Life's great disappointments

Adam looking rather gorgeous 

I won’t mince my words: everyone said it was shit.  “How can it be?” we thought, “it’s a punk film!”  I’d already bought the soundtrack album to Jubilee, having fallen for the cover and its inclusion of tracks by Chelsea and Adam & The Ants;  I knew that Siouxsie, Jordan and the Slits made an appearance, so it had to be good.

“It was shit,” my boyfriend and I concluded after we’d made it all the way to an Arthouse Cinema in Covent Garden one Sunday afternoon in 1979 to see it.  It didn’t help that the film broke half way through and a very well-spoken, somewhat adenoidal, lecturer-in-film-studies type bloke came out to convince everyone to bear with him while he tried to fix it because it was at a crucial point in the narrative or something. 

Maybe I’d have more patience for it now, be more open-minded, but I'm coming at this from the viewpoint of my 16-year-old self and I was not impressed.  I guess I’d built it up too much in my mind.  Adam did look rather gorgeous and there is that track on the album with the corniest wordplay title and a Charlie’s Angels type theme which I reminded myself of today and I still like it for all its 70s-ishness.  Apart from that, though, Jubilee, for me, has gone down as one of life’s great disappointments.

Amilcar: Wargasm In Pornotopia

I reckon I’m very lucky to have led a fairly blessed life so far because I can’t think of all that many other disappointing things, except for toffee apples.  What other so-called treats deliver so much promise – toffee and apples for a start – dressed up as huge lollipops in shiny gold-red glazing, yet fail to live up to it every time?  They look so good, they taste so bad.  A difficult first bite, musty mushy apples, pips and toothache all spring to mind, although I’d be interested to know if anyone has any differing experience of them.  Is it just me?

Ok, now I'm thinking about disappointments, another of mine was the Brownies.  They were supposed to be  action-packed gatherings with mysterious initiation ceremonies  for secret agent style missions, interspersed with baked potatoes.  Weren’t they?  Instead, my enduring memory is of spending a whole Saturday polishing shoes for which I was awarded  a sew-on patch.  I also had to forego watching a favourite after-school telly programme (my uncool confession is that it was the Thursday edition of ‘Blue Peter’)  to become a bored Elf for an hour a week; no secret agent style missions nor baked potatoes.  Mr SDS tells me he was equally disappointed after joining the Cubs, having been led to believe after a Cubs Open Day that there were always going to be coffee, hotdogs and possibly armed combat.

My mysterious Brownie initiation ceremony

There’s one other thing I can think of right now as being a genuine disappointment in life and that’s Ghost Trains.  Much like toffee apples, their outer appearance is deceptive.  

It'll tear your soul apart!

I can’t even remember much about the last one I went on, and it was only five years ago.  I think it did indeed promise to tear our souls apart.  I've a vague memory of going through lots of curtains and getting sprayed with water but, come to think of it, it was worth the entry fee for the helpless laughter it caused my friend and me, so maybe not so disappointing after all, and better than Jubilee.