My Favourite People & Me 1978-1988

No one in sport has ever had greater control over his emotions than Borg. To me this made him soporifically dull. Someone had to beat him, please. Control over your emotions is the very thing an adolescent doesn’t have.
(…)
McEnroe, on the other hand, brought an anxious, explosive petulance to the court that was sometimes less teenage and more pre-teen, or even pre-school. This sort of thing would, under no circumstances, be tolerated in the tennis clubs of Southern England. It’s just not on. If you are upset, you jolly well don’t’ show it and if there’s been an injustice, shame on you for bringing it up. Just carry on and don’t spoil everyone’s day.
(…)
No surprise then, that when we watched those Wimbledon arguments, I identified with McEnroe and my dad with the umpire.

The medical profession, at the time of my mum’s terminal illness, was divided on the issue of how much to tell the patient. She was not told how ill she was. She didn’t have the chance to say goodbye to her children or her sister, and her children and her sister regretted that hugely. Male doctors deciding what’s good for the weak and vulnerable female patient. There’s something patronizing about it. She’d better not be told, she has three young children, she won’t be able to cope.

He [Mr Pearson, Economics teacher] usually looked out of the window rather than at his pitiful pupils. The good thing about him was that he didn’t give a toss if you bunked off. It was your loss as far as he was concerned. He also liked “Hill Street Blues”, which he said was the only decent American TV show and the best thing on television.

As our peer group’s experiment with racism developed so it ran into the inconsistencies all bigots have to face. The real reason that all non-whites have to be shown the way to go home is that, if any remain, there is the clear and present danger of white people accidentally befriending them, thereby undermining the whole philosophy.

The first port of call for researching anything, now and for the foreseeable future, is the infernal interweb, accessed, more often than not, by the mind control device that is Google. I typed 1982 into my Google box and was predictably offered the assistance of the eagerly unreliable and peculiarly selective Wikipedia site.