I remember film for cameras. You couldn't just wander around with a smartphone snapping willynilly, you needed special film like Colourprint II designed for instant loading cameras. You bought a box of film from the shop, in this case Boots, and had to manoeuvre the cartridge into your camera without accidentally overexposing it on the way in. This particular film only had space for 12 pictures so you had to take photos really sparingly or you'd run out before the end of the holiday. There was always a best before date, in this case May 1980, and note the depressing news that PRICE DOES NOT INCLUDE PROCESSING. Every film had to be sent away after use, in this case dropped into Boots, and then you'd go back a few days later and excitedly flick through the blurry messes you'd taken. No 'dodgy' photos in those days, Mr Chemist was watching. If you're a certain age you probably remember film for cameras too, also I'm aware you can still get it for certain retro devices, but my word instant photography has moved on in the last fifty years. 24 cards featuring Dr Who And His Enemies just as Tom Baker hit his peak. You got 4 characters at a time, each of which had to be pushed out of its card before you could play with them in front of the colourful alien scene on the back of the packet. I never got the full set, instead I ended up with two Yetis, also I was only 10 so didn't remember any Dr Who stories containing a Quark or White Robot. Gordon Archer did the artwork and they're now eminently collectable, not that I realised this at the time. I also remember Magic Roundabout pencil toppers in Ricicles and Klondike Pete comics in Golden Nuggets, as will you if you're a certain age, and wow breakfasts got a lot duller when they stopped putting random freebies in cereal packets. plastic viewer with two eyepieces and then you could buy all sorts of discs on all sorts of topics to slot into them. Each 'reel' had 14 transparencies, and by viewing them in pairs you got to see seven 3D images as the disc rotated. This set's Wombles-themed from 1973, with three discs each bringing to life one of the stories from the stop-motion TV series. Ideally someone else read the text from the booklet out loud while you were clicking through, or else you knew the story off by heart because you'd watched them over and over. In the absence of video recorders, this is how we filled our afternoons. If you're of a certain age you'll remember Viewmasters too, maybe any age because they're been around since 1939 and are still in production. Originally the main content was tourist-related, so for example I have another set of reels from Niagara Falls, but eventually storytelling for children took over and in 2008 they stopped making scenic panoramas altogether. Letraset made some stunners - and pick a decorative style for a bedroom cupboard or something more sober for the front of a presentation. Of course you had to try to keep the line straight or the end result looked wonky, plus the letters had a tendency to eventually rub off, but if you're of a certain age you will very much remember dry-transfer lettering. comments if(postComments['91851351325181'] != null){document.write(' (' + postComments['91851351325181'] + ')')}else{document.write(' (0)')}; I remember Pocketeers. They were a series of hand-held non-electronic games released by Palitoy in the late 1970s and my brother and I were totally target audience. Each came in a green sleeve and generally what you got was a plastic box with some kind of clever mechanical game inside. Time Up was a maze through which you had to try to roll a small silver ball, scoring up to 100 points according to how far you got before a mechanical timer halted your progress. I also owned Steeplechase which was a mini-obstacle course, The Derby which was a wheel-turning four horse race and Pinball which was self-explanatory and ideal for 10 year-olds who couldn't go into pubs yet. My brother had Cup Final and Golf, the latter with a teensy player you took out of the box and set up to hit teensy balls into a teensy hole. We never got the full set of Pocketeers because they cost 99p at the Co-op and that was beyond our pocket money but they were a much-loved possession that filled many an afternoon and I remember them very fondly. boiled sweet produced by Trebor, named because they had a hard flavour outside and a soft sherbet inside. My absolute favourites were strawberries and cream Double Agents, numbered 004, closely followed by lime and chocolate (as pictured, 003). All the sweet wrappers had coded messages on them which could be unravelled if you found the packet with the right Spy Information printed on the inside (a simple substitution code but with all the words written backwards). Trebor often ran special offers - they sent me a Fingerprint Kit in 1978 in return for four wrappers and a 10p coin. Double Agents would have been the perfect sweet to eat while reading the KnowHow Book of Spycraft, an Usborne publication which I read and reread and which may still be one of the best books of all time. You may remember none of this, or you may have taken everything to heart and learned to reveal absolutely nothing. Space 1999. I must have got through a lot of lollies in the summer of 1976 because I've got a dozen of them, also they stopped hiding picture cards inside the wrappers the following year. The artwork wasn't great because the real Dr Helena Russell looked considerably more realistic than that. As for tea cards we weren't a great consumer at the time so my grandmothers funnelled all their Brooke Bond freebies my way, and between us we managed to fill the entire album of The Race Into Space (1971), History of Aviation (1972) and The Sea - Our Other World (1974). Cuppas have never been so exciting since. comments if(postComments['91851351325182'] != null){document.write(' (' + postComments['91851351325182'] + ')')}else{document.write(' (0)')}; I remember ink cartridges. This is a pack of 10 Parker ink cartridges for my Parker fountain pen, cursive script being an essential part of a 1970s education. You needed a stash of cartridges because at any minute your nib might go a bit scratchy as the ink ran out and that could be the end of the world if you were in the middle of a crucial essay. I always plumped for black ink rather than the usual Royal Blue, either because I thought black looked cooler or because in the early days we only had a bottle of black Quink ink in the house. Also I note that this particular pack of ink cartridges is unopened, this because there was once a threshold in my life when the need to use a fountain pen became redundant and my lovely Parkers now sit in a drawer. In a way it's a damned shame, but also a good thing because I'm not forever hunting a sheet of blotting paper and my fingers no longer look like they're decaying from frostbite, indeed hardly anything needs writing any more and when it does biros and fibre tips have totally won out. green plastic rectangle you could slot into a payphone and make a call without the need for coins. It meant you had to make a purchase in a shop before you could make a call, but BT smiled because their payphones were no longer full of cash and a target for theft. Instead a strip on the front of the card was heated and 'erased' so they knew how many units you'd used, and if you could read the bumps you knew how many you had left. I think mine's fully used up which is just as well because cardphone technology was phased out in 1996 and otherwise I'd have wasted some of my sunk cost. You may remember BT Phonecards if you're old enough, but mainly when people get nostalgic about payphones it's all about dropping coins in slots and what the minimum coin was and giving three rings and how you had to press Button A and Button B, and one day people who use smartphones will be just as retrospectively tedious. pocket pets which you had to nurture so they grew up properly and didn't die. Feed them right and clear up their poop and they might grow from baby to child to adult, but neglect them for too long and they'd get into bad habits or waste away and go up to heaven like an angel. Eventually you learnt it was OK to go to sleep at night because they'd still be alive when you woke up, but like today's phones they were always burning a hole in your pocket begging for attention. I know they still make Tamagotchis but this is one of the first generation circa 1997, not that I was still a child but there's no age limit on novelty zeitgeist gadgets, and I'm hoping that a lot of you who didn't remember any of the earlier things will definitely remember this. I remember being 30. I got given a birthday card with this badge on... '30 and red hot' ...and I wore it at work all day. I didn't think I was red hot at the time but I look back now and sigh, recognising I was far more red hot than I thought I was and considerably red hotter than I am now, relatively speaking, indeed they don't make '60 and red hot' badges and they wouldn't sell anyway. But it's all too easy to spend your time looking back and sighing about the past, and droning on about the past, and fixating about the past, indeed focusing all your thoughts on the past, whereas the present is all we've got and the future is all we can change. Remember that.

