FUNNY how things can come back to you with such clarity after so long, isn't it?

I was talking to a friend recently who was born in 1958 by which time I was already 15 and had left school.

He asked if I could recall any thing from that that year.

Immediately I got an image of a bunch of Teddy boys taking it in tuns to knock the bejasus out of a fairground punchball while Little Richard's Baby Face was blaring out of the speakers on the Speedway behind us.

One memory begets another and I didn't stop talking for ages. It was those early days at the fair in South Shields that led me to become a waltzer man on a travelling fair.

John Reynolds, Eldon.