Friday night’s 20 year school reunion had all the standard components: old mates chatting; drinking; fairly raucous singing old the school song; a meal; more drinking; a few speeches, that kind of thing.

And a school tour. If my kids had been there, I’m sure they would have thought it was very Harry Potter, especially the school tower, which now contains the school’s archive, with many and varied items of interest. The library is now the staff room. The computer room is now the geography department. The hall has barely changed — even some of the seats are the same.

Colin, the President of the Old Boys Association is an ex-teacher at the school, and this made for some amusement, as he attempted with his best stern teacher’s tone to get people to quieten down during the speeches.

A number of blokes I knew well at high school but whom hadn’t been in touch over the years (including the previous reunions) showed up, which was great. Most looked similar to how they had done years ago. Many now have families and kids.

John and Tristan decided that Essendon coach Matthew Knights was the most prominent old boy of our year, though he didn’t attend on the night.

Some noted my efforts, which was nice. And Andrew, who I had a lot of laughs with in years 9 and 10, surprised me by saying how much he enjoyed the How To Destroy Your VCR web pages.

One of the current assistant principals spoke of the current school’s battle — to prevent a 25 storey building going up behind the historic 1927 building, spoiling the vista. Most of us were roused up enough about this to give money on the night to the fighting fund.

Was a great night. To be followed up with a flurry of emails and Facebook additions, no doubt.

Nowadays I have a camera in my mobile phone, so virtually anywhere I am, I can take a picture.

There was a morning, back in 1993 or so, when I wish I’d had a camera with me. I was waiting for a tram to work outside my old flat in Power Street, Hawthorn. That place was what you’d call “handy for public transport”. The city-bound tram stop was literally at the end of the driveway; to Camberwell and East Burwood was across the street. If you were headed towards the city, you could hear the tram screeching around the corner, just down the road, so you knew if you had to hurry to the stop. The railway station was 8 minutes’ walk away, down the sidestreets, and overall this was the quicker to get into the city on weekdays. Two other tram routes (69 and 70) were also in walking distance. It was PT heaven.

So anyway I was waiting for a tram to East Burwood when two garbage trucks came past, one in each direction. They stopped opposite each other, and the garbos on the back of each one jumped off to empty numerous bins into the backs of the trucks. They probably acknowledged each other too, in that non-waving, nod of the head and gruff “uhhh” kind of manly way. They finished with the bins, threw them back onto the nature strip and jumped onto the backs of their trucks and drove off.

I think it was soon after that that they phased out that kind of garbage collection, in favour of wheelie bins. Such a picture would have captured an everyday scene which, like chimney-sweeps and milkmen, have completely vanished from the landscape. When I was a kid, the garbos generally came past very early, at least when we lived on main roads like Hotham Street and Inkerman Road. We sometimes jokingly referred to them as garbologists.

It came to mind because I was clicking around on the council web site and found a page about the phasing out of recycling crates, also in favour of wheelie bins. Apparently ongoing reforms to workplace health and safety had a part in it, though I suspect mechanisation and single-person operated garbage trucks are simply much cheaper to run.

I wonder if anybody documents this kind of thing? (This one from Sydney was the closest I could find on a quick look in PictureAustralia. And check this great photo of a milkman and his son.)

To get to the point: I rang up the council yesterday to arrange to swap my 240 litre general rubbish bin for a 120 litre one. I rarely put more than about 30 litres per week in it, and although it doesn’t save much annually having the smaller bin (about $30 I think), I thought I might as well switch so the bin takes up less space. Besides, the bin I inherited when I moved in has a small hole in it.

Evidently I have to leave the bin lying down on the nature strip, like a disabled turtle, and they’ll come past sometime in the next few days and switch it over. Easy.

Edit: A link in the original post hid a bunch of text which left it making no sense. Link removed.

The party made their way slowly down the corridor. Leading was Raftor the Brave, followed closely by Roder the dwarf. Bringing up the rear were the wizard Pyhus and Felonius, the group’s thief. They came to a door, which marked the end of the corridor. Raftor tried the door; it was locked. Felonius got out his tools and went to work on the door, while Roder and Pyhus kept a look out. Signalling that the door was now unlocked, Felonius nodded. Raftor kicked down the door and burst into the room with sword at the ready, the others closely following.

From the light given off by the wizard’s magic lantern, Raftor made out the shapes of five goblins with daggers at the ready, attacking.

