Author: shaun tenzenmen

Australasian DIY music specialist and practising poet, amongst other things

The Week That Was – 7th January 1979

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12th Oct 2021 – Each page of this diary had a small write-up on some important or legendary footballer and re-reading a lot of these names was a trip. Just seeing the name would remind me of the teams I was familiar with them playing for. Players were brutal and ugly in those days, playing on muddy and messy pitches. The sport was highly revered but was without the crazy amount of money that sponsorships and advertising brought once the Premier League began – which is also around the time I lost interest – though there are other reasons involved for that too.

7th January 1979
Granny beat me at Happy Days
But I beat her in Trumps

12th Oct 2021 – Trumps or Top Trumps was really popular around this time, a card-collecting game where you chose your best stat hoping to beat your opponents. Topics may be types of car or military vehicles. Unsurprisingly there is a website for Top Trumps, so possibly it is even popular now for any child who doesn’t have a phone. And come to think of it, many mobile phone games employ similar systems of scoring as TT too.

For Happy Days I had to go search and finding this picture I’m guessing this is what I was playing with my Granny. She was always Granny, never Gran or Grandma. I can’t imagine it but I hope playing this (and winning) gave her some affection for her grandson. The board doesn’t trigger any memories but the jukebox counting design feels familiar. Look at all the American words I was already subjecting myself to. Nerd, cruising, drag. After exposure to Grease last year I was getting to be all about the leather jacket.

8th January 1979
I am able to watch Danger UXB because there’s no school tomorrow
HEEYYYY!

12th Oct 2021 – Again, a quick image search triggers memories of this show. Otherwise, I’m lost. I was particularly anxious at times during this show as the soldiers would race against time to disarm bombs. Hard to imagine how they got so much mileage out this premise. 13 episodes and that was it – something I always liked about many UK TV shows. Concise and well written.

9th January 1979
Return to school postponed
WO!

12th Oct 2021 – Still improving my American language skills, I hadn’t yet learned how to spell Woah!

10th January 1979
Ipswich 3-2 Carlisle
HEYY!

12th Oct 2021 – WOAH and HEY are my attempts at being the coolest cat in deepest Dorset. There was no one to impress except my own maturing ego.

11th January 1979
Still no school and I ain’t going tomorrow cause it’ll be stupid

12th January 1979
A boring day
Nothing to say
It rhymes It rhymes

12th Oct 2021 – Here I am, already on my poetic journey. I must’ve been bored with the snow already.

13th January 1979
Previous scores 5-2, 6-1
Ipswich P-P Villa
Blurp!

12th Oct 2021 – At this point, football and Ipswich were my primary concern. Something that would change somewhat during the course of this year.

The Week That Was – 31st December 1978

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31st December 1978
Snow started falling yesterday
HEYY!

2nd Aug 2021 – My first memory of snow, though it is likely I experienced it previously when I lived in Cumbria. About 4 or 5 feet of snow fell over a few days and hung around for ages as the temperature stayed around freezing. I built huge camps by the garden hedge, reenacting great trench warfare battles with pine cones as grenades. My machine gun also finding the target of the British soldiers. As with football teams, I always sided with the team in blue, obviously not knowing the real history behind the wars. It also made me want to side with the underdog and to try to appreciate the other side of a story. This was probably helped along by a continual stream of British movies celebrating victory against all odds, an attempt to counter the decline of the Empire since the end of the second world war.

My brief research indicates that there was snow around Dorset until February at least. A child’s dreamland!

1st January 1979
Watched the zany goings-on with The Didn’t Quite Make It In Time For Christmas Show

2nd Aug 2021 – That’s Kenny Everett and Rod Stewart – and this is what people looked like in 1979! Other guests were Leo Sayer and Hot Gossip. Punk had definitely not gone mainstream yet!

2nd January 1979
Tried some tricks with rubber bands
HEYY!

2nd Aug 2021 – Not sure what I was doing with rubber bands here but my mum taught me how to tie rubber bands together to make them longer. In summer I would tie four together and shoot dead the flies that had come in through the open windows during the day. Their blood-splattered remains smeared across the walls and ceiling.

3rd January 1979
I rolled a snowball about 3 feet high but later I smashed it with Kung Fu kicks

3rd Aug 2021 – Kung Fu was a pretty popular TV series and I was always in awe of when the guy gripped the molten pot that burned images of a dragon and lion onto his arms. I think I checked out the show again a few years ago and like many things, it’s best left good in the memory of the past. Looking for the attached picture tells me the show has been revived this year. Hmmm….could be good. Could be terrible.

4th January 1979
‘Blue Peter’ were talking about diaries
HEYY!

3rd Aug 2021 – No one who saw it at the time will ever forget Peter Purves exclaiming ‘What a lovely pair of knockers!’ about a couple of door handles. A further search for this has the phrase spoken by Simon Groom – see how fallible our memories can be?

5th January 1979
I found out that Saturday’s match wasn’t on
HEYY
What do you mean Heyy

3rd Aug 2021 – I was writing HEY on most pages of my diary because I loved watching Happy Days and also thought the Fonz was so cool. It was as close as a prepubescent could get to being a potential rebel. It was the nearest we got to seeing punk rock on the TV most weeks. I notice most of my diary this week revolves around TV. At this time we cherished these shows as they mostly were only on once a week and life was planned around things you wanted to watch.

