Birthday Blues No. 1 #1 - The New Seekers - I'd Like to Teach The World to Sing

BOOM! 

At the exact moment my father's teenage jizz hit my mum's equally teenage egg, the Beatles split up. Of only marginally less significance, I was conceived. I've done the maths, it's about right. My Mum's 18th birthday or thereabouts. More booze than cake, no doubt. Band of Gold playing in the background. A warm spring evening in the hinterland between South London and Kent. The air thick with Tamla and Babycham. 

And then, wallop, the world changes.

I don't remember anything about being born and I don't want to. The stuff since is bad enough.

Quick aside time - Recently a friend announced to me that they were a "Platinum Gay". I didn't know what this meant so he told me it's a gay man who was born by caesarian and has never touched a vagina. Which is kind of disgusting and funny at the same time. 

Anyway, I digress. I wouldn't want to remember being born and it's probably for the best that we can't. I turned up on my due date, a Thursday, because back then in Good Old Imperial Measurements Britain, doctors knew what they were doing. They weren't talking to pregnant mothers like they did on the continent - old Johnny Foreigner couldn't tell a woman when her baby was due.

"Hey, Madame Ovary, your child is due, well, it is due sometime after Christmas, how is that?"

Well, that kind of vague information might work for your frauleins and what have you but here, back on the island of Great British Pounds and Ounces, you got a due date that worked.

I imagine my mother's doctor, probably a bald expert looking chap with a pipe on the go said somethng like "Well, your child will be born on January 21st. That's a fact. God Save the Queen."

Even though this was relatively recently, my parents quickly got married, because the sixties were over and Free Love and all that only happened to middle class people on middle class drugs. Hardly anyone turned up to the wedding by the looks of it. And, by jingo, I arrived in this world bang on time because of the efficiency of British Doctors.

Grandad by Clive Dunn was number one when I was born. A sentimental load of old bilge performed by an actor famous for playing people much older than he really was. It's possible that this is the first song I ever heard. No wonder I'm a mess. Anyway, my mother says I was a wriggler from the off. All the other babies in the unit slept all neatly, tucked in etc, but that I was somehow kicking blankets off me and wriggling out of nappies, just a few days in to this life. Blame Clive Dunn. Fucking weirdo.

Bromley is a shit place to be born. Admittedly better than say Chernobyl but still crap. It's the most unremarkable town in England. Golf clubs, racism and dull, unending suburbia. HG Wells lived there and had to invent science fiction for something to do. Charles Darwin lived just outside and had to uninvent God. 

A year passes. The song that was number one on my first birthday is more famous for being used in a Coca Cola advert that said hey racism is bad actually long before Idles did so take that, pop kids. That advert was part of the subtle propagada of my childhood television watching which suggested to me that America was cool as fuck and Britain was rubbish old shit, an opinion which I believed right up until I saw Compost Corner for the first time.

The New Seekers version I don't remember. In all honesty up until today I had always presumed it was the same people as did the advert. Anyway. it's a nice enough song. I was only a year old, and if someone sung it to me whilst rocking me to sleep as I fretted about the geopolitical consequences of Pakistan developing it's own nuclear weapons programme, then I'd probably have been grateful, surrendering myself to sleep just as Shoichi Yokoi famously accepted that it was pointless him still fighting World War 2  just a few days later.

Current Ranking of Birthday no. 1 - #1

Final Ranking of Birthday no.1 - tba

What Should Have Been Number 1 instead that week - Stay With Me - The Faces.