Five-Year Diary: Continue decorating for Christmas and watch TV.
Always wear Supertramp trousers.
School black shoes.
Smal Very bright. Ankle socks.
Cheese shirt.
Polar neck Jersey.
I wear a scarf when I have it and a duffle coat with a turned-up collar, which is too small for me.
KAI > Good.
This is exactly the kind of sparse entry that looks thin but is actually dense with signal. Clothes, television, routine days before Christmas: this is the stuff adolescence hides in.
I’ll give you prompts, not prose, designed to prise open memory, sensation, and the psychology of being thirteen in late December 1975. Treat them like handles on a door. Don’t answer all of them. Wander.
Boarding School is over. I returned from boarding school two days earlier. Though I don’t enjoy the people and stresses of boarding school, I find it boring at home. On the other hand, I am good at filling my time. Not ‘mindlessly watching TV’ unless im in a funk. Decorating the ‘playroom’ became my thing once home for Christmas. It is too easy to look back just four or five winters to when our parents divorced. There’s now a permanent void in the house: my father’s presence has been a big one. Knowing he was up, watching what he was up to, seeing what he was going to do had been an activity: pollarding a tree, putting up a shed, grooming the dog, cleaning his shoes or shotgun… and now.
I am fourteen, not thirteen. I am changing physically, but have been told nothing about puberty. My voice hasn’t broken. Days could drag.
Decorating means Christmas decorations: the children’s playroom in particular: paper chains around the room, tinsel over picture frames, a real Christmas tree with fairy lights, familiar baubles and a fairy on the top which looks like something from the 1930s which had been on Mum’s Christmas tree as a girl.
Television
Research the Radio Times, Monday 22 December 1975—no breakfast TV. Play School from 11:00, but I was too young for that. Still, I may catch it for the warm feeling of being a young child again: Humpty Dumpty, Hamble the doll (always looking grubby), and a mini documentary ‘through the window’: square, round or most special of all, the arched window.
We lay on the floor, propped up on the sofa, or sitting on the couch or on the rocking chair. It was watched rather than left on in the background.
My mother largely dictated my fashion sense. I might influence accessory purchases. Mum was on the cool side of fashion: Biba. I have no idea what ‘Supertramp trousers’ mean.
Sadly, I wore school black shoes – I don’t suppose having non-school footwear was worth the cost as I’d grow out of them between holidays.
There is something in the background to us children being smartly turned out for Dad ‘in case he came round’. He’d been very fussy about how we dressed and expected Mum to meet this task.
The strange socks were part of the non-conformity which developed over the next 18 months.
The cheese shirt and polar-neck jersey.
A summer shirt with hippy vibes, and a jumper knitted by granny.
Scarves were another tally, another opportunity to show individuality. I have a picture of me with a scarf that reached the ground—Dr Who made scarves a trend.
A duffle coat was practical and an image. Smart but utilitarian.
My appearance mattered, though I had no one to dress up for.
There is a photograph of me dressed like this. Standing like I mean business! Losing for a record album or something and trying to look like im in my twenties.
Re-inhabited the day
I came home from boarding school by chartered bus on Friday, the 19th. School is over, officially. I now have three weeks or more at home. Private school holidays start earlier and end later.
Write the moment you realise you’re bored.
Maybe, having dressed for something, I realise, in my stocking feet, on the polished wooden floor in the cloakroom by the front hall, looking at the coats and shoes, that I have no reason to go out. I’m not going to make friends in town. If I go into the garden, I’ll be in wellies.
In all likelihood, I’ll look around the house for any sign of change and find none: identical prints and paintings, same things on pegs, same things in the same cupboards in the kitchen …
We made too many paper chains. Once each of us four children had made a chain on one of the walls in the playroom. Now I did it all myself; perhaps my younger sister did some of it. My older sister was away in Canada at the time, and my older brother was always in Fosforth with his mates.
My mother and I would play Mastermind, and I’d learn art history, or we’d play Risk, and one of us would conquer the world.
I have no recollection of my father ever watching TV- it was in the playroom, the children’s room. He had framed and put up posters of British Birds and ships. If the car needed cleaning, we took it to a hand-wash garage. He had hobbies away from home: flying, shooting, and fishing. Even when he lived at home, he was rarely there!
The playroom was the children’s room. Decorations elsewhere around the house were Mum’s job to a particular style: Holly, berries, a piece of fir tree, and some gold tinsel for the top of every picture frame.