Back in 2003 I saw a table on Jonathan's blog and thought "ooh, I wonder how he did that". I checked the source code and tried to unpick it, also consulted my Teach Yourself HTML4 book, and so sussed out how tables worked. And since then tables have been a regular feature on this blog, almost a defining feature, because I really enjoy arranging facts and data in a grid. Most other blogs don't use tables, ever.Most websites don't use tables either, not within the actual text. Tables used to be more common, but not very common, perhaps for good reason.Tables look fine on my laptop, and generally perfectly readable on my mobile, but I suspect they muck up all sorts of accessibility for all sorts of people. Sorry if you can't read my tables easily. But I still love tables and have no intention of retiring them. Sorry.

The third week of July has more 30°+ temperatures than any other week of the year. heatwave update. Dates on which the temperature at Hampstead reached 30°C  JunJulAugSep 2010279/10   201127    2012 2518  2013 13  15/16/17  221  2014 18   2015 122  2016 18/19/202413 201717/18/19/20/216   2018 5/6/7/8 15 23 25/26/272/3  6/7  20192923/24/2525/26/27  202024/25/26317/8/9/10/11/12  2021 18/19/20   20221711/12  17/18/1911/12/13/14  202311  25  6/7  9/10 2024 19  3012  202519 21 28/29/301 10/11/12tbctbc » in red: reached 33°C in red & bold: reached 35°C in red & bold & underlined: reached 37°C

45 45 Squared (this because 2025 = 45², remember) Harrow  BarnetEnfield MarketHaringey MarwoodW ForestRedbridge ShakespeareHavering Balgores Hillingdon The SquareEaling HallidayBrentCamden CentralIslington NorthamptonHackneyBark&Dag Osborne Hounslow FerryH'smith &FK& Chelsea OnslowWestminster Vincent Dorset  GoldenCity DevonshireT Hamlets TredegarNewham Compressor Richmond The SquareWandsworthLambethSouthwark Trinity ChLewishamGreenwich MortgramitBexley Cygnet  Kingston St Andrews JubileeMertonSutton WallingtonCroydonBromley Station  You'll notice I'm trying to do at least one square in every borough. I still have 20 Squares to explore and would value your suggestions. at the start of the year and got dozens. n.b. I'm only visiting Squares that are listed in the National Street Gazetteer. by far the most Squares, followed by Westminster and Southwark.

Yesterday was St Swithin's Day. n.b. It may not have rained for you but it rained where I was and that's what counts. I had to hide in a hedge near Heathrow to avoid getting drenched, and I thought ah well, rain every day until August 24th. disproved as rubbish, obviously, because dead Saxon bishops don't affect our weather. back in 2022, so won't trawl over my four decades of personal data again. I'm calling it a SWITHINOMETER.  15     WET1617181920     21222324252627     28293031123     45678910     11121314151617     18192021222324     n.b. This table will only be completed by the August bank holiday, before that it's just a work in progress. n.b. I have a particular interest in St Swithin being wrong because my niece is getting married in the bottom right hand corner. n.b. Expect to see this table on the blog again in late August, hopefully while I'm still nursing a mild hangover.