According to the social media website Linked In, I'm now someone in the 'writing/journalism function'. I've been called a lot of things but never that.
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Growing up, there were always certain characters you were told to avoid. There was a woman with a hunchback called Mavis (and yes, that would spark someone into asking why a woman would give her deformity a name and someone else saying she just did it on a hunch.)
Then there was a man who stood outside a shop in Barkingside who simply said 'packet of Bird's custard' to everyone who walked past. Thank you Peter Poyton for reminding me of that.
And we also had the Major. Long before Fawlty Towers, this was a man with a ramrod straight back who wore a blue blazer with a regimental badge, slacks and a shirt and tie and would march around barking orders and muttering under his breath.
Our parents simply told us that if we saw him we should not talk to him and stay away. It was part of the 'don't take sweets from strangers' routine. The word paedophile was never used and we did not grow up in fear of being snatched from the streets, otherwise we wouldn't have been allowed to get the bus to school at the age of nine.
People who were perceived as being odd were dismissed as 'loonies' and the reasons may not have been much different then as to now - drink, drugs, or genetic.
Although this was the seventies, we did not have the problem the Americans had of shellshocked war vets coming home from Vietnam and being forced on to the streets.
The nearest we ever got to that was the whole care in the community fiasco when suddenly the 'looney bin' seemed to pour its residents out on to the streets.
I did hospital radio at a couple of these places - one which still exists in Goodmayes and one which is now a posh housing estate occupied by Spurs and West Ham players in Claybury.
Every area is probably characterised by its local loonies but somehow, looking back, they seemed more eccentric than dangerous, though the haze of nostalgia may disguise the issue.
I, and several of my generation from the area, remember one man we nicknamed Indian Jim. He wore Red Indian clothes including feathers in his hair and fired a toy bow and arrow at people around Ilford High Road.
When I was a reporter at the Ilford Recorder he came up at Redbridge Magistrates Court one day when I was doing court duty.
It was a drunk and disorderly charge or possibly disturbing the peace and it was not his first time before the mags. The clerk asked him his name and he replied: "Hiawatha." The clerk turned to the bench and whispered 'Malcolm Johnson' or whatever his real name was (I forget the exact details.) The clerk then asked: "And your address?" To which he replied: "The reservation." Clerk: "Which is where exactly?" Jim: "52 Ley Street, Ilford."
Like many of the other regulars, he was given one day in the cells which meant he was taken down and released at the end of the morning session.
I believe that statistically, there are no more incidents of children being snatched and killed now than there were back then - an era in which the memories of Myra Hindley and Mary Bell were still strong.
But somehow it's hard to be totally confident about the permanent safety of children anywhere in a week when a man with a couple of similar convictions behind him is on trial for the murder of Millie Dowler.
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Robbie Savage won a radio award for perpetually squeaking on Five Live about how much money he has made. And the say satire is dead. And to prove how far mediocre talent can go on the BBC as long as they have a regional accent, Colin Murray - basically a hospital DJ out of his depth - also won something or other at the same awards. Of course, what upset The Guardian types was that talkSport won various awards too because in the eyes of the intelligentsia, what right has a station listened to by men who drive white vans got to win an award that should go to Radio Four?
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Reading some papers you would think that the whole country is divided between choosing Made In Chelsea or The Only Way Is Essex. But look closely and you see that TOWIE (as it must be called, apparently) gets a million viewers at best. Which means approximately 59 million people in Britain don't watch it. And MIC (as it is destined to become) gets around a third of that.
Sometimes we get carried away by assuming that whatever we do in our own little circles is automatically mirrored by everyone else in Britain.
For instance, a major England football match in, say, a World Cup, gets around 20 million viewers if you're lucky. That's just 40 per cent of the nation. Which means 60 per cent have something better to do.
Audience figures for the Royal Wedding were 25 million. Yes, the roads were empty and everyone YOU know probably watched it (well, not everyone. I didn't.) But 35 million didn't.
That's 35 million who didn't bang on about how nice the anorexic sisters looked, how great it was for Britain, how we should be proud to have a monarchy sucking us dry and so on and so on until you want to turn the Mall into a great big vomitorium.
Just thought I'd mention it. Your ever faithful servant...Solly
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