Though I say so myself, that's a pretty nifty drawing of Lee Majors, with me experimenting in ink and wash, aged fourteen. I don't know when I've used ink and wash in the last thirty years, but I doubt I'm that good any more.
I'm on my summer holidays, so me, Mum & Jude are up in Montrose. I think I still have the incredible bundle of comics I bought across these two days, including 4 Classic Comics, Deathlok The Demolisher, and a very rare Batman comic. Rare for me, that is, cos we didn't seem to get DC comics back home and I think I only ever got them when we were up in Scotland. And I remember going to see Earthquake too, though I couldn't tell you much about it.
My records for the day were In Zaire By Johnny Wakelin and Exercise Is Good For You by The Wombles. Classics both.
If you're unfamiliar with The Trigan Empire, British comic fans will tell you it's a legendary comic strip drawn by Don Lawrence, which ran in Look and Learn comic through the 1960s and 70s, and was reprinted in Vulcan comic in the 70s. Fans will tell you how much they treasure this fully painted art and how it brings jot every time you find an intact page of it in the wild. What very few will confess to doing is cutting out panels of it and sticking them in their diary, thus ruining the original comics and rendering them worthless. But that's what I did.
The strip was running in Vulcan at the time of this diary entry and that's where I cut it from, to decorate a spread where, as usual, not a lot was happening apart from me reading (and dissecting) comics (and not metaphorically, in case that wasn't clear), and watching the telly.
I was also busy writing and drawing a book of comedy comic strip called The Amazing 3rd Looney Buke. I'd completed two of these books so far, and they were about as good as you'd expect comics by a 12-to-14 year old to be. Actually they were probably worse than that. Some day I'm sure I'll dig them out, as I happen to know they still exist, they turned up when clearing out the old family home.
The BBC was marking the 40th anniversary of the start of telly with a series of special programmes. I don't remember much about the programmes themselves, but I've subsequently learned that this was the point at which they realised they'd been systematically erasing programmes that they were only now discovering they might want to show again. So the wiping of the vaults stops about here in 1976, a bit late for most of the TV up till this moment.
My Records For The Day were both from the 60s, for whatever reason, and off albums that I owned then and still have, though I've not played them for years.
One of the hardest things when writing these blogs about my diaries of fifty years ago is trying to find something interesting to say about them, when almost every one was written at a time of my life when precious little ever happened. Just like this spread (which you can find in the My 1975 Diary 2025 Calendar, though I'm betting you knew that) where I do lessons at school, try to do my paper round at record speed (it seems to take 21 minutes every time), then watch telly. Compared to the start of the year, I appear to be watching lots of more telly. I believe it;s more likely to be the case that I simply didn't bother to record them in such excruciating detail back then.
My Records For The Day include one of my favourite Christmas songs, whose name I clearly hadn't learned properly yet, and a solid gold classic by 10CC.
