighbouring school field, and neighbours gardens
• Various videos and cassettes stolen 
• ...and of course, the next door neighbour’s derelict untaxed Volkswagen Beetle having its roof caved in:

I’m well aware of various other shenanigans that took place but it’s fair to say that there’s intentionally no names mentioned at all in this ‘before the watershed’ blog for many good reasons!

Back to the party (yes there was still a party going on), and there were, on occasion, quite a few minutes when I wasn’t actually hiding. Bless her, the same girl who had suggested a ban on jelly and ice cream offered to dance with me at one point as she could see I was suffering and not really having a good time! Just beforehand, one of the less bright attendees had suggested we put his cassette on to change the music. He said “you won’t need to turn the volume up Bez, as it’s automatically loud”. Okay then.

To my sadness, the majority of my best friends left relatively early for one reason or another. I really couldn’t blame them though, and I suspect I would have done the same as it felt the whole event was increasingly getting out of hand at times, especially when someone asked if there was a rear exit to the house because he thought he was about to be beaten up. Unluckily for him, the only exit was the entrance as we lived at the far end of a cul-de-sac. The poor lad legged it for his life as three other guys tore through the house, trying to attack him. Thankfully he got away safely.

And to put a cherry on top of my night, my parents came home an hour early at around midnight and surveyed the mess. The majority of people had gone by then, but a few wisely started to leave as my Dad was being told about the redesigned VW car roof by the understandably disgruntled neighbour.

The police were called, but so far as I recall they didn’t pursue any complaints made by the neighbours. My Dad promptly issued a warning/threat to all the remaining people that he would never allow any of them across his ‘threshold’ again. It took all the strength in me to stifle a chuckle when a soft lone voice replied on behalf of the group shuffling off: “Sorry mister!”

The next day though, Dad kindly offered invites to come back to half a dozen of my mates who had copped that rollocking at the end of the night. He graciously said sorry to them as I explained to him that they hadn’t deserved it.

Oddly enough I never got told off for it. I suppose my parents felt I’d learned my lesson by the shock and enormity of what had gone on. I spent most of the next morning tidying up, and a couple of friends very kindly came by to check on my welfare.

My brother returned home from my grandparents and claimed he had heard the party from the other side of the hill. And “what was that lingering smell everywhere in the house?”

He was also annoyed that people had been in his bedroom, which had rightfully been out of bounds.

*refer to earlier mention of shenanigans…

Pretty soon my parents were quite relaxed about it all – though Mum was peeved that most of the food she’d made had barely been eaten as someone had poured booze over it all... chicken vodka-vents are not nice!

It was probably no coincidence that the entire downstairs was redecorated within three months.

In truth barely a handful of people had really caused any aggro – it just so happened that too many people came, and I couldn’t be omnipresent in protecting the house. Even the majority of people I hadn’t invited were actually good as gold and gave me no problems. In fact the hardest thing I personally had to keep on doing was to persuade the smokers to smoke outside.

Overall it was a peculiar event. As a result of the mess and damage, my poor brother wasn’t allowed a 16^th party himself, but for me personally the most annoying thing was that I simply wasn’t able to enjoy the night at all.

Additionally, my confidence took its own little dance too. I guess amongst my school friends, I was always thought of as being quiet and unlikely to indulge in such an event that had just taken place, so my confidence rose slightly as it became quite a talked about event at school, and as a strange consequence my credibility also improved a touch. However I felt in other ways my confidence was absolutely shot as I knew I had ultimately lost all control of what was going on. Bizarrely I think it affected me for years as some aspects of my shyness came back with a vengeance.

I think I am able to laugh about it now though thankfully!

“Ha ha! *cough*”

So dare we answer in the affirmative to “Can I have a party please!?”…

Would you?

The Name Game

Okay so this one comes with a hint of self promotion, but evidently millions of bloggers solely blog to drum up some trade, so why should I be any different!?

Joking aside I am still solely blogging for fun (as if anyone actually clicks the adverts!), but I’m tweaking this one a bit, to help the one who lets me spend hours writing them!

Baby Names

So what will be the most popular baby names for 2014? Top of their respective trees for 2013 were Olivia and Oliver (no, really!), but trends dictate that they may not stay there for too long.

Does one go for a traditional name? Family names still come into play in the decision making process quite often…or maybe an outlandishly unique effort? The omnipresent Peter Andre recently told Magic FM’s Jo Parkerson in an interview that his eldest daughter is fed up with her given name of ‘Princess’ and already wants to change it. Hopefully she won’t though – the more unique an individual you are, the better. Why be normal?

