Courtesy of sister Hazel giving birth to her daughter Abigail earlier this morning, I am now an uncle. Which makes me feel quite old, yet unwise, for some reason.
Mind you, brother Andrew became an Uncle when our daugher Elisha arrived last new year’s eve, so he’s now a double uncle and he’s not sixteen until next week, so everything’s relative.
Anyhoo, congrats to Hazel and Ian on the birth of Abigail – hopefully she’ll be as much of a bundle of fun as Elisha has been for us in her first year.
Back in the mid 80’s I had a cassette tape that I recorded all of my favourite TV themes onto. My favourite shows, like Airwolf, Blue Thunder, Knight Rider, and The A Team, were usually shown on Friday or Saturday nights. If I liked the show enough I would crouch in front of the TV with my stereo balanced on my knee to record the theme, while the family tried their best to be quiet for me. Once a theme was on the tape I could listen to it as many times as I felt necessary to fill the void until the programme was on the following week.
Using one of those paint pens, I had coloured my TV Theme tape gold to highlight it’s importance; I didn’t want anyone borrowing it and recording over the contents. This was further ensured by keeping the tape in a small safe in my room when I wasn’t listening to it. These are the kinds of things that are precious to an eleven year old, so you’ll have to forgive what seems particularly anal behaviour in hindsight.
The original tape had been a C30 – a demo tape that I’d gotten with a Walkman my mum had bought me for Xmas ’83. As brief as TV theme shows are, by early 1985 the tape had run out of space and I needed a way of transferring the contents to a new one.
To accomplish this, my friend Brian agreed to loan me his stereo to duplicate the golden tape on the condition that he could have the original once the copy was made. I wasn’t convinced that it was an ideal set of conditions, but I needed the space for the themes from Street Hawk and Battlestar Galactica, amongst others, so I agreed.
It’s hard to fathom why, considering I’d been using jack leads between tape recorders to copy Spectrum games for a while at that point, but we used no such connectivity when we copied the contents of the golden tape to a new C90. Sitting one stereo facing the other, we pressed play on the original and record on the other and then sat in moderate silence for the half hour or so it took to complete the job.
A couple of months back when I was at the Great British Beer Festival, I bought myself and Fliss a pair of comedy tee shirts from a small company called Smart T’s who had a stall there. The tee shirts seemed to be of good quality, and they weren’t too pricey either.
When I got back, Fliss was well pleased with her camouflage style tee shirt with Weapons of Mass Distraction printed across the chest area.
With me, you don’t just get a present, you get a touch of class! ;o)
Sadly, after just one wash, some of the letters peeled off, leaving her tee shirt looking a bit on the used side. Disappointed, I had a look for the Smart T’s website and sent a polite mail detailing what had happened and asking if we could have a replacement. Much to my surprise and delight I received a reply from Ade at Smart T’s almost immediately, apologising for the fault and offering to replace it if I sent the old one back to him.
This is where I got a bit crap with postage, carrying the tee shirt in my bag to and from work on a daily basis for the next four weeks, but never quite getting close to packaging and posting it. I started to think I’d missed the opportunity to exchange it, until I received another mail from Ade asking if I had posted it yet. I thanked him for the good customer service and explained that I was the weak link in the chain, promising to post it in the days that followed.
Somehow, although the tee shirt made it into a padded envelope, it still took me until the following week to post it off. I don’t know why, I just always suck at getting round to post stuff.
Smart T’s, on the other hand, were not so tardy, and Fliss had a brand new tee shirt within a matter of days. I’m pleased to say that this one has survived a wash, so it was obviously an isolated incident.