The Summer of 1976

 The famous heatwave of 1976: we were living in our rented furnished flat in a house on Berridge Road East. (Shared front door, ground floor with locks on the living room and bedroom; by then we had our own bathroom - it was a palace compared with the flats on the two floors above.) I guess being on the ground floor the heat was more bearable than it might have been.

I was working for UKCIS (The United Kingdom Chemical Information Service - which we tended to call "YouKiss" rather than the alternative "UckSis") - an organisation The Chemical Society had set up to exploit the novel use of computers to process scientific information. 

In the summer of 1976 I was also working one of the allotments in Hungerhills (St Annes, Nottingham) and this involved a lot of trips after work to water. (I had to quietly unlock the gate and sneak in because the lady in the next allotment, down the hill, always wanted to chat, and if she spotted me I could spend more time talking to her than doing any gardening!)

Temperatures in the office reached 32 and one day we decided to visit Highfields Lido the following lunchtime. At that time there was no Djanogly Gallery in the south eastern corner of University Park but a classic old Lido, and just a 10 minute walk from our offices on the campus. Down the hill we went with our towels and cozzies ... but we hadn't reckoned with the aphid infestation that was going on that summer. Once in the welcomingly cool water we realised it was a veritable greenfly soup! Yuk!

The Lido was closed in 1980.

That was also the summer of trips to The Imperial in town to see bands like Cisco and Plummet Airlines and listening to Trevor Dann's excellent Saturday morning rock show on Radio Nottingham called Extravaganza. Bar 'I'm Sorry I Haven't a Clue' this is, I think, the only radio programme I've ever listened to every week.