Well, I have had my five minutes of fame in my local paper, the Kentish Gazette, under the heading Thrilla-gran-jaro! Just as well I am not a sensitive soul.
Now I come to think of it, I have made the news before. In 1971, the Guardian newspaper ran a competition to celebrate the 150th anniversary of their first edition. Every day for ten days, they published an extract of an article which had appeared in the paper at some time in the past, and the competitors had to try to work out on which date each extract had appeared.
Nowadays, I imagine the answers could be worked out in minutes using the internet. However in 1971, the only way to find the answers was to go into one of the two libraries in the country that had the Guardian on microfilm, and go through looking for the actual article. I was between jobs then, so decided to spend two weeks working on the competition in the Central Reference Library in Manchester, where we lived at the time. Each morning first thing Stewart, who knows stuff, would look at that day’s extract and tell me what he thought it might have to do with and when. Each microfilm held three months of newspapers, so I would go through the relevant film looking for the article. I did manage to identify all ten extracts, but was very disheartened when my name appeared in the paper along with several others, who had also done so. A tie-breaker competition was announced: they gave us another half dozen extracts. These six were nearly impossible! I remember one of them started “The security of Europe is being threatened…..” and not much more! I found four of them, but the other two could not be located. I remember meeting Stewart as he left work, after having spent a long day in the library, telling him I was going to give up. Happily, Stewart persuaded me to send my answers in, making calculated guesses for the two we couldn’t find – and I won! We discovered later that I was one day closer in one of the guesses than anyone else.
The prize was the amazing thing! Someone said at the time that the Guardian staff must have thought of it on a drunken night out! There were twelve parts to the prize and we got them all! They were:
1. Bacon, egg and marmalade every day for a year to go with your morning Guardian.
2. A weekend for two in the Mediterranean. (More about this to follow in future blogs).
3. A trip round the Guardian presses.
4. A print by Papas, the Guardian cartoonist.
5. Four premium bonds.
6. Two test match tickets.
7. Four LPs of your choice. (Long play records: this was the olden days!)
8. A family subscription to the National Trust.
9. Twelve bottles of wine.
10. A copy of “The History of the Guardian” by David Ayhurst.
and two more, which I can’t currently remember, but will no doubt come back to me when it’s too late – my brain is definitely going.
A guy from the paper came to our flat to discuss and negotiate about the prize. It turned out that a chef was not going to serve us up with our breakfast every day! We agreed a price for that, but did get all the other prizes. Stewart remembers that we were shown round the Guardian presses by a man whose job was to sit in a van with a telephone outside football grounds. All the football results would be phoned through to him and he would tell printers, who were in the van with him, what to put in the “Late News” section of the Guardian’s sister paper, the Evening News, so that when the fans came out of the game, they could buy a newspaper with all that day’s results in. All of that has been eclipsed by the arrival of the digital age.
At least my moments of fame have been original! I was the only person to get anything in the Guardian competition – I got everything- and I might be the first granny, accompanied by two other generations, to climb Kili!