Suddenly, a booming voice said “Roll for initiative!” and two giant dice came tumbling down squashing Felonius and two goblins. The party of adventurers had gained initiative, and Raftor attacked first. A huge twenty-sided die came crashing down in the corner flattening the remaining goblins. As the remainder of the party gathered around the crumpled body of the fallen thief, two giant hands descended, and grabbed the huge dice. The booming voice spoke out once more: “That’s enough for this session. See you all on Wednesday.”

– from Toxic Custard 14, October 1990.

The inventor of Dungeons And Dragons, Gary Gygax just died. Not at the hands of a goblin — it was natural causes.

I played D&D a bit in high school. A few of us did the occasional lunchtime and weekend session in years 7/8, and I had a go of Advanced D&D in the following years. At one point I had all the (basic) D&D rule books, a bunch of player character sheets, a stack of graph paper, and a full set of those funny dice. I had a go a designing my own scenarios, but they were never as successful as the professional ones. Child And Adult in Elsternwick sold all the gear.

For a while there in the mid-80s, D&D was quite popular. There was a cartoon adaption on morning TV, and a magazine called Dragon. At one point I encountered a Fundamentalist Christian brochure claiming it was all about devil worship.

It was D&D that got me into computer games like Ultima — which I played a LOT, leading at one stage — with friends Conrad and Konrad — to attempting to write a clone of it on the BBC Micro.

When I first watched Fellowship of the Ring, I was struck by how similar that was to a D&D game. Which I guess just shows how much D&D was influenced by Tolkien.

Unlike some things from my youth (such as classic video games), I’ve got no real urge to revisit D&D, but it does bring back some happy memories. And it leaves me wondering what I did with all that D&D stuff I used to have.

PS. The character names in the piece above were nicked from D&D characters my friends and I had.

This year marks the 20th anniversary of my leaving high school, and the Old Boys’ Association has a reunion dinner organised which I’ll certainly be going to. I’m even thinking I might go early for the tour of the school, to see how it’s changed. (A teacher I knew at a different school is now principal, for a start.)

The MHSOBA web page has a summary listing of which ex-students they know about: name, years at the school, postcode. The postcodes are mostly in Victoria, with the odd UK (or possibly Canadian) format postcode, and one or two at five-digits, apparently in the USA. One I know to be Polish, and a couple in formats I don’t recognise. Some are blank - out of contact.

And there’s another column: “Dec”. Of the roughly three hundred names, three four have this column filled-in. If I’m reading it right, these are the people who — like my friend Charles (who attended another school) — didn’t make it to their 20th anniversary year. It was a big year group, and I didn’t know these guys personally, but that saddens me a bit.

Maybe we should toast them on the night.

I’ve mentioned this briefly before, but back in my uni days, my diet was pretty shocking. Often a bunch of us would go down to the corner shop (now razed and redeveloped as Yet More University Buildings). I’d chow down a $1.50 hotdog, and maybe some chips, perhaps a Big M or an OJ, and if there wasn’t another lecture imminent*, we’d retire to the back of the shop and play video games. I remember my friend Brian remarking that he played so much Tetris, he used to have dreams of falling blocks.

Those days are long since past me. I don’t know how many of those hot dogs I consumed, but it was probably more than was healthy.

Following some comments left, and as a result of the pizza place the kids and I sometimes go having an out-of-order phone on Wednesday, we decided to try Jasper’s Pizza in McKinnon. They made a good first impression, giving us bits of garlic bready pizza stuff to nibble on while we made up our minds what to order.

Then one of the guys behind the counter looked at me. I thought he was about to ask about TV (it happens; last night on the train I got buttonholed by a TravelSafe team), but instead he asked if I used to study at Monash Caulfield. “15, 20 years ago?”

“Yeah…”

“I thought I recognised your face. I used to run the corner shop!”

He said they sold up in 1994, and the Commonwealth bought the land, no doubt to commence the aforementioned razing and redeveloping.

So it seems I’m not the only one who remembers those $1.50 hot dogs.

I wonder what happened to the Tetris machine?

Oh, the pizza was delicious, by the way.

*Well, that we wanted to go to.

I get some terrific comments on this blog. Quite a few of them, too. The database reckons over 6000, though I think there might be some suspected spams in there. Then again, there are some old comments from 2003 that haven’t been imported into Wordpress yet.

