Happy Birthday Mum!

Today is the big day – my Mum is 70. Happy birthday Mum!

So, In Honour Of My Mum, some Random Facts about 1938, with some rather tenuous and contrived links to our family:

Thornton Wilder’s play Our Town was performed for the first time on January 22 1938.
In 1980 (or was it 1979?) my long suffering mother had to pretend to enjoy a school production of this fine play, in which I featured only as a member of the choir that provided the nice backing music. I have no idea why I was in the school choir, I can’t sing and had to pretend by miming badly whenever it got to the high notes.

On January 27th the bridge at Niagara Falls collapsed as a result of an ice jam. (I have no idea what that is, so any explanations would be very welcome.)
In 1992 my sister visits Niagara Falls and is astounded when an American couple ask her how she had heard about it.

On January 30th my Mum was born, just beating Crown Princess Beatrix of the Netherlands who arrived the following day.

In March, oil was discovered in Saudi Arabia and in June, Laszlo Biro patented his famous pen in Britain.
Both life changing events for us all really.

Mallard set the world steam record on July 3, reaching aspeed of 126mph.
It was doing a slightly less impressive speed of exactly 0 mph when I saw it as a child. But it looked nice and I bought lots of postcards.

Neville Chamberlain declared “Peace In Our Time” on September 30th.
Well it wasn’t, was it? My Mum ended up taking a long holiday at her Grandmother’s house in the country until all the excitement carnage was over.

The famous radio broadcast of Orson Wells reading War of the Worlds caused panic in late October.
42 years later my 12 year old self dances to Jeff Wayne’s musical interpretation of WotW in a competition with the other members of my school dance club. WotW is not an obvious choice for a dance about the water cycle, but it’s modern dance – why be obvious? We are the least posh school there by a million miles. We realise immediately that we have no chance but dance like crazy anyway. We win. Bloody hell. Then all our parents, school mates, teachers and just about the entire local population have to sit through endless repeat performances. We even get videoed, but thankfully this has yet to appear on You Tube.

Seventy today. Where does all the time go? Many happy returns and all that.