Grimbeau

You who remember Squire Gonks’ Almanac and Charlie’s Aunt beware. Beware of foam stuffed velvet aphids. of gaudy palmable comfort bags,  of protei packed cabbage patch dollies, and other suchlike pre Vietnamese potbellied fads.  Gaudy were those blobs born fully formed of an optic oil crisis and a  major miner’s strike that felled a regime of long standing empire of snot, botched though they were by lumpen candlelight late into the black out night during the three day week, when a ten o clock blindfold was a plaything of the pissed.

If the Gonks could do it then you could do it too. You could have a privileged white space hopper or a bespoke purple chopper and flaunt your carefree brazen streak in broad daylight through  scrumptious corporate orchards. Mister Mennish in ambition but not so cuddly as gonks were in a disposable tactile tantrum way; eminently best home-makeable on the laminate dinner table – blunt scissors, clear gummed, sample felts of tasteless hues & farbs – put it together and you surely got your Gonk!

Mine bestie was called Paulus, a mythical gnome in a fabulous lamimate wood, purloined from under a trestle table at a school fete worse than death by gammon tickling. It was Paulus who suffered a fly on the wall documentary crew to film in his ancestral home and share the ups and downs of  pastoral life in the knot of a tree with a bunch of fellow arboreal misfits . As I recall there was a big mean black crow called Ted Hughes who harboured deep dark secrets of the occult and allotment plot.

Paulus disintegrated  after a vigorous drubbing in a temperamental twin tub. having always had a penchant for self harm then known as accident prone by abusive adults.

Life sure weren’t perfect by no means in the seventies.