the pointless weblog

This guide to World Cup 82 was written by John P. Baker and published by Ladybird Books. It seems to have had the results filled in by my brother and also probably my grandad, too.

I don’t remember anything at all about World Cup 82 (I was only 4 then), although I did spend ages obsessing over this book in the build up to the subsequent tournaments. I think the thing I liked most about it was the way my brother had filled out all the tables completely wrongly, suggesting he wasn’t quite as infallible as I feared.

Looking at it now, though, I think maybe it was my grandad who had filled it out wrong, and my brother was correcting his mistakes. This is the worst discovery of my entire life.

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These puzzles are all from the late 70s and early 80s. For some reason when we were little we had hundreds of puzzles, even though I’m pretty sure none of us liked them that much. I suspect they all cost about 10p from school fetes.

This beautiful Chriss Foss puzzle was always my favourite.

I also remember incessently making this Return of the Jedi puzzle. We had another one too, of Luke and Han and everyone on the bridge of the stolen Imperial Shuttle, but I don’t know what happened to that.

There was also this Star Wars puzzle in the loft, but I don’t remember that one at all. It is a beautiful thing.

There was a terrifying amount of really crap 80s TV and film merchandising puzzles, too. The Muppets I can accept, and possibly Tron, but Street Hawk? It’s a disgrace. The Street Hawk puzzle really is the most lacklustre piece of merchandising possible. I wonder if they still make this sort of stuff. I expect they do.

Much better than these are the Action! Adventure! puzzles. What more could a boy want than a picture of a battle ship being blown up? Absolutely nothing, that’s what.

There were hundreds more puzzles, too. Some of the more interesting or awful ones are in the gallery below. Also in the box I found these in were some terrible “3D” animal puzzles, where the 3D aspect was that the pieces were big lumps of plastic.

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Physics Bulletin was a physics journal published by The Physics Trust for The Institute of Physics. This gallery covers the years from 1977 to 1983.

These magazines were my father’s. Most of the covers are pleasingly abstract images of scientific processes, although a few are less interesting pictures of machine shops and occasionally trains, and there are some odd things, too, of course.

Also there’s a picture of some 1980s children smilingly using a computer, which is basically my favourite genre of images of all.

One of my earliest memories, or at least one of the best, is of my father spending entire weekends using our crappy computer to slowly generate monochrome fractals on the screen when I was about five. It is only when I remember that my father was 2 or 3 years younger then than I am now that the weeping sets in.

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