The first of the two years mentioned in the title to this Blog post was the year in which ‘Yours Truly’ turned five and the second was the year in which ‘Girls Of The Golden East’ got going, specifically on 28th March of that year when my fifty-fifth birthday would come along getting on for four months down the line. It’s strange that 1966 should come up in this respect as events in that year were behind the only other time I’ve responded to the ‘Daily writing prompt’ here at ‘Girls Of The Golden East’. The Valérie Čižmárová referenced at that post would subsequently go on to be the cause of the ‘Sister Blogs’ to this one, ‘Bananas For Breakfast’, later re-named ‘Hotlips On The Horse Tram’. It obviously cannot be said that, when I was five, I had any inkling that, in the year I’d turn sixty-five, I would also be blogging at ‘Lost In France’ and ‘The Fifth Oorthuysen’, but here I am, doing so after the mid-2010s-vintage accidental discoveries of what the satellite nations of the former Soviet Bloc were putting out in terms of female Pop during my childhood, adolescence and early adulthood led to my deciding that blogging about it may be a good idea. Also during that time France and The Netherlands figured strongly in a sort of “noises-off” way, so it was inevitable that I’d eventually also start blogging about the Pop Culture of those two countries too, specifically the great Girl Groups of the latter. In view of the period covered by all these Blogs one could say that the scenes featured therein grew up with me.
Regarding what I wanted to be in the real-life timeline when I was five I cannot recall any serious ambitions at that early age. One thing that I clearly do recall from those times, though, was the to-me disastrous ITA teaching method, that was all the rage at the time (whatever happened to that?) where I, perhaps a little beyond my years, reasoned that one would eventually have to learn to read and write proper English in any case, so what was the point of all this? It’s very difficult to re-construct how this happened after sixty years, but I think I was moved up an academic year at Long Row Infants School, Belper in which year ITA was no longer taught. Either way, the sense of dislocation and a mistrust of the educational system was strong, together with the mis-match of having a father who was a Horticulture, later General Science teacher, at Spondon House Secondary Modern School, which later became Spondon Comprehensive. I suppose, at least, however, that Dad was not personally responsible for teaching ITA, being a teacher at the Secondary level, so I couldn’t hold that against him! It could be said that the aforementioned Blogs are a sort of education, both for myself in the course of doing the research for them and my readers/followers, so am I, in that respect following in his footsteps, in a manner of speaking, helping people “home-school” themselves? Perhaps so, which would be neat.
These last ten years have been similarly dislocating, where, in March 2016, the following were all different from my life today. First and most importantly, both my aforementioned father and my mother were still alive, although the latter had already sort of “died” four or so years previously, going down with Alzheimer’s and living at the time at Pool Cottage Care Home, in her home town of Melbourne, while I was still living with Dad on the other side of Belper. 2016 would be the last whole calendar year when both parents were still alive, Mum first passing away in February 2017, followed by Dad in October later that year, in the very different circumstances of a sudden death out of the blue, rather than the long, slow decline in Mum’s case. The basic plan was to sell up the old house and use the proceeds to find somewhere more appropriate for a single man to live when once Dad had passed away, so, a year to the day after Dad’s death, I found myself across town, with a week’s holiday in Brno in-between while the electrics were sorted out, travelling to both Jihlava and Česká Třebová during that time, where the aforementioned Valérie Čižmárová’s own professional singing ambitions were realised in a couple of talent contests in 1968, when she turned sixteen. Returning to the matter of that previous address the people that moved in were the son and spouse of the older of the two sisters from two doors away, with whom my older brother and I would “play house”, say, sometime in-between 1966 and 1968. They called our parents “Auntie” and “Uncle” and we did theirs, in return, so the house kind of stayed in the family! Of course, this has been a momentous decade nationally and globally, too, ending in the apparent phantasmagorical chaos of 2026, the most personally dislocating aspect thereof being the UK’s departure from the EU, voted for, much to my devastation, later in 2016. On the subject of ambitions one could say that the EU, through its Erasmus-like COMETT scheme, helped me attain mine of a degree in Geography with German as a part-time mature undergraduate in my thirties in the 1990s at the University of Derby, working on the scheme on an archaeological dig in Derby’s German twin city of Osnabrück during that time. In that context I knew only too well that the EU wasn’t just there to “make trouble” and “push us Brits around”, as some would have had one believe!
So, here’s to another decade of surviving the personal, national and global maelstrom with the help of ‘Girls Of The Golden East’ and its descendants!
'Girls Of The Golden East' - (Mostly) Seventies Songstresses of the Soviet Satellites 