2 B or not 2 B

'A thing of beauty is a joy for ever' wrote John Keats, and so did my dear old Nan, in neat fountain pen handwriting across the page in my little autograph book.  It was a pocket sized volume with embossed lettering on its cover and each page was a different colour.   Although mostly scrawled in by my eight-year-old school chums it did boast a salutation from a proper famous person - well, he was in my eyes - H E Todd, author of the 'Bobby Brewster' books. He'd visited my school and read us some of his stories, many of which I already knew from featuring on 'Jackanory' in around 1970.   I adored Bobby Brewster and his ability to telephone his tummy when he was hungry (or something like that - I seem to remember he could translate its gurgles and rumbles into requests for sardine sandwiches, but I might be wrong).

Another signature which seemed important at the time was that of the woman from the Puffin Club who had been at the one and only members' event I ever went to, a Summer fancy dress party in Hatfield Broad Oak to which I wore a rather hot home-made caterpillar costume. I mean 'hot' in the temperature sense, of course...  All I gathered about her was that she was called Jane, so if she ever went on to scale great literary heights, or to feature on a special Puffin Club edition of 'Family Fortunes' (unlikely, I know) I'd be none the wiser.

'Sniffup Spotera'

My favourite autograph, however, was from someone closer to home. With a twinkle in her eye my Mum wrote this on a pastel blue page above her name:

YY U R

YY U B
I C U R

YY 4 Me

She'd learned it when she was a schoolgirl, back in the 1930s or '40s, and when she carefully scribed it in my little book I loved it so much I never forgot it.   Our familiarity with text-speak makes it quicker to decipher now than when I first saw it, but back then it looked like a curiously puzzling riddle.  Once solved, it seemed a perfect mix of ingenious and yet simultaneously simple humour.  Too wise, indeed.

In an era when it's commonplace to bemoan the increasing use of economical spellings and linguistic short-cuts it'd be easy to assume that they're a recent thing and a threat to our language, but I don't think so.  In 1867 a poem by Charles C Bombaugh was published (labelled as 'emblematic poetry' and thought of as very clever); here's one of its verses:

He says he loves U 2 X S

U R virtuous and Y's

In X L N C U X L

All others in his i's

Then, of course, there was Slade...

Mama Weer All Crazee Now

... and did somebody mention Prince?

I love the way language can be so many things: playful, pliable and adaptable, as well as beautiful.  And a thing of beauty is a joy for ever, innit.

Give 'em enough rope

I was lucky enough to grow up in a house with a garden which had some trees.  Nowadays I’d like them for the associated wildlife and a natural comfort that they might bring – I’d love to have them watching over me like gentle guardians, keeping the secrets of past decades safe in their silent, living presence.  But when I was a nipper there was really only one good reason why I liked our trees.  Well, one tree in particular.  And that was for the ‘Tarzan Rope’ suspended from it.

I don’t know whose idea it was to hang this rope from the huge central tree – mine was a family with no boys  – but my dad naturally got the job of climbing a ladder and fixing a chain to a high bough, from which he then attached a very strong piece of broad, long cord. This hung down at double thickness and was then knotted in several places.  The specially adapted piece of kit to go with it was a section of a broom-handle, just over a foot long I reckon.  All you had to do was position this wooden bar into one of the gaps between two knots (choosing the most convenient one according to your height), place your hands either side, lift your feet from the ground and….off you went…. Hours of free entertainment would ensue.

There were several different manoevres that my big sister and I invented and soon became experts at.  One was to walk back as far as you could in a straight line and simply swing back and forth.   A better one was to start off close to the tree trunk, run a short distance outwardly from it and then lift your feet off the ground so that you could swing around the tree in an almost complete circle, touching down again at the opposite side of the trunk.  A slightly dodgy and less popular variation was to position the bar so low down that you could hook your legs over it, effectively sitting on it and hanging on to just the rope.  This wasn’t much fun though because you couldn’t really go anywhere on it.  You’d just hang there in a highly uncomfortable sitting position trying not to look bored and ungainly. Not to mention the risk of getting rope-burn in a most undesirable place.

The best, and most impressive move of all was ‘twizzling’.  This was when you did the circular swing around the tree but incorporated some mini 360 degree spins, or ‘twizzles’ as we called them, along the way.  Thinking about it now this must have taken both bravery (stupidity?) and skill and I can’t imagine for a second that I would have enough of either to do that now – but in the relative safety of my own garden I was lithe and fearless and became a bit of a twizzling champion, sometimes managing to spin repeatedly from start to finish.  It’s funny how I didn’t seem to get so dizzy in those days.  Now I only have to turn around too quickly in the shower and I need a sit-down and a cuppa to help me regain my balance.

As this was chiefly a summer activity I would usually be found throwing myself around this solid old tree dressed in my pink shorts and yellow T-shirt, barefoot and bare-headed.  No crash helmets, no safety harness, no knee-pads.  The big old branch so many feet above sometimes creaked ominously, and I frequently got my planned trajectories hopelessly wrong, ending up slammed against the trunk with nothing to protect me from the blow except my epidermis.  I hit my head countless times, got blisters on my palms and grazes on my knees, but still I loved that Tarzan Rope. 

Unfortunately it was responsible for more casualties than just my bruises and temporary braining.  I was the lucky one.  My sister fell off and fractured a toe.  My cousin misjudged things too, came off the rope and landed on a stone which embedded itself very painfully in her gluteus maximus region.  And a neighbour’s awkward tumble resulted in a huge gash to her arm.  I remember my mum running out to give her a small glass of brandy.  I’ve no idea what her parents must have thought when she was delivered home to them, oozing blood and smelling lightly of alcohol - but this was the Seventies after all.  It’s funny how I can still remember the way the trail of blood drips led from the tree, down our garden path, all around the house and to her front door over the road.  Those dark claret stains stayed on the pavings for several weeks that hot, dry summer.  I think her scar lasted some time longer. 

Eventually we just grew too big for such shenanigans and my parents may have started fretting about our unfortunate, injured friends and family, even though I don’t remember them ever expressing anything outwardly other than genuine sympathy to the victims.  The Tarzan Rope was left to slowly rot away and the little girl who used to swing on it like a deranged whirling dervish learned that there were even better things to spin: little black slabs of vinyl that twizzled at 45rpm.

I'm sure you get the tenuous connections...