Now I am nearing 50, I have been harking back to the 70s (my teenage years) and in particular to my boyfriends. This was all sparked off by one of my brief dalliances featuring on the Jeremy Vine radio show discussing his heroin addiction and the fact that he had spent 25 of the last 30 years in jail, so that was a good start!
Then while I was at technical college, I met a Venezualan called Jose Roberto Quiroga Baldomar, whom one of my friends called "Bertie Bird Shit" because the major export of Venezuala at that time was guano. I seem to remember that he looked a little bit like a younger version of Barry White (which was nice!). However, I had better be careful what I say as he is probably now the Head of a Drugs Cartel and I may wake up with a horse's head in my bed (or was that the Mafia?). Incidentally the same friend who came up with such an inspired name for my boyfriend also used to call the menopause the "doggie paw paws" which I think makes it sound much more inocuous!?
But the "piece de la resistance" was a boyfriend called Sag. I was 14 years old and he was in his late teens which at the time seemed perfectly OK, but now seems really weird. Anyway, one of the things that attracted me to him (apart from him looking like a complete geek) was that he had this large sign thing with his name on which he wore round his neck when we went to watch live bands at the Students Union on a Friday night. It was made out of that plastic resin stuff that you made paperweights out of as a kid, moulded into the letters S-A-G with fairy lights set into it and two wires, one going down each arm, with switches on the end so that he could flash the fairy lights on and off in the dark while the bands were playing. Now that I have actually written it down I realise how totally sad that sounds, but at least my dates with him weren't ever boring and he was a real gentleman.
