…I had my first piano lesson of the term with a new teacher
because my old one died.
I brought a water pistol [to school] but it leaked and wet my trousers.
Everybody seemed to have videoed O.H.M.S.S., but we haven’t got a video.
I am feeling horrible and left out…

Real, proper, grown-up tragedies were nipping at my heels. One of my teachers had been hospitalised from a heart attack; now my piano teacher was dead.

Yet they didn’t register on any sort of different scale from the petty mishaps and misfortunes to which I gave equal prominence in my diary. Rather, they all resonated in unison, the one seeming just as consequential as the other.

I remember on this occasion kicking up quite a fuss about not having a video recorder. I’d voiced protests before, but to no effect. I felt like ours was the only house in the world that didn’t have one.

Here was a rare instance of me feeling out-of-step with the times in which we lived. Normally I didn’t give a toss. I think what prompted such alarm was the fact that, as I note, “everyone” seemed to have recorded the Bond film, revealing to me just how ubiquitous this gadget had become, and therefore how laughably antiquated my family now appeared.

Suffice to say my petitions were useless. We would go on not having a video recorder for not just the rest of the year, but the rest of the DECADE.