Being a child of the 80’s, it’s been quite funny over the last few years engaging with people that are approximately 15 years younger than me called Kylie, Jason, Scott and Charlene – proof (if ever it was needed) that television influences our choices in life on so many levels. For my younger readers, please click here to see what those above names relate to!

How many children born this year will be named after Game of Thrones characters I wonder? Khaleesi Daenerys anyone? Surely not Joffrey though…

So once you’ve chosen a name for your precious little one, and you’ve registered their birth with the authorities, how do you go about celebrating it?

Traditionally, Christenings or similar have been the rite of passage for babies, but in these modern times, other options are available – such as Naming Days. An increasing amount of families are choosing to formally celebrate in such a non/part religious, modern or alternative way. The beauty being that you can tailor the event to exactly how you want it to be, and make it much more personalised than perhaps traditional methods have historically allowed for. For example, Naming ceremonies are being hosted to welcome adopted children and step children into families. It can even be done for pets!

Earlier this year, though not due in any part to being ‘anti-religion’, but more about being ‘non-religious’ in our own beliefs, my wife and I opted for our daughter to have one of these Naming ceremonies. We’d both been Christened ourselves, but we did some research into alternatives and decided to choose something that would allow our child in the future to take a route in life or spirituality that she herself wanted to pursue.

A Naming Celebrant conducted the ceremony in our back garden in glorious sunshine amongst many friends and family, and it just felt so much more comfortable and relaxed that way. Similar to how Christenings work, we selected Godparents and let them choose readings and poems that they felt summed up the role they were about to accept. Candle lighting, sand ceremonies and music were also all included at our request.

Godparents you say? I guess it sounds a bit contrary, given that the ceremony was deliberately religion free, but the point is that it was entirely up to us what we called them. We could have chosen Guide-parents for example, but we went with a bit of tradition after all – because that is what WE wanted to do. Flexibility rules!

So pleased were we with the positive response the ceremony received from those attending, my enterprising wife decided to launch her own mini-business as a Naming Celebrant within days of our daughter’s big day! She’d done a few similar ventures herself when she was a trainee teacher, and felt it was something she would really enjoy doing for other families.

And what a response she got!

Enquiries came flooding in and already she has performed a number of ceremonies, all individually styled to how the recipient family wanted it to be. Even local BBC Radio got involved with popular presenter Sarah Gorrell hosting a live on air interview.

Clearly it’s a booming option, but more than anything else, it simply offers a different route for something that had seemed set in stone until very recently.

Don’t join the revolution, join the evolution: Brighton Baby Naming

November 1993

Someone asked me recently if I missed going out on the lash and pubbing and clubbing. I honestly hadn’t given it much thought, having been so busy since the time when I guess you could say that I ‘stopped’ doing all that.

Giving it some reflection though and casting my mind back, I have to say that initially (i.e. the first three years worth of clubbing) I didn't really enjoy it at all.

I’d been drinking in pubs for years – my first time being half a Guinness that my dad bought for me at the St George Inn in Portslade when I was about 4 years old. I was sitting at his feet at the bar and he opted to hand me down a half of the black stuff rather than a coke for that particular round!

But in terms of clubbing, I first went in November 1993.

Most (though not all) of my friends used to go to The Event nightclub (now called Prizm) in West Street, Brighton but in truth I virtually had to force myself to go, as I really wasn’t fussed about going. I had glandular fever and anaemia around the ages of 17 to 19, so maybe that explains my nonchalance to it all! Not that the first night I went clubbing was uneventful though…

I remember that first walk down the stairs into the club and seeing a particular girl from school – a girl that virtually everyone fancied – walking towards me and my mates. Now I’ve never been keen on girls being too heavily made up with garish lipstick etc. and have always preferred a more natural look, but she looking stunning and it struck me that we were no longer kids in a playground.

I didn’t get drunk, but that was mainly because I hadn’t really found my tastes in alcohol yet. I’ve never really liked beer, and I hadn’t discovered spirits at that time, so I tended to just push and tolerate my way through a few bottles of Budweiser and peel the labels off just waiting till midnight when the ‘decent’ music started. This would be a forty five minute session of 80’s music or commercial chart songs. I was never into the heavy techno, trance or garage music that was played for most of the night. I was far happier listening and dancing to Michael Jackson, Madonna, Wham!, Madness, Dexy’s Midnight Runners etc. than the other stuff on offer. They even played Beatles and Stones songs on occasion.

Pretty much that became the pattern for a few years. Save money, go clubbing, drink poor beer, enjoy 45 minutes of music, eat takeaway chicken and taxi home.

