Write a letter to your 100-year-old self.
Statistically there is little chance of me, or anyone else, getting to three figures. As in cricket, though, it’s a target that seems to obsess people. Why is 100 so much better than 99 or 96? Why is it something to aim for? The truth is that it’s pointless unless you reach three figures in good health. There is no point in getting a telegram from the monarch if you are a wreck in a chair. Like most people I want to live as long as possible, but it needs to be on the basis of a high level of QALY. This is the concept of Quality Adjusted Life Years which I first came across in my teaching of prospective medical students at St George’s. In essence, it looks at your overall health and gives you a score. Let’s say you can expect 20 years of life but your health is only half as good as it was. That gives you a QALY of 10 years of life. If you can get your coefficient above 0.75 I would say that every year is worth it. If it slips below 0.50, what’s the point? It’s just sitting in the house probably in pain and not able to get anything out of your life, and that’s just existing. So, if I reach 100, which I won’t, it had better be with a QALY of at least 0.6! The century is as irrelevant in life as it is in cricket because an effective 89 will carry more weight than hanging on for an ineffective 100.
If there is one programme that instantly transports me back to my childhood, Bagpuss would be it. It was first broadcast on 12 February 1974, with the final one of the 13 episodes being transmitted on 7 May 1974. The first episode would almost certainly have been shown during the half term in my first year at St Andrew’s, so my clear memories of seeing it are probably not a trick that my mind is playing on me. I was just over a month away from my ninth birthday and I was still a big fan of Watch with Mother. Watching it now, I think it’s quite clear that, although it appeared in a slot for pre-school children, it was aimed at primary school children in general. The language and the ideas were quite advanced for five year olds, although the repeated introduction and ending would have appealed to the youngest viewers who could learn from the repetition and start to identify words and pictures. Occasionally, I would mention IT at school if I was talking to someone I knew wouldn’t say anything, but I tended to steer clear of anything that could be used against me. It’s not that this happened at St Andrew’s, but after two years of bad treatment from classmates and teachers I definitely played safe.
The opening of each episode was the same. Emily, a Victorian girl in a long dress with long dark hair, played by Emily Firmin, daughter of Peter Firmin who made the series along with Oliver Postgate, would be introduced as Bagpuss’ owner. I remember being absolutely enchanted by Emily who was about the same age as me and looked really pretty, and I doubt I was the only one! Let’s just say that even if I hadn’t enjoyed the programme, I would have tuned in at 1.45 just to see Emily!
The narrator, as he was for so many of the series they made together was Oliver Postgate, whose voice just exuded comfort and security to the young viewer. He created all the voices, except for the singing duo, Madeleine and Gabriel, whose folk songs are sung by Sandra Kerr and Peter Faulkner. Their songs became a very important part of the memories I have of the programme.
Episode 1 Ship in a Bottle
We are introduced to Bagpuss, The MIce on the Mouse Organ, Madeline the Rag Doll, Gabriel the Toad and Professor Yaffle, a bookend in the shape of a distinguished old woodpecker. The item turns out to be a ship in a bottle. Gabriel sings a folk song about mice who sail a very small ship, which the Mice enjoy very much, but which Professor Yaffle describes as very silly. The mice disagree with him and find a music roll to put into the ‘Marvellous, Mechanical, Mouse Organ’! This enables them to hear the song again accompanied by pictures that appear on the screen of the mouse organ. Professor Yaffle decides that Bagpuss needs to tell a magical story to reassemble the pieces of the broken ship. He puts on his Captain’s Thinking Cap from when he was a Sea Captain and tells a story of a voyage that he took. The ship is becalmed so he goes fishing and catches a topless mermaid! Now, that was one bit that I really thought my memory was misleading me on, but no! Let’s just say that the 70s were a different time shall we? If your parents read The Sun, then you will have seen your fair share of topless females before you got to the age where you might appreciate them, so perhaps this was considered completely innocuous. It certainly wouldn’t be these days! However, the fact that there ended up being at least a dozen, similarly unclad mermaids putting the ship back together was something I hadn’t remembered! Anyway, the story works and the mouse under the instructions of Professor Yaffle put the ship looking like new in the bottle and push it to the front of the shop window.
Episode 5 The Hamish
This is the episode I remember most fondly from the series. It is a piece of tartan material that Professor Yaffle says is a soggy bag with legs. They realise it is from Scotland so Bagpuss is given a Tam O’Shanter and then proceeds to weave the beautiful tale of a Small Soft Hamish. It was a creature that lived alone because it was very shy and frightened of people. It didn’t even have a name because it was completely unknown to mankind. Then Tavish McTavish (!) who played the bagpipes so badly that he was forced to live far away from other people (!) hears the call of the creature which sounds like someone else playing the bagpipes very badly. He decides it can only be his long lost brother Hamish McTavish as Hamish is the only other person in Scotland who plays the bagpipes as badly as he does. He introduces himself to Hamish and takes him into the small house he lives in. As it is very dark outside, it is only when he sees Hamish in the light that he realises it isn’t his brother. They decide that they like each other and they live together for many years until the Hamish hears the sound of many other Hamishes and Tavish tells him he must go to his own family. They are both very sad that they have to part and over 50 years on, so was I all over again. Tavish does not want to live on his own without the company of the Hamish, so he goes to live with his sister Mavis McTavish who hates the sound of bagpipes and he never plays them again.
