Saturday 3rd Jan 1975
Don’t really get up ‘til 11:00, have breakfast, read, have Benelyn for sore throat. Mum goes to a party, and I lose £2. Ring my girlfriend and ask to see her in town. My older brother fixes and paints his homemade GoKart. Silly books and 50p for his birthday from me. He goes to Doug’s. Go out with my girlfriend on a Teddy Hunt. Find one in town. Go to the Kard Bar and Pet Shop. Get different buses. Watch TV. Very cold, went to bed at 8:30 with a headache and a cold.
KAI> This entry has the texture of a day spent slightly out of joint: late rising, sore throat, money lost, people coming and going, warmth sought and not quite found. Rather than interrogate it, the trick is to walk back into it sideways, letting small facts tug loose larger ones. Try these prompts slowly, not all at once. Let the mind meander.
1. The late morning body
My staying in bed is most unusual. I must have been unwell. My bedroom was at the top of the stairs in the middle of the landing. The door was over my left shoulder—a window onto the garden at the end of the bed. I would have particular dreams related to being ill. For some reason, visions of hundreds of bobbins of different-coloured threads floating in the sky appeared before I vomited.
2. Benelyn and care
Mum had been unwell on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, so a bug was going around. Benelyn was our standard medicine. If ‘properly poorly’ we’d get a hot water bottle, Lucozade, grapes and a visit from the doctor,
3. Mum’s party / your £2
Bad luck to lose the £2. Worth more like £10-15 today? In 1978, two single pound notes, I assume. Mum was a 43-year-old divorced – she’d not had a boyfriend in the 5 years since separation and divorce from our father that we knew about!
4. Ringing your girlfriend
During the day, it would be the kitchen or hallway phone, but with mum’s permission. For extended private calls, we used the phone by the bed in her bedroom
5. Older Brother and the Go-Kart
Mechanically minded like his grandfather, he’d constructed the GoKart frame, bought four wheels, added a lawnmower engine and bought or purloined a seat.
6. “Silly books” and 50p
Wicked Willy Books sounds about right. Or a book or cartoons.
7. Town with Girlfriend
I can’t imagine why we were on a Teddy Hunt. No, for either of us, perhaps for a young cousin she was expecting to see. It was a project and an excuse to be together.
8. Kard Bar and Pet Shop
The Kard Bar in the Handiside Arcade was a hippie Mecca of Bowie and Roger Dean posters, joss sticks, and secondhand army-surplus clothes.
The Pet Shop would have been to get something for her pet rabbit, Elvis. I probably got something for our pet rabbit, Joker!
9. Different buses
We both got buses towards Gosforth from in front of the University Theatre, Haymarket. I had further to go and fewer choices, a 45 or 45 to Polworth Drive, on the other side of Gosforth High Street. She needed a bus that turned off the North Road towards Kenton – the wrong way for me. It never crossed my mind to take the first four stops with her, then change. The day before, she’d rushed for her bus without a goodbye. We may have kissed on the cheek this time. Just a polite good-bye. This is my second date ever! Two days in a row :) I didn’t think of it as momentous then, but I do now – fifty years on. It was the start of a trend.
10. Evening television
On the sofa. Half-asleep. Whatever was on. Did we have to get up to change channels? Probably. I’d lie on the floor with my foot extended so that I could change channels that way.
11. Cold, headache, early bed
A head full of cold. Thick catarrh. It’s a familiar story
12. A final, quiet nudge
Seeing your girlfriend, a girl your age. Going to the shops in town together. This I could do. Why did I prefer the company of girls? Who knows!
The ill body as threshold
Illness loosens the usual grip of discipline and time. The room becomes a container: door over the shoulder, garden beyond the feet. The body turns inward, and the mind produces those strange, pre-verbal images—the floating bobbins, colour without narrative, pattern without story.
That image is striking because it’s non-symbolic in the adult sense. It’s sensory cognition doing its own thing, like a brain sorting threads before the loom is set.
Children and early adolescents often report these geometric, swarming, or patterned visions when feverish or nauseous. The mind is not thinking yet; it’s processing. Vomiting ends the vision. The system resets.
Care, and its clear hierarchy
Your description of Benelyn versus “properly poorly” is quietly revealing. There is a well-understood ladder of care:
- Benelyn = acknowledged but contained
- Hot water bottle, Lucozade, grapes, doctor = sanctioned vulnerability
You knew exactly where you stood on that scale. This matters psychologically: predictability in care creates security even when parents are stretched. Mum having been ill herself adds a layer of realism—this is not indulgence, it’s triage. No fuss, but no neglect either.
The £2 and Mum’s party
You do something important here: you translate value without sentimental inflation. £2 matters, but it’s not catastrophic. What’s heavier is the adult context you now see clearly and the boy then could not.