Hardly exciting times, but just to add to my indifference on that first night, on the way home one of the lads in our cab was sick which meant the rest of us chipping in to pay the cabbie the ‘clean-up’ fee. Deep joy.

And if that wasn’t enough, when I got home I found I had great difficulties in taking out one of my contact lenses. I kept trying to get hold of it and pinching and missing before eventually being in tremendous pain. It turned out I must have been at least partially inebriated as I’d actually already got the lens out, and was in fact pinching my eye-ball. Eventually I went to a&e, and after a few hours and scans later, the doctor said I had three scratches across my eye and put a few drops over them to ease the pain… though I had to put up with triple vision for a few days.

After a few years of trudging through boring nights out, things finally improved as I started to find other club nights, like 80’s nights and student nights (with music I liked played endlessly)…and the cheap spirits and mixers offers often helped!

It was mainly about the music for me, but once I worked out what drinks I genuinely liked (dark rum and coke / southern comfort and lemonade) I found my enjoyment of the nights out increased immensely.

And I believed I’d found the answer to clubbing enjoyment in one word:

Friday

Such a different group of people would go out in Brighton on a Friday night compared to a Saturday night. The atmosphere was so much more relaxed and you didn’t have to actively try and avoid the people who couldn’t handle their shandies.

My Friday nights between the ages 22 to 26 took on a life in itself. Work pending, I was out with a certain group of friends every other Friday. It possibly looks uninspiring looking back, and I didn’t travel the world and change lives etc…I just had a really enjoyable social life with my friends, with such a simple routine: 

1. Get ready between 4-5pm – music a-blaring throughout
2. 6pm: With a full wallet (£60) make way to friend’s house for a few alcoholic 'tasters'
3. Get to the Pull & Pump Pub at 7pm-ish and await the arrival of others in the crew
4. Move on to the Quadrant Pub for 8pm (cart wheeling through the Imperial Arcade on the way) - insist on the bar staff putting THIS on the jukebox and gently mocking the Bryan Ferry and Mark Owen look-alikes
5. Down to The Event (by 1015pm to avoid the queues)
6. Get hammered on cheap booze, do a circuit of the club to see who is about.
7. Dance ourselves sober
   
   
8. Get hammered again (do another circuit - week after week we would contrive to not pull a single girl- this is why >>>
   
9. Leave at about 130am to avoid the crying girls who invariably had lost their purses
10. Go to Hungry Years night club (RIP)...
    
    
    
    ...to meet with others in the crew
11. Head to Subway for a foot long double (quadruple) cheese, double bacon, single turkey, BBQ sauce and salt fest… served by a kid we called Andy. But that wasn't his real name… or was it? He might have been called Bob.
12. Walk as far as we could before we were just too knackered to go on... and hail a cab with whatever change we had left, and get dropped off wherever the money ran out
13. Leg it across Easthill Park kicking an imaginary football into the goalposts that were set up for the Saturday morning league games
14. Get home at around 3am and go on ICQ to talk again to the people I’d spent all night with
15. Start to eat Subway...fall asleep
16. Wake at 7am to finish Subway and down a glass of strawberry milkshake and rejoice at yet another night out with no hangover!

Happy days… the trend stopped during 2001, and after that I had children and priorities changed!

When I stopped going, I definitely missed it, but I think I’d had my time and in particular I thoroughly enjoyed the latter part of it. Many of my other mates who didn't come along used to give me tremendous stick for my habitual routine, but I couldn't care less… it was my music and my time and I loved it.

And tellingly, whenever they came with us, they tended to love it too.

I went many years before going clubbing again, but relived a few good nights nonetheless. When Michael Jackson died in 2009, during a period when I was going through something of a personal breakdown, I went to The Event (by then renamed Oceana) as where better to go to grieve on various levels than to somewhere that was celebrating his musical legacy. They didn’t let me down and literally every other song that night was a Jackson classic.

And this boy was last seen leaving a nightclub in August 2009, with Black or White playing in the background…

Update!

Rummaging around I came across the song list for that first night clubbing - the aforementioned '45 minutes of decent music':

Boom! Shake The Room - Fresh Prince & DJ Jazzy Jeff

We Will Rock You - Queen

Right Here - SWV

Grease Megamix - John Travolta & Olivia Newton-John

Summertime - Fresh Prince & DJ Jazzy Jeff

Satisfaction - Rolling Stones

Out Of Space - The Prodigy

Leader Of The Gang - Discredited 70's artist

Baggy Trousers - Madness

Atomic - Blondie

Come On Eileen - Dexy's Midnight Runners

People Everyday - Arrested Development

Moving On Up - M People

Informer - Snow

Jump Around - House Of Pain

Relight My Fire - Take That & Lulu

Just don't ask me why I still have that play list to hand!

