That Thursday Feeling

I was never a girlie little girl, not one for dolls or that nonsense. My sister, Kathryn made up for the both of us on that score, being the proud owner of the COMPLETE Sindy range, including an ex-display Southfork-sized Sindy house which still takes up one of my Dad's attic rooms. There's probably a sweet tableau being played out there to this day between any ( or all) of Kathryn's 6 Sindy dolls and an Action Man that I'd often sneak in to titivate things up a bit.

I was a very young subscriber to Twinkle magazine though. Twinkle was a children's comic which came out in the 70s. It always had a cut-out doll on the back page which you could dress with little outfits held on by fold-down tabs. Kathryn would carefully cut hers out and paste them onto cardboard covered in sticky-back plastic (yes! we were the envy of all our friends having our very own roll of the much-coveted stuff) whilst I would invariably try to tear them out and end up crying as the whole lot was thrown away.

I soon grew out of Twinkle, or maybe Mum thought it would be less traumatic for Kathryn, who to this day is very neat and arty-crafty, and progressed to a brand new girls' magazine, which I think was called something like " My Girl". I remember the very first issue came with a free lipstick and I thought it was the coolest most grown-up thing I had ever owned.

By early teens, the ONLY thing to be seen reading was Jackie, and later, Just17. They always arrived just before I had to leave to catch the school bus and I'd spend all day eagerly awaiting the time when I could run all the way down Tee Lane, just in time to watch the Colgate Blue Minty Gel commercial which was always shown at 3.50pm, you remember the one to the Baggy Trousers tune, and then spend the rest of the evening reading the problem page, checking my zits, and lusting after the boys in the Blue Minty Gel advert photo stories.

I also had a subscription to Smash Hits magazine for a time, although I think this must have been at Junior School. I can't imagine I'd have been very popular at our Comp if I'd regularly herded up a bunch of kids and instructed them to sign the lyrics from the latest Kajagoogoo song, in the round!

All of these magazines came out on a Thursday. It has always been my favourite day of the week, purely because of this.

Tonight my current subscription magazine arrived at the same time as the RSPB quarterly issue. So I've got a double helping of Thursday Feeling. And it's still only Wednesday.