Life is Healthy

And behind part of the red present is ...



Break up Yipee!

We break up!
We break up!
We don't care if the school blows up!
No more English, no more French!
No more sitting on the old school bench! [What a hardship that was.]
If the teacher interferes,
Tie her up and box her ears!
If that does not serve her right,
Blow her up with dynamite! [Or gelignite, depending on your preference of high explosive. Unlike dynamite, gelignite doesn't sweat unstable nitroglycerine, so can be safely stored, handled and moulded to fit your teacher.]

Ooh, hang on. If we broke up on the 18th, then I might be able to work out what year this was. OK, December 18th was a Sunday in 1977, so that's out. It was a Monday in 1978, and I can't see us having gone back to school for just one day after the weekend, so that makes it 1979 (a Tuesday) at the earliest. Or possibly 1980 (a Thursday), though I definitely had fischertechnik that year, not an Inter-City 125 set (though I perhaps already owned that and just wanted to draw a picture of it). Surely it can't be 1981 (a Friday)? I can't still have been making homemade advent calendars with my sister at the ages of 11 (me) and 14 (her)? OK, that is possible, but I think that I would have been more likely to draw a ZX81 in 1981, so I'm going to go with 1979, though there may be more clues to come, either this year or next.

• Tense time
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• Clinic on cholera front line

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And behind the long row of portholes is ...



Activate zoom ...



An Inter-City 125 in original 1970s British Rail livery!

Which means it is entirely possible that I had one of these that Christmas (as I definitely had this at some point):



Note that I didn't try to write 'Inter-City' or attempt the tricky BR logo - I had obviously learned from the Christmas cake debacle (if it was a Christmas cake). The Inter-City 125 (surely today they'd drop that hyphen and just have an intercapped 'InterCity') wasn't launched till 1976*, and Hornby didn't bring out their model till 1977 (see below), so that means that the earliest this advent calendar could date from would be 1977, though I'd kind of worked that out already from the standards of handwriting, cutting out and mention of orchestra parties.



My sister had a friend whose dad worked for British Rail, and I remember her cheerily informing me that the people standing by the railway line on the catalogue cover would be sucked into the air surrounding the speeding train and killed. Merry Christmas!

* They are still going strong today, despite the rest of the world having moved on from high speed diesels.