Update 2016!!!

Remember the girl on the stairs at the Event near the start of this blog?

Well in August 2016, I bumped into her for the first time in years at a friend’s birthday party.

 

Many mutual friends from back in the day were there and as 40 year olds we drank, laughed and danced to 80’s / 90’s music galore, just like before. And for completeness I thought it might be nice to offer up this little soundbite that she told me:

“I miss nights like these…”

The Great Storm of October 1987

Anyone who lived in the south east of England, and was awake during the night of 15^th – 16^th October 1987, will never forget the great storm. My 12^th birthday was just two weeks prior, but even now at 39 years old the events are still quite clear to me.

The day before the storm we’d had a charity event at school, raising money by running laps round our playing field. We even got to meet Olympian swimmer Sharron Davies before for a photo shoot and I was lucky enough to have a chat with her (about toast) as the photographer had to change his film before proceeding with my photo. It was a terribly blustery and wet day, and when I got home, I recall my Dad (a keen weather enthusiast) noting that it was going to be very windy during the night.

Having gone to sleep, the next thing I knew was my Dad waking me and my brother up and in a calm voice he simply said:

"Get up, there's a hurricane outside!"

Even in my half-awake state, being the cock-sure-know-it-all youth a year shy of being a teenager, I retorted quick as a flash with "we don't get hurricanes in this country."

I'd barely finished the words, when the roaring noise hit my ears and shut me up! Technically it wasn't an official hurricane (Michael Fish was right!) but to all intents and purposes it felt like one at the time.

My Dad told us to get dressed as quickly as possible and go downstairs. This wasn't altogether unusual for me as my Dad often woke me in the middle of the night to watch thunderstorms with him, but as I began to dress I found myself staring in disbelief out of the window at a group of sixty feet tall, hundred year old trees thrashing back and forth at impossible angles, all being lit up in the middle of the normally dark night by what seemed like constant lightning.

We made our way downstairs to find my Mum huddled up on the sofa and crying. Storms at the best of times used to frighten her, but this was a different storm to anything we'd heard or seen before. The constant roar was immense and didn’t seem to let up at all. Within minutes of going downstairs the loudest, most scary crashing noise I had ever heard in my life made all of us scream and jump. Before we had a chance to consider what it might have been, it happened again - and again! It was the roof. It was literally being lifted off its weakened supports and was crashing back down to somewhere near to where it was propped before.

Where we lived was at the time one of the highest locations on Foredown Hill in Portslade, so we were obviously a bit exposed to potentially damaging gusts. My Dad didn't waste any time at all in deciding we'd actually be safer elsewhere. We daren't even go upstairs again for fear of being injured or worse. My Grandparents lived on the other side of the village in Drove Crescent, Portslade which was also on a hill, albeit significantly lower and better protected, so my Dad decided we should head over there - it was no more than a 10 minute walk and we'd be there in no time. Or so we thought!

Having grabbed what extra warm clothes we could from downstairs we abandoned the house and started the mile long trek to my grandparents. That said, we'd only just started walking, when I shouted out: "there's a tree in the road!" - I had to shout as the wind was too loud to talk normally.

Foredown Road

Sure enough about halfway down Foredown Road, a massive tree had come crashing down and blocked our route. Several other trees had come down too and we literally had to climb four or five feet over the trees to get down the road. Once we got through and down into the valley the wind was less, but this proved to be short-lived as we slowly fought the gusts climbing up Drove Crescent. As if this wasn't enough we encountered the new danger of roof tiles flying at us from all angles. My Dad suffered a blow straight to his mouth from a piece of debris and he was lucky to get away with a couple of chipped teeth. Me and my Brother can't remember it, but my Dad insists he tied books to the sides of our heads to protect us before we'd left the house – this became a source of mirth over the years as my Dad more and more insisted that’s what he did – he also thought he put a crash helmet on my brother! We’re still unconvinced we had any form of head gear! Anyways, we arrived at my Grandparents without any further injuries.

They were both awake already and had lit several candles as the power cut was now widespread and in fact the only other light was the arcing of the nearby power lines. My Grandad kept hearing tiles coming off his roof and wanted to go outside to check! It took my Dad some effort to keep pulling him back indoors as it was obviously highly dangerous. We stayed there till the sun rose some 3 hours later, the storm having done its worst.

