More nostalgia from the pages of the very dormant Salut! North, which I shall close down once I have transferred material here.
Please bear in mind that this item was written 12 years ago; the photograph above was taken then, too. I did not maintain the gym regime mentioned in the piece but still play badminton - interrupted by a knee op last year and the pandemic this year - as well as swimming and walking a lot less than I should.
I do get plenty of the arm exercise shown below in a photo taken on Saturday, my 72nd birthday, in Bormes-les-Mimosas, the south of France ...
For some entertaining comments on the piece I reproduce below, go to the original item (while it's still there) at https://www.salutnorth.com/2008/01/no-bones-were-b.html. Coming next: my friend Bill Taylor's terrific read, 'Woodbines, Shildon Tunnel and a boy's first kiss'. All items transferred from Salut! North - two so far - appear at this link ....
No bones were broken. I was left grazed and dusty, not bleeding. There was, unfortunately, no cause to stay off school and counselling hadn't even been invented.
But it was still a middlingly unpleasant experience, being pounced on in the dark, pushed and jostled by two or three other boys and left feeling sorry for myself on the ground as they ran off laughing.
If only they'd known how bad a grammar school pupil I was, how hard I was applying myself to the sort of under-achievement that could have only one outcome, explusion, they might have spared me. But no, at that moment on the path that leads down from the King Willie to the railway tunnel top in Shildon, I was a "grammar school snob" and that was reason enough for their half-hearted assault.
It is actually just as well that they didn't know my parents, both Londoners with London airs and graces despite ample North-eastern family connections, also sent me to elocution classes. That would have been real provocation.
I was a natural target in one other way. I was painfully thin. No one looking at me now would believe that this could ever have been the case, but there was indeed a Colin Randall before weight gain. That is me standing on the far left in the photo of Woodhouse Close Secondary School's leaving Class of 1964 (sent to me the other day, ie Aug 2020, by my old geography teacher George Dixon)..
Spindly legs, knobbly knees, the hint of ribcage sticking through skin. Perhaps I exaggerate, but only about the ribs. I even remember that, during that miserable grammar school career, the threat of the cane was somehow all the greater because I feared in my childish way that my trousered backside would look emaciated, bringing further humiliation and headmasterly contempt when I bent over.
Once, after I had moved on - been moved on - to Woodhouse Close in Bishop Auckland, I was playing in goal in a house football match. I would have been 14 or 15.
To my absolute horror, I noticed two girls, probably from the next year down but on the precocious side, ambling towards my end of the pitch. At least during the day, I had my long trousers to protect me from embarrassment. In my football kit, more or less static when play was at the other end of the field, I was utterly vulnerable.
The girls reached my goal and stopped behind it. There wasn't even the flimsy protective screen of a net. I tried moving further out into the penalty box but couldn't escape their taunts. "Y'naah," one lass said to her friend, raising her voice to make sure nothing would be missed, "Aa've seen more fat on a wet chip."
This putdown has remained with me ever since. I know worse things have been said in the history of girl's inhumanity to boy. It just didn't feel that way at the time. And they not only heard but giggled when the team captain, a rather smug youth, turned at one point to look back, pointed me out to the refereeing sports master and said: "Doesn't Randall look pathetic?"
Well yes, he almost certainly did. Only a two or three years earlier, the class tough at grammar school had sidled up to me in the changing rooms and said: "You know, you'd look good in drainpipes. Seven-inch bottoms should be about right for you."
The sort of remark that was wounding at 11 or 12 was devastating to a fourth or fifth former, especially on the lips of a pretty girl who then, along with her equally pretty mate, also heard my classmate's jibe.
It was all enough to persuade me that drastic action was required. I tried eating more, without success. I gazed at those "do you get sand kicked in your face?" ads and considered buying the exercise equipment on offer - weren't they called something like Bullworkers? - until I realised that "on approval" didn't mean I could avoid paying for it. And then, in the pages of Reveille or Titbits, I spotted something called Wate-on.
This, it appeared, was more or less guaranteed to pile on pounds. Can you even imagine trying to market such a product in these diet-conscious days? Well, I just made cursory Google checks and both Wate-on and Bullworkers seem still to be with us (NB: I have not checked again for a 2020 update).
In any event, I bought my fattening food supplements as slyly as a man in a dirty raincoat ducks into the porn parlour. Not in Shildon, or Bishop Auckland, where the chemists or their assistants might recognise me, but during a trip to Newcastle.
When I got home, I hid them up the the chimney of my bedroom. They remained, so far as I know, undiscovered. And I certainly remained skinny, despite taking the horrible stuff religiously until the contents of my packets ran out. Wate-on was expensive for a lad with only a paper round and modest pocket money; I'd had to save up for the first supply and when that failed to build me up, I convinced myself it was not going to work at the dosage my money would stretch to, and simply gave up.
Why I was so thin was a mystery to me, since I had a hearty enough appetite. Why I got fatter is not so hard to explain. It would be easy to blame the makers of fish and chips, fried breakfasts and Guinness, and later rich French and Indian cuisine and red wine. But they didn't actually make me eat and drink any of their products.
Badminton keeps me reasonably fit, but not sufficiently unfat. I need to lose a stone. And I have a plan. Soon my wife will join me in Abu Dhabi. I have bitten the bullet of getting into shape and poured thousands of dirhams into the coffers of one of the local hotels for joint membership of its health club.
Much as I loathe gyms, and gym classes, I know what is needed, along with that most effective of exercises, planting your palms against the dinner tabe and pushing it out of reach.
If I can bear to do so, I shall report my progress. Watch this space, if only to see if it gets smaller.
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