Missing Blog Entries Discovered!

Missing Blog Entries Discovered!

"When I last visited Longleat I went to the Dr Who exhibition and I bought a dalek…"

Write about what you know, they say. Well, newly recovered documents indicate that I've been doing this since at least 1975. I was banging on about 'Doctor Who' then and it's a habit I've found hard to break...

Regular readers of this collection of assorted strangeness may remember my piece a few months ago 'A Look At Longleat' which mentioned a picture I drew at school depicting the main console room part of this much-missed attraction. I couldn't quite track it down at the time, but some subsequent digging in dusty boxes has unearthed the complete school workbook from that period in surprisingly good nick.

I can date the start of the book to September 1975 as the first entry in this prototype blog details how we have recently moved house from Knowlton (which had the grand total of two houses, a ruined church, some earthworks and a silage pit) to the grand metropolis of Monkton-up-Wimborne (four houses, a river that flooded every Winter and still no mains drainage). It's a recurring pattern that every time I've moved, it's been to a larger conurbation, with our current location of Poole seeming like a major city in comparison to my addresses in the 70s and 80s.

Entry number two is fairly mundane, concerning a sink unit being put into our new kitchen, but Page Three is where the excitement really starts.

We are talking the first week or two of Season 13 here, so Longleat only has stuff on display up to the end of 'Revenge Of The Cybermen'. Now I was never going to win any prizes for my attempts at artwork, but if you look closely at the picture, there's a cheery silver figure in the middle, waving his arms about with gay abandon. A couple of yellowish Daleks are on the left, with Davros exuding less menace than is customary. On the right, there's a Giant Spider and what may be a maggot from 'The Green Death'. Several minutes have been wasted trying to work out what the two brown lumps about the Spider are, and sadly there do not seem to be any photos from the 1975 console room display available. There is a written report which gives the clue that they might be anything from Yeti to Axons to Gell Guards or even plain old-fashioned rocks. This is why I was never brave enough to send anything in to 'Vision On'...

I clearly like my TV even at this early age, as along the way I mention 'Tomorrow's World' (Thursdays, of course, before 'Top Of The Pops'), 'It's The Knock-Out' (sic - apparently we watch this every Wednesday after I've been down the pub for a cherryade - BBC Genome says it starts 6.55pm and runs till 8.10pm when 'Softly, Softly : Task Force' starts, which means we didn't stay long in the pub) and 'Watch' (Tuesdays). The latter is interesting as there's a drawing of an elephant and the Genome entry for 11th November 1975 gives 'Watch' at 11am, shortly after an edition of 'Science All Around' that mentions weighing elephants...

Claire (not sure of her surname, sorry Claire!) has brought in her Womble, Orinoco, who seems to be wearing a red-and-white bobble hat, rather than the more familiar Tom Baker-style get-up and this page also notes my hope that the Loch Ness Monster is a Womble. If this is a reference to something from a book or an annual, that might explain this odd notion, as I'm unlikely to be mixing up Orinoco with Ogopogo, as we're a bit too early for me to have seen 'Arthur C Clarke's Mysterious World'...

Actually Nessie seems to be on my mind at lot (we are talking just after 'Terror Of The Zygons' here) as I've also rendered a two-headed version, who seems very happy, noting that "some people say that there are 50 monsters in the Loch and they are 40 feet long..."  But then, some people say some right old nonsense, after all...

But it's 'Dr Who' (guilty as charged on that front!) that clocks up more mentions than any other show. We watched 'Who' followed by 'The Generation Game' before going out to dinner with some friends. Who apparently drove around in 'Joe 90's car, for some reason. judging by the accompanying illustration...

Shortly after I have made some Christmas cards (one for my parents, the other for my cats & rabbits), I brought my 'Doctor Who' book to school, and it seems that "inside there was a picture of some of the monsters on..."

Given that 'The Doctor Who Monster Book' was published late '75, I'm therefore getting the feeling that I got this as a Christmas present, but with no specific dates in my workbook I cannot be 100% sure.

It's been fascinating going through these early example of my writing, as clearly much of what interested me then has carried through over 40 years later.

But then, that should be no surprise to anyone!

(Written by Andrew Trowbridge. Some of it in 1975)