All the fun of the fair.

Growing up in Warwick in the sixties, a highlight of the year was Warwick Mop, a funfair that closed the centre of town for a few days. Probably still does. We have a local fair on Victoria Park just about to open and it is reassuring that even in this doomed climate some things remain pretty well unchanged. Sneaking around this morning there are still ERF lorries and Foden's. Old English manufacturers that used to be powered by Gardener 180 diesel engines with a second in the back to power the massive generator needed to run the ‘Bumper Cars’ as we called them. I intend to visit one night very soon and see if the heady smell of candy floss and diesel can take me back to my childhood when i watched in awe, the operators skipping nimbly from one car to the next collecting a shilling off each of us. Of course, it was all in black and white then....

A Boom for Shoppers.

There used to be a grocers here, run by a smiling chap with greased back, black, hair. Those that have lived around here for over 25 years will remember him. It was old style. Shelves with packets of Birds Custard and a slicing machine with some dubious looking cooked ham. Now we are having a new Sainsbury’s Local to a mixed reception. As there was always a queue in Jackson’s a need can be clearly proved. My own thoughts are that far from suffering, the local, owner driver, shops may well benefit. There will no longer be a need to drive to a supermarket for loo paper etc. and I, for one, will be doing all that on Queens Rd, on foot. This may prompt locals to return to buying meat from a proper butcher and fruit and veg from a proper Greengrocer. Completing all of the weeks shop (whatever that is) on foot and on Queens Road. I hope so.

1984 and all that.

In a dastardly move today the Council has announced that we shall now be held responsible for issuing our own parking tickets. This move, hugely unpopular with residents, will save thousands on traffic wardens. Surveillance cameras will be positioned on every street corner and of such high definition they will even be able to read tax disk dates. Car users, the scum of our society, will be charged with sticking parking tickets on their own cars if illegally parked and reporting their own out of date tax disks! Fines will have to be doubled to cover the installation costs, but Graham Ramsbottom, the brains behind the scheme assured people they would soon get used to it like all other stealth taxes. The pioneering scheme is being applauded by snoopers everywhere hunched over monitors in their high vis jackets and hard hats. Possible future developments include catching thieves who bend down and pick up coins off the street, those who don’t own up when they’ve been given too much change in shops and people who wear odd socks. As English subjects will shall, naturally, take it all on the chin. If we were French we would block all the roads with turnips and retreat to a bar until the plan was shelved, but we’re not. Vive le France.

Lost World.

Few people ever notice as they stumble from one bar to the next on Queens Road, that if they were to just stray a little further the other side of the Clarendon Park Rd. traffic lights, then hang a left, they are in unspoilt countryside. This is the Queens Rd. allotments and have, I guess, been there since the area was developed around the beginning of the twentieth century. Throughout the War they would have provided a lot of fresh food and post war they have offered chaps a chance to escape from the family at the weekend and head for the shed. There are various pleading notices asking if any are vacant, but no clues as to who owns any of them. Some are cultivated, but many are not, so I expect it’s only a matter of time before a property developer buys them and they become another housing estate. Ever the optimist.

All gone.

Almost as quickly as it came, saw and conquered, so it has melted with the exception of these massive snow balls rolled in the park looking rather incongruous in the sunshine. I listened last week to the news on local radio casting doom and gloom about closed schools, buses not running, the county ground to a standstill etc. etc. What a stark contrast this made to the reality on the streets and in the parks, where everyone was out having fun - snowball fights, tobogganing and building snowmen. I guess that will be it now, possibly for some years. What fun it was and how it brought back memories of ones own childhood as a crisp, well formed snowball goes down the back of your neck.

Flower Power.

Braced for the busiest days of the year the stalwart and delightful staff at Flower Corner are ready to sell, wrap, listen, advise and deliver thousands of blooms this weekend. It’s quite a risky business. All those flowers will fade rapidly if not shifted over the next three days. Those who plan in advance were in today ordering the best, tomorrow will be the last minute’ers and Sunday morning will be those in the shit trying to bail themselves out of a tricky situation. My pals Naomi and Steve run a florists in Gloucester, Steve seems to end up doing a lot of the deliveries, like Paul, the owner of Flower Corner. Steve told me he was amazed at the number of girls who, when he knocks on the door with a lavish bouquet ask him to tell the bloke to shove them where the sun don’t shine, and slam the door in his face! Strange creatures women.

R.I.P Vicbag

Vicky Keens-Soper, aka Vic-bag, or Vicky Keen Groper was our first employee at TJ’s Hamburgers when we opened back in 1982. Vicky was a little older than us and a member of the much revered Clarendon Park Women's Army. A group of women who all went through divorce at about the same time and were feared throughout the area. Vicbag was a star though, and a good friend as well as model employee for about 7 years before drifting off into a thing called a career. Social Services, working with ‘lifers’ in prison, from memory. However, she was always at her best flirting with the young chaps and this picture was taken at Clive Millac’s 40th a couple of years ago when she was in full flow with Clive and Leon Fisk. Vicky was always good at listening to the problems of others. Hence the career listening to prisoners. Maybe her own colourful life equipped her for that. It seemed to have many phases. First the Mum, living in a Chateau in France bringing up Robert, Alex and Gus, then a vague cultural existence with Maurice 2nd in Clarendon Park, then her ‘wild’ days working for us and sharing her life with Doug, before settling down with Stephen in Devon and starting a whole new life. It all adds up to far more ‘life’ than most of us manage and yet she embraced it all. It was last Autumn that I had a call from Splev (Ian Splevings) to say she was not well and in Hospital. Things were apparently ‘not looking good’ and just today I bumped into her old pal, Lynne Smith, who confirmed Vicky had died last week. A great loss. Many fond memories, but one that sticks in my mind is when I had completed a basic food hygiene course and felt I should assert the importance of hand washing before starting work to all the TJs staff. “There’s no need for me to wash mine, they are perfectly clean already” was Vicky’s predictable response! R.I.P.