A 43-year-old divorced woman going to a party in the mid-1970s is not a neutral fact. It’s a social risk, a small assertion of life continuing. You don’t moralise it, and that restraint is wise.
What emerges is a boy with access to money but no permission to feel entitled to it—and that combination is psychologically potent.
Cash appears in his life not as a steady allowance with rules and explanations, but as episodic, slightly unmoored: birthday money, a lost £2, a note here, coins there. It’s enough to enable movement and choice, but not enough to feel owned. He uses money, but doesn’t claim it.
That helps explain the flat tone in the diary. Downplaying £2 isn’t ignorance; it’s a learned stance. Making a fuss about money would risk aligning him with greed, dependency, or accusation. Better to treat it as incidental. A tool, not a need.
Layered over this is the deeper unease you name: the sense—sometimes shared among the siblings—that money could be substitutive. When affection, presence, or explanation are inconsistent, cash risks becoming symbolic. Not generosity exactly, but compensation. And compensation is awkward to receive. You don’t thank it warmly; you pocket it carefully and say nothing.
So the boy develops a careful economy of feeling:
- Money is useful but not to be celebrated.
- Loss is irritating but not worth protest.
- Spending enables connection (bus fares, cinema, town, Jane), but the money itself must remain emotionally neutral.
In other words, he treats cash the way one treats a slightly unreliable adult: accept what’s offered, don’t ask for more, don’t complain if it disappears.
That stance has longevity. It produces competence and independence early—but also a tendency to underplay needs, to translate value into action rather than feeling, and to narrate substantial things as minor.
The £2 wasn’t small. What was small was the space he felt allowed to say that it mattered.
Phones, permission, and privacy
Your memory of phone geography is exact, and it matters. The hallway or kitchen phone is public speech. The bedside phone is licensed for intimacy. You needed permission not just to call, but to occupy that space of extended attention.
That you remember this distinction tells us how alert you already were to boundaries—what could be overheard, what required sanction. Many teenage diaries of the period obsess over phones for this reason. The telephone was the narrow bridge between worlds, and it always creaked.
Brother and the Go-Kart: competence nearby
Your brother’s mechanical fluency sits in the background like a steady engine. You don’t compete with it; you observe it. He inherits a lineage (grandfather → Nick → machine), and that lineage is tangible: frame, wheels, engine, seat. Things that work.
For you, this competence is reassuring rather than threatening. It’s part of the domestic ecology: someone is always making something go.
“Silly books” as coded speech
Wicked Willy-type humour is not trivial. It’s bodily, transgressive, sideways. Giving such a book is a way of saying I know what makes you laugh without saying anything at all. The 50p is almost secondary; the joke does the relational work.
Adolescent gift-giving often works like this: not sentiment, but recognition.
Town, Teddy Hunts, and pretexts
You’re right to distrust the literal logic of the Teddy Hunt. It’s a project—an agreed fiction that allows proximity without scrutiny. Adolescents are masters of this. Errands, collections, quests: all ways to be together while pretending not to need to be.
What matters is not the hunt, but the shared motion through town. You’re rehearsing adulthood in small, safe loops.
Kard Bar, Pet Shop, and identity browsing
The Kard Bar emerges vividly because it’s an identity showroom. Bowie, Roger Dean, incense, surplus jackets: curated otherness. You don’t need to buy to participate; browsing is affiliation enough.
The pet shop adds tenderness. Elvis and Joker anchor the day back to care and responsibility. Even here, the relationship is mediated through looking after something else. That’s very 14.
Buses and the unimagined choice
This is one of the most revealing moments. You see, now, the option you didn’t take: four stops together, then change. The fact that it never occurred to you is the point.
At this age, intimacy is often bounded by rules that feel natural rather than restrictive. You followed the logic of routes, not desire. A polite kiss on the cheek is progress enough. Two days in a row already feels extravagant.
You name it accurately now: a trend beginning, not a climax.
Television as sedation
Half-asleep on the sofa, foot extended to change channels—this is not entertainment, it’s cooling down. The house settles, the day discharges. TV is not watched so much as endured until it’s safe to disappear into bed.
Illness again, as ending
The cold closes the circle it opened. Catarrh, headache, early bed. The body calls time before the mind does. There’s no drama in it. Just withdrawal.
And the quiet truth
Your final line says the most: This I could do.
At 14, competence with girls—walking, talking, browsing, sharing small projects—felt more navigable than the noisier, more competitive worlds of boys. That preference doesn’t need explanation or defence. It’s a temperament finding its terrain.
Many adolescent diaries echo this: girls as interlocutors, boys as background noise. Not because of sexuality as such, but because conversation, attunement, and shared looking arrive earlier than bravado.
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