Here’s some followups on some recent comments, and on my own recent posts.

On ties. Biff commented on the niceness of silk ties. I concur, in fact over the years I’ve steadily retired the polyester ones and migrated to silk — all those I wear regularly are silk, most of them woven. Nice. I still haven’t learnt how to do a Windsor knot though.

Stitch Sista commented that bow ties were invented for scientists and doctors who couldn’t have ties dipping into things. Fair call. Doesn’t explain why some desk jockeys wear them though.

Roger doesn’t like the phrase “heads-up”. I wouldn’t say I’m overly moving towards Americanisms (assuming it is an Americanism), though I do sometimes call my kids “guys”. As my sister has argued in the past, you can resist to a certain extent, but the nature of language is that it’s a developing, evolving beast, inheriting things from all around.

Flerdle remarks on a school bell that was an actual bell, rather than electronic like the one at my primary school. Marita remarked upon this too (small school in the country) and that on sunny days they would listen to Let’s All Sing outside on the teacher’s car radio.

I wrote about emergency undies. The other day I wore the emergency shirt, when the one I’d intended on wearing (last one in the cupboard) lost a vital button at the last minute.

Not a comment here, but Josh ponders Buying vs Renting.

Oh, and I thoroughly enjoyed Life On Mars last night on the telly. Made me want to dig out all that old daggy 70s music again. And I wonder if I still have that video of The Sweeney around somewhere?

PS. After Life On Mars I had a sudden urge to listen to Cream’s White Room, but couldn’t find it on my ipod. Realised with horror that I don’t have it. May have to go CD shopping at lunchtime.

Isaac has reached grade 6, top of the heap at primary school. The grade 6ers get to wear special shirts and jumpers, and get School Leader status for a term.

In my year of grade 6 at Ripponlea PS in 1982, I was flag monitor, with my friend Mark. On the first day, we initially hung the flag upside-down, but after that it was okay.

I also got to work the mid-lunchtime bell sometimes. The bell was next to the school office, and worked by a button on the wall. Next to it was an ancient radiogram that was piped through the school intercom once a week so we could listen to “Let’s All Sing”. It also played records, which were also played in the playground to warn that lunchtime/recess was coming to an end.

The mid-lunchtime bell signified the library was opening. By the time I was in grade 6, the big hit attraction at the library was the wireless headphone system, which was connected up to a tape deck in the librarian’s office. Raoul and I used to bring in Beatles tapes to play, as I recall. I seem to remember we also played poker in the library — possibly an odd way to use the facilities. When the library chucked out some books, I claimed a couple: I still have that copy of The Goodies Book of Records, and I think an old copy of Fungus The Bogeyman is around somewhere too.

Apart from lunchtimes in the library, there was time in the yard playing mock tennis with tennis balls in the painted squares on the ashphalt; swinging around on the monkeybars; brandy (officially banned — when I got hit in the eye with a tennis ball, I told the teacher we’d been playing cricket); British Bulldog, and whatever that game is where you try and keep the tennis ball in play by hitting it towards the ground, then the wall, then back to you again. By grade 6 I think we’d grown out of running spy clubs. Oh and of course there was just walking around talking about Really Serious Stuff.

I was deemed by the teachers to be responsible enough to help with school newsletter distribution. Not so much folding and production, but making sure all the classrooms got enough of them. It felt a teensy bit special to be authorised to be roaming the school while other students were confined to their classes. I suppose giving kids these sorts of responsibilities isn’t just child labour, it’s also a way of helping them grow up.

Fun times.

• More reminiscing

When I were a lad, my sister and I walked to primary school with our friends — at least in the upper part of primary school; I don’t recall the first few years; I assume my mum walked with us, though she’s said a friend in the same block used to occasionally drive us. But by about grade 4 we were walking. We used to meet up with Stuart, Lisa and Tracy from the next street, and Merlin, and sometimes also Raoul and Jeremy from a few streets away, and all walk up to Ripponlea Primary. I’ve just checked a journey planner and it says this is 1.6 km; about a mile.

There were two main roads to cross, one with no convenient lights (but not really heavy traffic), and the other with a lollipop person. But it never snowed, and we didn’t have to wear old sacks.

A few times we tried catching the Hotham Street bus (then the 602; now the 216/219) instead. I recall one time my sister and I missed our stop, and I think it was her (or maybe it was me) that started crying until the bus driver stopped the bus and let us off. The bus trip was only three stops, so it probably wasn’t worth the fare, thus most of the time we walked.