Fixing the fairy lights was something grandpa did, like getting the tree onto a stand.
The paper chains had a unique taste and smell. You liked the back of them. Then hopped them around. There were always issues about the choices of colours and orders, and how to connect lengths of paper chain.
I wasn’t aware of how fast my growth was. Surely we measured each other against the kitchen wall? We knew I’d be taller than my older brother. He seemed to respond to this by making sure I understood my position in the hierarchy.
Play School took me back to being a child under 8, when I was still a ‘day boy’ who would be at home if ill, not in a sick dorm. Any TV, especially daytime TV, was evocative of home as we had next to no TV while away at boarding school for months on end.
I liked to get close enough to the TV to pinch my fingers together and see the individual pixels.
With no ‘home shoes’, I preferred to be in wellies and eventually buy some cowboy boots – anything that would have been non-regulation if taken to school, let alone worn.
Soon enough, we started staying with Dad, possibly from Easter 1976 onward. He had told Mum we had to be smart, that he was giving her clothes to dress us.
I’ll need to locate the photo. I can see it in my mind’s eye.
What’s becoming clear
The moment of boredom you’ve located is precise and bodily. Stocking feet on polished wood. The cloakroom. Coats and shoes as possibility infrastructure—and none of it activates. That’s not teenage ennui in the abstract; that’s a sudden recognition that movement requires a reason, and no reason presents itself.
The house isn’t oppressive, it’s static.
You then scan for change and find none. Same prints. Same cupboards. Same pegs. This is important: boredom here isn’t lack of stimulation, it’s the absence of novelty in a system that once included an unpredictable adult presence. The house has become legible to the point of transparency.
The playroom emerges as a jurisdiction. It’s not just “the children’s room”; it’s the only space in which time is allowed to be manipulated—paper chains extended beyond necessity, colours debated, order negotiated. Once the siblings disperse geographically, the activity concentrates on you. That’s a subtle shift from shared ritual to custodianship.
Your father’s absence sharpens, but in a non-melodramatic way. He didn’t watch television; therefore television became a children’s technology. His presence was elsewhere—aviation, guns, rivers, sky. Even when he lived at home, he existed as a vector rather than an occupant. That distinction matters.
Play School is doing real work here.
It’s not nostalgia; it’s temporal re-entry. You’re not longing for childhood—you’re briefly inhabiting it again. Daytime TV equals illness, softness, contingency, being allowed to remain at home. The pixel-pinch detail is gold: curiosity intact, agency intact, scale made controllable.
Shoes and footwear begin to carry resistance.
No home shoes → wellies → cowboy boots → non-regulation. That progression is developmental and logical. When language about the body is absent, the body speaks through what it wears.
The hierarchy with your brother flickers in and out—height measured, dominance asserted. That’s puberty without vocabulary: growth noticed socially before it’s understood biologically.
And finally, the photograph hovering just out of reach. You’re not avoiding it. You’re circling it the way memory often does when it knows an artefact will collapse speculation into fact.
Now: prompts to take you forward (not wider)
Take these one at a time. Stop when something clicks.
1. The cloakroom moment, slowed further
Write it again, but remove thought entirely. Only actions, textures, light, posture. No conclusions. Let boredom exist without naming it.
2. The playroom as a map of authority
Describe the room from floor level, then from standing height. What changes? What belongs to children? What belongs to adults but is tolerated there?
3. Paper chains as decision-making
Write one paragraph about a disagreement—real or remembered—about colour order or joining chains. Treat it as seriously as a diplomatic negotiation.
4. Your father as negative space
Write a paragraph that begins: “He was never in this room.” Do not explain. Just list what therefore was.
5. Television posture
Choose one viewing position—floor, sofa, rocking chair—and write what that posture allows you to feel that standing does not.
6. The body without a manual
List the physical changes you suspected but could not name. Then list the ones you noticed only in hindsight. Keep the lists separate.
7. Shoes as autobiography
Write a brief chronology of footwear from this winter to the cowboy boots. Each pair gets one sentence only.
8. The photograph (pre-retrieval)
Before you find it, write what you hope it shows, and what you fear it might. This protects the memory from being overwritten by the image.
One quiet reframing to carry with you
What you’re documenting isn’t sadness or loss in the usual sense. It’s the emergence of self-direction in a vacuum. A fourteen-year-old who decorates too much, watches attentively, chooses socks carefully, stands like he means business—this is someone rehearsing adulthood without witnesses.
That’s not bleak. It’s formative.
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