Shortly after sunrise my Dad left us to return home to see how the house looked. He eventually came back to us a couple of hours later, bringing with him some more clothes and the news that two trees had come to rest on the house and porch roofs. Though anxious to get home to have a look, we actually took a bit of a tour around Portslade to see the incredible aftermath of the storm. Walking through the carnage of dozens of cars crushed by trees and hundreds of tiles all around us, it was an incredible experience to take in, although excitement is an inappropriate term as tragically some fatalities had occurred.

We detoured to view the devastation at Easthill Park. There were hundreds of trees down, and the park was never the same again. I wish I’d taken a photo of how the old play park looked as I can only recall it in my mind’s eye now. It was demolished shortly after to make way for new trees which was a real shame because that type of ‘industrial’ play park is not really to be found anymore. Certainly the apparatus were scarier than you’d expect to see in the bark chippings and rubber laden parks that started to appear everywhere in the mid 1990’s.

Despite the immense damage all around, it struck me just how beautifully bright, sunny and eerily peaceful it was. No-one would ever have guessed what had just happened. Indeed when recounting my story to my friends at school (once it had reopened) I remember some telling me that they'd slept through the whole event!

My mates said that we must've been mad to go out in that weather, but upon arriving home and seeing the damage to the house, I was convinced my Dad's judgement had been sound and that we were indeed safer and better off having abandoned the house.

Having got home we saw that amazingly most of the roof was still in place, though many dozen tiles were spread about the area, and the porch had a huge tree embedded in it.

As we started the immense task of cleaning up, I remember my Mum's boss turning up almost to check to see if she had a valid reason for not going to work! 

The Cul-De-Sac we lived in only housed 6 premises, and our house was really the only one that suffered damage, but all the neighbours rallied round to help clear the debris and saw up chunks of massive trees in order to get our home back to normal. Stereotypical as it may now sound in these more enlightened and equality driven times, but the men cleared the paths as the women and the children supplied the tea, horlicks and bacon sandwiches to them. No-one complained, and neighbours who had barely spoken to each other were all now getting on with the job in hand.

Things were back to normal pretty soon, though we had a deja vu moment in January 1990 with a lesser daytime storm which brought it's own excitement as we were dragged out of school, but I'll never forget that night when the fantasy of a ‘storm in a film’ became reality.

When Technology goes Missing

A missing child is always big news, and rightfully so. Some cases attract more attention than others but staggeringly over 140,000 under 18’s go missing every year – and every 3 minutes another missing child report comes in to the Police.

One of the positives to modern technology and social networking is that news of a missing child invariably gets to millions of people rapidly, therefore increasing the chance of a happy ending. Speed of communication has not always been so present though.

Strangely enough during the summer of 1978, I managed to become a missing child for a short period of time…well a short period in my mind, and probably only a few hours in real time, but in all likelihood a lifetime for my Mum.

Evidently my Mum was chatting in the front garden to a neighbour. I was milling about and my baby brother was in his buggy. She took her eye off me momentarily and within seconds I had gone.

The rear gardens to the houses backed onto woods which bordered the old Hove Golf Course, and thankfully not the A293 (A27 link road) that opened in 1992, so onto the lawns was really the only direction I could have gone.

Having discovered me missing, my Mum naturally ran around in a panic and got neighbours up and down the road looking for a blond (yes blond) 2 year old boy.

 

Bear in mind back then not everybody had landline phones, and NOBODY had a mobile cellular phone, so Mum had to find someone somewhere with a landline phone to make the call to the Police. She couldn’t call my Dad as he was at work driving his bus and therefore totally uncontactable, so having called the Police and given details they said they’d pop along shortly. She then went onto the golf course with a few of the neighbours to ask the golfers (of which there were many) if they’d seen me.

No joy.

From my point of view I can just about remember walking along a stretch of grass (supposedly the golf course) and subsequently walking up the A270 Old Shoreham Road towards the junction with Hangleton Road, which is a distance of just over half a mile.

Albeit the Old Shoreham Road is far busier now than it was then, it was still a major road back in 1978 due the Brighton by-pass having not yet been built.

I couldn’t have been on the roadside long though before I was approached by two young girls who had got out of a bronze car and started to speak to me.
In fact the photo below (taken in 1987 Dave Denyer - with thanks) shows exactly the spot where they picked me up! 

I have no recollection who they were or what they said, but evidently they took me to a Police box* in Olive Road, Hove

*#tardis

Soon enough the Police bought me home to my relieved Mum. When my Dad got home, oblivious to what had happened, he asked my Mum if she’d given me a bloody good hiding for running off!

It’s fashionable to knock modern technology at the moment – and in particular mobile phones – but in some cases, what would we do without them?