Midway through grade 6 (1982) we moved to Elwood, close to the beach. The trip to school was longer, about double. While the New Street/Hotham Street bus would have been the logical way, instead we mostly caught the 600 to St Kilda, then caught the tram from there. I assume it was so we could leave the house with my mum, who also caught the bus to St Kilda Station then the train into work in the city.

High school at Ardoch (now defunct, it was in Dandenong Road, Windsor) the following year meant another change. Although once again the Hotham Street bus would have been the logical way, again it was the 600 bus to St Kilda. Then either the 79 tram or 246 bus, up to Dandenong Road, then another tram. It seems totally illogical now that I’d have wasted all that time changing from one service to another, but there must have been some logic behind it. Maybe the new Travelcards had made it so easy to make multi-modal trips that I was determined to do so. Maybe I just enjoyed riding on trams more than buses. Or maybe I just didn’t want to walk through Elsternwick Park. Probably I was going part of the way with my sister, who was in primary school for one year after me; that was probably it, as now I think about it, I sometimes went home the direct way.

If going via St Kilda, on the way home there was a place, a little cafe I think, on the corner of Barkly Street and Carlisle Street where I’d wait for the bus, that had a Galaga machine, into which my spare 20 cent coins would go. Often at the stop a blind man would wait too, always holding up to his ear a little device that may have been a radio, but also told him the time. He used to sway from side to side, a slightly manic grin on his face. Some of the other schoolkids travelling around used to mock him, which seemed a bit cruel to me.

While living in Elwood I’d also zoom around on my shiny new bicycle (the one finally stolen in 1995), visiting friends, going up and down beach bike path, and sometimes riding all the way up to the Commonwealth Bank in Elsternwick to take money out of the new-fangled ATM for my mum. At the time it was the only ATM for miles around.

We were still living in Elwood when I switched schools to Melbourne High. The trip became a walk to the 246 bus on Glenhuntly Road, a quick trip up to Elsternwick station (why didn’t I just walk to the station? Inherent laziness?) then the train from there to South Yarra. Sometimes I’d meet Konrad on the train at Ripponlea and we’d swap notes about the latest Commodore 64 games.

Coming home there’d be the occasional food fight between the platform 2 kids and those on platforms 1 and 4. I’d watch these from the far end of the platform, given I was wanting the back of the train for alighting at Elsternwick. On hot days we’d hope for an air-conditioned train; they were pretty scarce at the time.

Then we moved into Elsternwick itself, and the trip became much easier. I got a parttime job at Hattams, which was about a minute’s walk away from our front door. The flat we lived in was above a shop on Glenhuntly Road, which was great apart from the faulty shop burglar alarms that would periodically go off at night. There was also an elderly Irish brother and sister living next door. The sister would periodically get drunk and also go off at night.

From there my sister was going to school by tram, and used to talk of “tram hopping” — jumping ahead from tram to tram on the way home as they in a bunch at the traffic lights, to try and get on board the one you’d missed.

Then we moved to Murrumbeena, right next to the railway line. Gradually we got used to the noise of the trains (apart from freight trains which would drown out the TV), and it was just a short walk to the station to catch the train. By that point I was in year 11, and a few of us would congregate in the back of the 7:36 from Oakleigh every morning. The trip to my parttime job in Elsternwick took me onto the 67 tram. If I was lucky, finishing at 12:30 on a Saturday I could just make it home by 1pm to watch Doctor Who.

Uni in Caulfield made it a quick easy trip, using a Rail+2 if I wanted. It got harder and more expensive when we moved to Hampton (the final move of many). A walk up the hill or a bus ride to Moorabbin, then a two-zone train trip. Austudy funds had kicked in by then, which took the edge off it, but it still narks me a bit that that trip of six stations was so expensive.

There was actually a point to all this rambling when I started writing it.

As children grow up, there’s a point at which they start to roam around on their own. It seems to have got later with the current generation. It certainly seems these days that more parents drive their kids to school… because the traffic is worse these days because more parents drive their kids to school.

My kids haven’t yet done much getting around on their own, as unfortunately they live way too far to walk to school. And as I’ve mentioned before, it’s a long hard slog on PT. But with Isaac going into high school next year (it’ll be a 15 minute walk) it’s about time for them to start exploring.

All part of growing up, and becoming independent.