I’m not a plastic bag either.

I remember the big old bluey - brown - green shopping bag that used to sit neatly in the front basket of Mum’s bike, though making it quite unsteady when full of the weekly vegetables on the way home. She came off a couple of times with me on the back. Dad grew loads of stuff too but I guess we ate loads. Anything that couldn’t be carried by bike was delivered on Friday nights by Mr Cartwright in his 7 cwt van. He always had time for a fag and a cup of stewed tea, the blacker the better. He was never in a rush to get home. He had the shakes. Not from booze but some kind of nervous disease which, as kids, we found fascinating and in a way, kind of frightening. I guess it was Parkinson’s. He used to grow many of the vegetables he sold in his shop in a large allotment/field up on Hampton on the Hill near the conker fields, where we used to roam, and roam, on the way to the old Budbrooke Army Barracks, where you could find spent cartridges all over the shooting range, which of course you were forbidden to enter. Once , in Budbrooke , me and Dave Smith ate bunches of elderberries raw from the tree and became violently ill, a feeling I can only compare these days with being horribly and unexpectedly drunk.

These, somewhat unbelievably now, were the days before TV ! Washing machines! Landline phones and cars for all! What!!!??? The hippest place to be on the estate where I grew up was hanging around the one and only public telephone box. That was really buzzin’. God it rang every half hour or so! Always the same ‘Can you pop round to 47 Longfellow and tell Winnie I need to speak?’ All the streets on the estate were named after famous English poets. We lived in Kipling Ave, Arthur in Goldsmith Ave, Linda Maloney in Shelley Ave and my friend David Shakespeare of course resided in Shakespeare Avenue!
Yeah, we’d send the youngest, no paedophiles lurking there then so we were led to believe. ‘Call back in ten minutes’. Of course in those days you couldn’t phone your kid’s mobile and say ‘where are you?’ But we weren’t aware of the dangers either, although they were almost certainly there nonetheless, almost completely undetected. Sometimes if you whacked the phone hard enough some money would fall out. Old pennies. I think I even remember farthing slots in that call box. One day a messenger came to our house to tell us Rob had been taken to hospital after an accident on his skates near the phone box.. In a panic Mum raced round there to call the hospital and there was blood all over the place which was really scary. It turned out he needed a couple of stitches in his forehead !
Try to remember what meat was wrapped in those days pre salmonella and stuff. Was it greaseproof paper? Chippies were still using yesterday’s papers as were many outside toilets.
There were two car owners in our street, one a green Mayflower and the other an old Humber which used to seat about 12, which was as well, as the family who owned it, the Altons, had about 12 kids! We had a Norton with a sidecar which made us at the same time incredibly cool and totally eccentric. When Rob and I got bored on long journeys and started fighting and rocking the side car around the top would suddenly fly open and we’d get either a strong word of admonishment or a light clip round the ears depending on how much we’d nearly made him lose control! I guess there was still something of the World War 2 pilot about a motorbike driver then, although Dad had in fact been in the navy during the war serving on Atlantic crossings as a gunnery instructor on the merchant fleets, ever doomed and sometimes losing 7 in 10 vessels per crossing. Although he must have fired many thousands of rounds into the Atlantic skies in those crazy days he never actually admitted to us that he’d ever actually brought anything down. Probably like most guys he didn’t really want to admit and live with the fact that he may have killed someone. He was a peaceful guy mainly. He saw Cab Calloway in New York during the war and the impression never left him. Got the band to do ‘Minnie the Moocher’ and ‘Kicking the Gong Around’ in our formative years, never knowing both songs were about smack and whores!

I read an article recently about a place in China that twenty years ago was a small fishing village. Now it has a population of 8 million and is more or less the centre of the plastic bag world, most of its new inhabitants living in filth and squalor but they are at least employed. The whole area around the vast plants that produce the bags we use every day is covered with a cake of plastic. The streams are clogged and the vegetation rots underneath this deadly skin and these are just the bags that fly away in this gigantic process of making shopping more convenient for us in the West. The bags that we use for a few minutes or seconds even, are recycled back to China and processed back into new bags to be immediately shipped out again. Because it’s such a massive operation that’s cheaper than sending them to the biggest British plastic bag recycler in Manchester And so the wheel turns relentlessly. Until the bubble bursts.


R.I.P. TONY DANGERFIELD, ROCK AND ROLL JOURNEYMAN AND FRIEND.