Are retirement Christmases different from pre-retirement Christmases? Answer. Yes, but I’m not quite sure how or rather it would take too long to explain how. Suffice it to say, this Christmas certainly has been different and the reason is simple – we’re on our own for the first time ever, in this country anyway. The children are in Australia. In one case permanently and in the other temporarily for the cricket. So we are on our own. And just let me say this hasn’t in any way been a problem*. We’ve just done as we pleased and not a jot more.
One way we’ve ‘done as we pleased’ is by reading about other people’s celebrations often breathing a sigh of relief that we are not required to have a good time in the company of others. I did however read on the internet about the celebrations of retired footballers. Jamie Carragher posing the question to his fellow retirees – what was the best Christmas present you have ever received? The general opinion among them all (5 of them) was it was a BMX bike.
Having time on my hands (because of no visitors) I allowed myself to idly speculate as to what has been my best ever Christmas present? It certainly wasn’t a BMX, wrong era. I did once get a three-wheeler bike all bright red and shiny it was. Was I proud of it? Could I not wait to take it out in the street and show the other kids? Well, no and no. What I really wanted was one of those box carts / wagons (home made out of planks of wood, old pram wheels which you steered with a piece of rope) made by their dads which unfortunately I did not have he having died when I was 5)
So no bike or cart as present or at least not the right kind (ungrateful little sod) but what I did get, a little later in life, was my best ever present. It was a Grundig reel to reel tape recorder. Unless you are of a certain age you will have no idea what a reel to reel tape recorder is and why I should be pleased to receive it, so I have included a photo of the nearest I could find to the one I got. Not exact but close. To be honest I was amazed that you could still buy anything remotely similar in this day and age. Just goes to show.
This machine had a microphone on a cable which meant, in theory at least, that I could point it at the TV (black and white as I recall) and record Top of the Pops. Clever? Well not so much because the flaw in the scheme was my grandma who used to sit in the armchair right next to the TV and talk through my recordings. In fact many of them had me exploding as she refused to shut up. I remember a particularly bad episode of me going apoplectic when she saw Phil May of The Pretty Things who she said looked like a girl (which he probably did, certainly in those days). Funny what you remember when you can’t remember what you had for tea.
So my memories of my Grundig reel to reel were not entirely benign but the fact was it was a beast and yes I believe we got it cheap because my mother, who bought it worked for the company that made the wooden casing and got a bit knocked off as we used to say in those days. I might have been the only (boy) child in the street without a cart but quite a few years later (call it deferred gratification) I was the only teenager in the street with a reel to reel tape recorder (ie. my best present). As I’ve said, funny the things you remember.
*Children excepted of course.