GRANDAD'S SLIDES (PART 103) - ANOTHER NEW YELLOW BOX

SLIDES 0643-0645

So, there's my sister sitting in the living room wearing a red bikini...

Hold on a second... That doesn't seem right does it...? I mean, it's hardly indoors-y gear now is it, even it it was taken during the laissez-faire 1960s...?

I do remember that chunky old sideboard, though, and that picture on it of my sister and I taken at some far earlier time, graced many a surface in the family homes for many a long year, and, although I can't swear to it, parts of that shiny stainless steel tea service may still lurk in the boxes salvaged from my mother's place that I'm still struggling to bring myself to get around to sorting through.

The telly, with that strange tell-tale sign of its times - the black residue from the heat given off by its cathode ray tube - did not survive into the modern era, and, strangely, does appear to be in the "wrong" room if memory serves. In my world, the television lived in the back room, the "living" room in which we also ate, and never, ever in the "lounge" where this interloper appears to have been placed.

Our first colour TV arrived several years later when the man from D.E.R. arrived and prevented me from watching the end of an episode of "Thunderbirds" on one long-ago school holiday morning. The disappointment of that, of course, was far overwhelmed by the stunning miracle of full colour images which were not unlike those of the real world beyond our living room.

I do remember the six-sided climbing frame (and the swing which, in later years, I fell off necessitating a trip to Accident and Emergency...) in the back garden though. It was part of the paraphernalia of mother's "Play Group" which also included tyres sunk into the lawn, and the control panel/footplate of a train which I can remember being there, but which I sometimes think that I just imagined.