A trip down memory lane with the radgies... without social media

I WAS at a get-together for mates I hadn’t seen in decades – luckily it was for something nice, as in your fifties you start saying goodbye to contemporaries at an alarmingly more frequent rate.

Then a scary truth hit me … we all have started to look like each other.

We Geordie men north of 40 or 50 seem to have adopted a uniform of shaven heeds, bargain-rail shirts (not tucked in), cardboard-creased jeans and too-white training shoes that look like they’ve been looted from a slain LA rapper.

I used to joke about the ‘aad codgers’ in my youth all seemingly wearing macs and trilbies, but this phenomenon seems to have happened to my generation too.

If you closed your eyes, however, and listened only to the voices and the patter, it almost sounded like it was a pitch black winter’s night in 1978 and we were back ‘garden creeping’ down the big posh houses. “Is that ye Davie?”

“Nah, man, it’s Gaz, Davie’s owwer there with Kev, Dazza and big Bazz.”

Gary, Kevin, Darren, Barry, Graham, Steven and Trevor – the true sound of the sixties and seventies.

Once the mainstay of a million primary school registers; now only to be spotted on limp 50th or 60th birthday banners or on the side of self-employed gas fitters’ vans as they cut you up at the lights.

Aye, it was like these long lost kids now seemed to be channelled through their middle-aged hosts; like some sort of weird Gateshead version of ‘invasion of the body snatchers’.

Stories tumbled out as if they had only happened last week, and were slapped, tears rolled down leathery cheeks and old nicknames once again rippled through the air. Teachers got the worst of it ...

“D’yee remember auld ‘Tefal heed’ in maths? How aboot that pervy art teacher who looked like Rocky Balboa’s trainer gadgie?

“Ah’ll never forget Gus Gorilla’s face in metalwork when mad Malla hoyed that chisel at Catweazle.”

Exes and their partners came a close second for memorable monikers...

“How long did ‘Norman ney neck’ gan oot with ‘path cracker’ after ye’d finished with her?”

“That wasn’t the ‘ bath shaper’ man, that was ‘Betty the Yeti’ and she ended up gettin’ off with ‘Bagpuss’ at ‘Terry the tramp’s party.”

Those poor people will always be remembered by the identities they were given at 14; nobody was ever allowed to choose a nickname... or lose it!

Indeed, we pondered if there should be a national nickname amnesty at election time where politicians had to make public what they were REALLY called at school.

(I’d love to know what the Boris replacement wannabes were called – can’t believe any of those appalling people were ever popular!)

Our final youthful hurrah was to thank all of creation that camera phones and social media hadn’t been invented when we were at the height of our radginess.

If only a few of our (or even our teachers’) gannins-on had ended up being recorded, then quite a few of the people present would have been either in the papers, in jail, out of a job or out of a relationship – or all of the aforementioned!