Barmy Blue's Bland Blog

You know how sometimes a film or an advert, maybe even a picture or a song, heck even a smell or just a feeling, can somehow reach something deep within you and stir up some old memories, this insane nostalgia that makes you want to cry even though they're not bad memories?

I was just happily playing Sims and mum's asleep in her chair, it's gone 2am and she fell asleep while channel hopping. It's a documentary about model trains and it makes me want to cry so much. But. You know I never cry around other people, especially if I'm not actually sad. How exactly do I explain that? 'Why are you crying?' 'Because it's about model trains.' 'Huh?'

I might have mentioned....Maybe I didn't.....I know I've said it to mum more than once. Rich Tea biscuits. A lot of children don't really like them, or at least, they're not their favourites. They're not mine either but they're the only nostalgic ones in my life. My Granddad always had Rich Tea biscuits in this old tin. I didn't always eat one but sometimes I did. We never had them at home, we had Digestives instead. Similar but not the same.

Whenever I think of rich tea biscuits I think of my Granddad and vice versa. He also had this tea cosy in the shape of a cat lying down, a bowl of fruit that always included purple grapes that were rounder and fatter than the green ones we used to have at home, I didn't like them so much because they were too squishy and had seeds in (we always had seedless ones at home), he had green ones too but they were also squishy. That might be because his were out in a bowl, we always kept ours in the fridge. He had these funny kind of blocky triangular clocks with no display but a button on the top that said the time when you pressed it, similar to when you phone the speaking clock I guess. He had one in each room. There are other things too that would stir up similar nostalgia of my Granddad.

The model trains are from the other man of my childhood. It's funny. Thinking about this model train nostalgia suddenly makes him my Dad again instead of Napoleon or the Old Man.

Probably since before I was born my dad had his own little retreat in the loft. He had his model trains set up there. He'd been trying to build something of an elaborate track but seemed to have given up. For as long as I've known it the track was never expanded and the dead ends were never completed. He seemed happy enough just to have the trains go round in a loop.

He had some little models here and there but never really set them up around the track, he never bothered with scenery, no trees or grass, so it wasn't really an aesthetically pleasing setup. Even the cheap plastic grey bridges were just propped up on a couple of cheap, ugly grey wooden blocks. He had a pretty biscuit tin with a flowery design (a rose design I think) under the......not a table or a shelf really....the....surface? the structure? that the track was built on, and inside the pretty tin was a lot of model coal that he never used. He had boxes and things under there too. Boxes of the different shaped tracks, boxes of trains and carriages. Some of the train boxes he'd stuck together from cut up cereal boxes and painted red for some reason. I never know why he'd painted them. I guess he lost the original boxes, or maybe the original boxes weren't good enough so he made his own.

You see. There's one key detail about him you need to know to understand this a bit. He can be a really cheap guy. I'm not sure if he's just stingy, couldn't afford much at the time or whether it's just because he never had much money in his earlier years, or just how he was raised. He's not quite that bad now but he can still be quite cheap, even when he's getting an expensive product, like an electrical device for example. It depends on what he's getting really.

Ever since I was able to climb the ladder by myself he'd let me go up into the loft with him to watch him play with the trains. It was a weekend activity. Until I was old enough to climb safely by myself he'd go up the ladder behind me in case I fell. Half way up there was a railing and he'd tell me off for taking my hands off the rungs of the ladder and holding the rail instead. I never understood why because it was firmly fixed and I wasn't stupid enough to do anything stupid.

He had shelves of little screws and nails and things up there in ice cream tubs, margarine tubs (we used to use Stork margarine when I was little but when I was a bit older and it was just me and mum I got us onto butter. I always had my suspicions about margarine compared to butter, not sure why) and empty Slime jars. A little explanation needed there.

For quite a while I had this bubble bath called Slime. It was a kind of orangey gloopy jelly and came with a different plastic dinosaur in each tub. I liked dinosaurs, especially since I saw Jurassic Park. I liked T-rex because he beat the nasty raptors which kind of made him a sort of hero to me.....actually, the dinosaurs in the park were supposed to be female, weren't they? She then.

Although, now I think about it the dinosaurs on the label actually looked kind of scary, there was a charging triceratops with evil eyes. I'd say the product was primarily aimed at young boys rather than girls. Gender stereotypes and expectations seem to pop up earlier on than you'd think; girls get Barbie and boys get Action Man, boys get trains and dinosaurs and girls get dolls houses and toy tea sets. I never had a tea set, I never had an Action Man either .

