Secrets from my past...

When I attempted to put the local bus operators straight

Having just emerged from finishing writing a book (working some bonkers hours in the process) I’m trying to get my life in order. It’s extremely messy and dusty and needs sorting out.

So I’m delving through boxes of old junk when I find an ancient folder on which my mum had written FIONA’S LETTERS.

I must have seen this before but so long ago that I don’t remember what they were - and anyway my memory is shot. Actually, not just the memory bit - my brain is shot. I only wake up knowing precisely what day it is because I do the New York Times crossword every day - the Daily Mini, not the difficult one - and it says the day eg FRIDAY.

So handy and reassuring that they put that there! And this is me aged sixty, leading a reasonably moderate life these days and not waking up with my shoes on in an unfamiliar London neighbourhood like Plaistow and shuffling mortified to the tube.

Anyway, the letters! What could these be I wonder? Excitable correspondence sent to my parents soon after I’d left home? How sweet that Mum kept them! Because nothing else was kept, as far as I’ve ever discovered - apart from (extremely randomly) my smelly Girl Guide blanket (for camping trips) and my fabric sew-on Madame Cholet badge.

I have to admit, I’m disappointed to discover that the letters aren’t real ones, ever sent in the post - but just practise letters from school in 1978.

Why did Mum keep these items? I have no idea because they’re certainly not interesting, amusing or illuminating in any way.

In fact re-reading makes me want to impale myself on a fence post.

For instance, here’s my polite request for a refund for a busted Stylophone.

Sense the gritted teeth restraint? That was the fourteen year-old me - so troubled by throbbing spots and an absence of exciting party invitations that all I wanted was to sit in my bedroom and play my Stylophone!

Have you ever heard one of those things? It’s as pleasant as listening to a wasp entering your ear canal. The higher register can dislodge amalgam fillings but on the plus side I imagine it could function as an effective rodent deterrent.

Sit there with your little stylus, whining away, and no mouse - or indeed any living being - will have any desire to enter your home.

In between dreaming of owning a Stylophone that actually worked, I was instructing ‘West Yorkshire Co. Lt’ on how to organise their bus timetables more effectively.

Because - y’know - a kid with zero experience of transport logistics is obviously the right person to take charge of that stuff.

‘I often find myself waiting a long time for a bus.’ Yes, well - they are hourly, you goon. The trick is to show up at the bus stop a few minutes before the bus is about to depart. Not as you see it disappearing around the corner.

You know that question that’s asked all the time these days? ‘What advice would you give your younger self?’

That’s easy. Consult the ruddy timetable! I’d tell her.

Also, why not be a tad more aspirational? Why not write to British Airways ordering them to reorganise their flights out of Heathrow Terminal One?

Perhaps I was too busy trying to organise a school trip - not to, say, China or even Blackpool Pleasure Beach (which in 1978 was the only place anyone wanted to go) but some exciting engineering works.

‘The children will be under proper supervision.’ I’m sure the foreman would have leapt at that - a horde of clattering teenagers plunging their sweaty hands into machinery and getting their fingers sawn off!

Seriously, is this the stuff that filled our heads, back in the 70s? Crap musical ‘instruments’, bus timetables, engineering works? When told to draft a letter was this the very best we could come up with?

Things have have improved immeasurably in the past forty-odd years. School trips are now to thrilling far-flung destinations and not Dean, Smith & Grace Ltd. of Bradford Road and no terrible Stylophones are screeching away in teenagers’ rooms.

I sincerely hope the Keighley-Laycock bus service has upped its game too.

Love,

F. Gibson (Miss) xx

PS Just three weeks until my new novel, The Full Nest, is released! If you’ve ever felt even slightly squeezed out in your own home - then this is for you. You can pre-order here!