On Saturday’s I would usually play football for the school team – I was centre forward, wishing to emulate my heroes Trever Whymark and Paul Mariner. Talking of which, as previously mentioned I think I also asked the hairdresser to cut my hair like the Fonz – which also never worked out well for me or the hairdresser.

I think in this case the match I was talking about was the Ipswich game as this would have still been school holiday time.

6th January 1979
Ipswich P-P Carlisle
BLURP!

3rd Aug 2021 – Ipswich had won the FA Cup last year and I believe did very well in 1979 too, winning the Cup Winners Cup and possibly the First Division (though that may have been in the following couple of years). These were days before big sponsorship deals and the names of the competition changing every year depending on who provided the money.

Letts Association Football Diary 1979 – 30th December 1978

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This Association Football Diary 1979 Belongs to
Shaun “Concorde” Hemsley
Forest Cottage
Holtwood
Wimborne
Dorset

Pussycat??

19th Jul 2021 – Gordon McQueen, Terry Yorath, Liam Brady – these names! Memories of Match of the Day on Saturday nights and the one on Sunday afternoons on ITV….what was that one called – the one with Brian…..damn, what was his name!?

So, in search of this name I came across this sad piece of information:

My first team was Ipswich Town (and Italy – purely for the reason that they wore blue and their names began with I!) and they did amazingly well in the late 70s and early 80s, so much so that manager Bobby Robson got the job of managing the England team. Trevor Whymark was my favourite player and when Paul Mariner joined they were a great upfront duo.

I took a very similar picture of Mariner to the hairdresser and told him to make my hair the same. Of course I didn’t understand that it wasn’t possible and was severely disappointed with the results. The same hairdresser balked at dying my hair blue a couple of years later so I figured out how to do it myself.

Childhood heroes dying are more a shock than sad really. When I calculate his age to 68 I then calculate that’s just 14 years away for me. I want to outlive all my heroes!

Anyway – The Big Match was what it was called, and hosted by Brian Moore. I always preferred Match of the Day anyway really but not really sure why.

I’m not sure if I crowned myself ‘Concorde’ or if I was given that nickname by others. I was in the second year of middle school, at St Michaels, Colehill. I was the fastest runner for my age in the school (over short distances).

Why I wrote ‘Pussycat??’ I have no recollection.

The address is where my mum and I moved to in October 1976, just before my 9th birthday, after the long hot summer in Devon, where we lived for only six months. Forest Cottage was where my grandparents lived and my mum now became their carer and I went through my formative teenage years.

I note that our phone number was ‘Witchampton 203’ originally – when there were so few phones that we only required a three digit number.

This is what the house looks like these days – the house itself pretty unchanged. My bedroom was at the top left and my mum used to sleep on the landing, which I found strange and impressive. There was a bigger bedroom on the right (both windows) but I always felt uneasy in there as the floor sloped away and creaked as if it would break.

“Our’ room – my mum and I – was the extension on the left. I would play here until I was 13 or so when I retreated more permanently to my bedroom. I think the original house was a couple of hundred years old.

Until about the age of 13 or 14 I would take a football over into this field, usually when there were no horses in it, and play football with myself, often scoring the winning goal in the FA Cup Final of my dreams. I would also often have to retire injured with twisted ankles in the horseshoe divots in the ground. It wasn’t quite Wembley.

At the fence between our house and this field I would often spy on horse riding girls who would come and groom their animals, inspired by their horsey faces, porcelain skin and thigh hugging britches.

Elvis is dead – 16th August 1977

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30th Aug 2025 – I was sitting at the dining table in a room that served as my mother’s workspace when it wasn’t occupied by our dining lodgers and me. I spent plenty of time here as my mum worked at her knitting machine.

But on this day, early evening, maybe post-dinner, Paul, our longest serving lodger, ran in from the living room, where our old dial TV/radio was ensconced, proclaiming that “Elvis is dead!” They said he died on the toilet of a heart attack. I sure didn’t want to die on the toilet.

Elvis was in the zeitgeist, but I wasn’t exactly sure why. I had probably seen his movies on TV at some point, but at age 9, I wasn’t yet aware of the sexual revolution that surrounded ‘rock ‘n’ roll’.

The dining room was, however, where I, aged 6, and a similarly aged girl from ‘down the street’, played doctors and nurses, showing each other our private parts. And I specifically recall asking my mum if it was ok for us to show each other our bottoms too. If only our innocence remained.

By this time, mum and I were living with my grandparents in Dorset and hadn’t sold our three-floor end terrace house in Whitehaven, Cumbria. This was probably our first visit back since moving. By the time of my next return, one or two years later, I had discovered Sid Vicious, the Sex Pistols and was processing the anti-‘rock ‘n’ roll’ of punk and Elvis was a sworn enemy, a faker and a part of everything that should be destroyed.

I was still enjoying Elvis’s final single release, ‘Way Down’, at this point though. The song suddenly found itself scaling the charts, showing just how sellable a celebrity death could be.

The beginning….at the ending – 27th October 1967

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13th Dec 2025 – I came across this copy of my birth certificate today. I’m not even sure where the original one is now.
My first home (apparently), near the river. I’m guessing we stayed here until my dad died a couple of years later. I assume that my mum then took me to the other end of the country to get away from the memories here and start a new life. Hmm – things I should’ve asked my mum, or maybe even did and have since forgotten.

It’s interesting to me how much this looks like the house I lived in during my early 20s. A small two-bedroom semi-detached with a garage. I think it’s a similar colour too but my memory could be playing tricks. Bronwyn also used to laugh at how pale and dull everything looked in England. I had to agree.