Back to school essay

Today is 1 September.

This means that it is autumn.

In the autumn, the leaves fall off the trees.  Our dads rake them into big piles in the middle of the back lawn and set them alight, thus barbecuing the poor hedgehogs who thought they'd found a nice cosy place to hibernate until spring.  My  dad then goes back out into the garden at night with a torch.  He tears the cowering slugs off the leaves of the plants, shouting: "Eat my f***ing hostia, would you, you bastards!" and chucks them over the fence into next door's garden.

When I was a kid, I genuinely used to believe that the seasons had to start on precise dates decided by the government.  Never mind that the administrations of the Seventies couldn't even organise a piss-up in a brewery, hence all the mayhem of the three-day week and the miners' and dustmen's strikes, these bunches of incompetents could still somehow manage to keep Britain's ecosystem running.

Mind you, I was also convinced that traffic lights were operated by teams of people crammed into an underground bunker turning a gigantic handle to change the colours over.  Most of the time they lounged about on old sofas, eating bourbon biscuits and Tunnocks caramel wafers, slurping from sturdy mugs of tea and coffee, while watching endless repeats of Diana Dors in Queenie's Castle and Bruce Lee in Enter The Dragon on a television set hanging from the ceiling like the ones you see in takeaways.

The head of the team was a cantankerous old git who modelled himself very closely on James Robertson Justice, via Captain Birdseye.  He kept peering through a periscope hidden in the middle of the traffic light itself.  When a suitably large backlog of traffic had built up behind the lights, he bellowed: "All change!" through a loudhailer.

Then all the lazy ginks would have to rush over to the handle and change the lights.

Rooms like this existed under every single set of traffic lights in the country.

During their vacations, students often worked on the traffic lights to earn some extra cash.  As with every type of manual job during the Seventies, the wages were really generous.

Oh, and the ceilings of the bunkers were always covered with empty cardboard egg boxes, possibly to act as soundproofing in the rush hour.