I've never exactly been completely gender stereotypical, then again with Napoleon as a father what do you expect. He had no idea what to get a little girl. I don't think he even knew what to do with a little girl, since the general consensus was that I'd be a boy (apparently back then they didn't tell you the gender for your first baby. They didn't give you a picture of the scan either, mum's kind of disappointed by that, she says she'd have loved a picture of the scan, predictably Napoleon wasn't at the scan....or the birth..... To be fair it wasn't so much a done thing then as it is now). Also, it's not like he had any sisters to draw inspiration from, he's the middle child of three brothers and his father died when he was little, his mother didn't remarry. So I think it's safe to say that having a daughter really stumped him. Especially a slow, clumsy, short sighted one who takes more after her mother than him.

I've become more girly as I've grown up but it was a long process that I won't detail now. The point of this is train nostalgia.

So.

The trains ran on a little electrical circuit that he'd put together. Sometimes he'd let me run the trains but only under his supervision. I've forgotten how to work them now. At first, when I was very little I could crawl under the.....I'll call it a table for convenience, even though it's more like a shelf than anything else, that the trains were on to get into the middle of the loft that the trains went around but when I got older I had to step over it like my dad did, which was difficult at the time but got easier as I grew taller.

He had a little three legged stool up there with a picture of a horse on it that I could sit on when I was small and when I was bigger I was able to just sit on the floor. A lot of the time when I was there I'd just leave him to fiddling about with the trains while I played with some toy cars he had at the side. It was fun. I gave them all personalities and relationships. I never played car crash games which seemed to delight little boys, I never quite new why. I might have conformed to the idea that cars have to play car crashes except for the fact that if I clinked then against each other dad would get mad at me because it might chip the paint. He was kind of obsessed with having toys like that and having them played with but somehow staying in near mint condition because they might be worth something later.

Dude. Don't give a child, be they a boy or a girl, toy cars, busses and trucks to play with if you don't want them getting scratched or chipped. That's what children do. He'd gotten me a collection of little toy busses that, for some reason I quite loved. They were surprisingly detailed and shiny Routemasters with number plates and different adverts along the sides.

Well. I say little. They're little to me now but they were quite big to me when I was small. I had some classic red ones, some lovely dark green ones and two open topped tour busses, a blue and a white one. They were a little troublesome to play with though because every time I had to take them out of my toy box, take them out of their individual boxes and plastic packaging, play with them without letting them touch each other or any other metallic toy, and then put them back in the right plastic bits and the right boxes. If I was playing with them and maybe parked them a little too closely together so they touched he'd tell me not to do that because they'd chip. They never did though, not noticeably to me at least. I think the paint job on them was hardier than he thought.

I also had assorted toy cars and two trailers.....those big things that they put a bunch of cars on to deliver them to showrooms and stuff like that, they can have two or three levels to them so you can fit more on. I had a simpler one with two levels and an more complex one with three levels, that one could be a little stiff at times so wasn't so much fun to load up but was more fun to look at.

So. Going along this kind of theme and watching my dad play with his trains it was only a matter of time before I got my own. One year I got his cute little wind up Thomas the Tank Engine (I had a little collection of the videos at the time). It was and still is the best train up there. It was a clockwork train with a little square key and a switch on the top. You had to wind it up until it wouldn't wind anymore and once you took the key out it would start running, unless you flipped the switch at the top which locked the mechanism so you could set it down on the track first.

I loved to watch my little Thomas whizzing round the track and he didn't need the electricity on to do it, although that meant you couldn't control where he stopped and had to break the magic of the motion by taking him off the track to wind him back up again.

I last went up there a few years ago just for the nostalgia really. Since I forgot how to work the switches and everything and since there weren't any of Napoleon's trains on the track (he'd been clearing some of them out some years before) and I didn't want to pry around in any of the boxes in case I damaged one of his trains and he found out and he'd get mad a t me, I couldn't play with any of the trains except for one, my little Thomas. It was still fun to see him whizzing around the track. I can't really go up there now though, since we put the ladder up to accommodate the dog that we were just looking after . Since we put her bed there I don't think the ladder will be coming down again anytime soon.

Napoleon's not the only train enthusiast. His older brother (the one who's dead) built a little track in the cellar of his previous house. I never saw it but I think I saw a couple of pictures once. He had more ambition with his track than Napoleon did. Then again he was retired then so he had plenty of time. I wonder if Napoleon will build a new track when he's retired. I don't know if he even has the space to do it where ever he lives. Maybe I'll help him along with the project in the future. We'll see.

There are two things....good things. Two kind of bonding moments that I remember most strongly with my dad. First, of course, is the trains. Secondly, when he would sing me Incy Wincey Spider. He always did the hand gestures and spread him arms wide when he did "out came the sunshine" and at the end, which goes "So Incy Wincey Spider climbed up the spout again" he'd add "All the way to the top" very quickly, and speed up Incy's hand gestures, so it was more like "allthewaytothetop".

I just tried to do the song. My nails are too long to do Incy's gestures properly .

There was probably more I wanted to write about this model train nostalgia but I'm not sure what and I've gone on long enough.

Bluebiird out.