Professor Yaffle is totally unimpressed by the Hamish explanation and decides it is a porcupine. Madeleine and Gabriel sing a song about a porcupine who travels around the world in a hot air balloon which is eventually brought down to earth by an errant spike. Finally Madeleine realises it is a porcupine pin cushion, so the mice find lots of pins to stick into the porcupin cushion, as Professor Yaffle calls it, and it is restored to its former glory. I beg leave to differ here as, to nine year old me it was a Hamish and all these years later, a Hamish it remains!
Episode 11 The Fiddle
My final choice takes me to Ireland, or rather the Bagpuss version of Ireland, which bears as much resemblance to the real Emerald Isle as the Hamish episode represented Scotland! Professor Yaffle says the old bucket that Emily has brought in is Irish. Gabriel hears a fiddle playing from inside the bucket and he and and Bagpuss recognise the playing as coming from a Leprechaun called Seamus O’ Hoolihan! Bagpuss met O’ Hoolihan in a peat bog in the far West of Ireland and he refuses the option of getting a pot of gold from him, much to the leprechaun’s delight. The leprechaun and Bagpuss then tell the story of when O’ Hoolihan was last caught by a cabbage farmer called Michael O’ Sullivan, and it’s a confusing tale of fiddle playing, dancing spades and axes and 40 acres of cabbages all cut in half! The fiddle was then played by the leprechaun to mend all the cabbages, as you might or might not expect. The mice find the fiddle in the bucket that Emily bought them and it starts playing on its own before joining in with a very strange song about Brian O’ Lim and his use of various animal skins to clothe himself. Perhaps exhausted by all the strangeness, Bagpuss goes pretty much straight to sleep at the end of the song. It is a genuinely bizarre episode!
Final Thoughts
From the first notes of the introduction and the first sight of Emily the years fell away. It was much more off the wall than I remembered, but in a lovely way that is absolutely enchanting. I remembered so many of the musical cues and the way that the characters spoke, sang and interacted. It’s amazing how fresh it seemed though. Some of the best children’s television of the 60s and 70s was given the kind of care that seems amazing nowadays, and Bagpuss was the gold standard. If your memory has been jogged and you want to see Bagpuss again, you can view all the episodes on YouTube or buy the Blu-ray version released last year, which I am tempted to upgrade to.
I actually met Bagpuss once when he came to Canterbury. As you can tell from the picture below my inner child was delighted!
Where would you go on a shopping spree?
This year I am on a serious spending curb as I am no longer working full time. So, any spending spree is definitely in the realm of fantasy, but if and when I win some money or some vouchers, I would definitely put it towards a book buying bonanza! I am a member of Waterstone’s Plus so I get 1 token for every full £10 I spend. That won’t go far on a spending spree, but every so often they have a wishlist competition that asks Plus Members to choose £300 worth of books to potentially win. I love choosing my books for the competition because they tend to be books I would otherwise see as too expensive. That is like a spending spree in my mind and my list changes for every competition.
If I won book tokens or Amazon vouchers I would take the same wishlist based approach and buy lots of books. The book pile at home is being reduced by increments and I am happy with regular trips to the library to get books that are a bit of a punt. However, if and when I do have the opportunity to spend a fair amount of money I will focus completely on books as they bring me so much pleasure and so much learning.
What is your middle name? Does it carry any special meaning/significance?
Starting with me, my middle name is Gerald. That was my Dad’s first name and in his generation it was very traditional to give the first born son their name as the son’s middle name. Interestingly, it wasn’t the case for the first born daughter and I suppose this reflects the status of women at the time and arguably currently. So, my wife doesn’t have her Mother’s first name as her middle name, which is very fortunate for her as her Mother was called Doris!! I got huge amounts of stick for my middle name and she would have had even more.
Our oldest son has my first name as his middle name since we decided to follow tradition on that. Our second son has the middle name Michael because that was the name I really wanted to give him for a long while. When we decided on a different name we decided that we would use Michael as his middle name. The same principle held with our oldest daughter, whose middle name of Louise was, once again, something of a front runner for a while and so we wanted to acknowledge that. Our youngest daughter has the middle name Grace after her great grandmother, the finest woman you could imagine. Determined and hard working, she lived up to her first name in every possible way. Of all the people I have known, only Janet matches her spirit and her huge reserves of common sense.
What is the last thing you learned?
Short and sweet today. The last thing I have learnt is that it is never too late to get yourself into shape. I have been combining yoga and dumbbell exercises for just five weeks and the results have been beyond expectations. The dumbbells have given my arms and legs more definition than I have had for 8 years and my neck has gone from scrawny to slightly less so 🤣🤣. I am regaining some strength in my lifting so that’s really good. My stomach is starting to feel more defined than it has in those 8 years and my whole core is stronger.
The yoga has really helped with my balance. I can now stand on one leg for between 20 and 30 seconds after barely making 5 seconds before I started. My ability to stretch for things has improved significantly. My muscles are working with me not against me and the twinges and aches and pains are in retreat. The biggest surprise came the other day when I realised that the combination of the exercises is making me walk differently as my spine is straighter and my neck is holding my head up and overcoming the slightly stooping gait I have had for years.
So, there you have it. I started exercising at 60 after nearly a decade away and I have learnt that exercise at any age is incredibly effective. If you are younger than me, keep at it a bit more so you don’t have such a low base to work from! I am on the up physically and at my age that is simply brilliant!!
David Pearce - Popular Culture and Personal Passions 