When I was a child, my Grandma let me stay up past my normal bedtime when she baby-sat me one night. I saw an episode of THE AVENGERS, and fell in love with EMMA PEEL. 
I was absolutely fascinated by this pretty lady, clad in catsuits and leather, who bashed the bone-marrow out of all the bad-guys. I had never seen anybody like her before and I couldn’t take my eyes off her when she was on-screen. Emma Peel was my first ever crush, many years before I was old enough to have any idea of what a crush even was.
Supposedly, I made a huge fuss on subsequent nights when my standard bedtime was enforced and I wasn’t allowed to see Mrs Peel kicking arse any more. Grandma tried to make amends by helping me write a letter, asking Emma to put her TV show on earlier, before my bedtime. I doubt very much that the letter was ever sent… but a few years later I was old enough to stay up late and watch the re-runs, anyway.
I recently bought some DVDs of this 1960s TV series, starring Patrick Macnee and Diana Rigg. It is a snap-shot of that time when everything coming out of Britain was automatically seen as being cool. The Avengers still plays well today, if partly undermined by other shows that have come along since, including many that THIS show inspired in the first place.
The martial arts fights that I had remembered as being so exciting, when I was a child, are hopelessly naff by today’s standards. We are now accustomed to seeing well choreographed action, and women in fight sequences aren’t a novelty any more, either; television has a different battle-babe for each night of the week. That wasn’t the case when Emma Peel hit the screen for the first time; she was a revolutionary character.
Though her “Karate Chop” style of fighting may look cheesy to some modern viewers, the character herself is every bit as charming as had I remembered. Even 40 years after Emma Peel first appeared on TV, there aren’t many characters to match her easy confidence, strength, book smarts, wry humour and sense of style.
The playfully platonic relationship between Emma Peel and John Steed holds up particularly well. It is still unusual, even today, for a man and a woman to have a long running screen partnership that doesn’t inevitably end in a romantic entanglement.
I should also mention that Emma Peel, as played by the incomparable Diana Rigg, is every bit as beautiful as I had remembered her, maybe even moreso.
Recently there were ELEPHANTS IN THE NEWS book launches in both hemispheres, North and South. Dad launched the Elephant book (plus 
Even though I was running the table solo, I was far from lonely. At one point on Saturday a fellow, who I had never even laid eyes on before, came up to my table earnestly chewing away at a bowl of candy. After a pause, to swallow whatever tasty treat was in the bowl, he demanded a FREE HUG. When I told him that there may be someplace at APE where he could get himself a hug, but my table certainly wasn’t the place, he went away, with a confused look on his face, still chewing on his candy. A few minutes later he gave ME something to chew on when he returned holding the official APE handbook, opened to the Exhibitors page, and pointed to the listing for our table. It said “Abismo/Nerve Bomb, events: FREE HUGS. NO PURCHASE NECESSARY.” Well, this was news to me as I had not filled out the paperwork myself for this particular convention. Rhode and I take turns on that… and this year it was HIS turn. 
Without a table-partner, I had to be strategic with my breaks and I didn’t have the chance to walk around and do any shopping. Thankfully, some great books were brought right to me as I sat there. 
Blair Kitchen hooked me up with the first two issues of his hilarious goofy-hero comic, 
Drive-In theatres are fondly remembered for providing teenagers with both a cover story (a trip to the movies) and a relatively private place (a car) for their furtive, mutual anatomical research. But they were also frequented by families with small children. Before the ages of video and DVD, a drive-in theatre was where parents could see movies without having to feel self-conscious about their bawling kids. No need for a baby sitter for the tiny ones, just bring them along. Sealed off in your (more or less) soundproof bubble you weren’t likely to bother the other patrons, who were probably families themselves, or teenagers who had more pressing things (ie; the pressing of “things”) on their minds. But you could easily bother each other, cooped up in there during a double bill of “Blue-Beard’s Ghost” and “Herbie the Love Bug”. With all the bickering and crying and spilled drinks and whatnot there was often as much tragedy and comedy and drama in the car, as on the screen.
Like a lot of children, the death of BAMBI’s Mother affected me very deeply and I’m absolutely sure that I added my own blubbering to the general commotion within our car at that point. Parents sometimes like to shield their kids from such raw emotions, but this moment of tragedy is a big part of one of my most powerful early-childhood memories. And it wasn’t over yet, BAMBI was about to affect me in perhaps an even more powerful way; it was while at the drive-in watching “Bambi” that I realised that this film was somehow different to other movies… IT WAS DRAWINGS… Moving and talking and seeming to be alive… and then seeming to be killed… drawings making me feel both happy, and then sad. The tears of anguish were barely even dry on my face before I started to wonder how this could be so…. What kind of magic was this? I could not grasp how it was possible for these drawings to be alive. It was a singular moment; I was both pulled into and popped out of, the movie at the same time. 
Behind our car at the back of the drive-in, in the same building as the snack bar, there was a tiny window allowing patrons to peek into the projection booth. In an attempt to convey the truth of the animation process to me, my Dad lifted me up high enough that I could see in. I watched a big machine spool out a long shiny ribbon that passed through a ray of light, sending a flickering beam out through the main window and onto the huge screen, in front of which our family car was parked, under the night sky. I was told that there were thousands of hand drawn little pictures on that strip of film and through some process as yet beyond my ability to comprehend, they looked alive when put through the projector and light went through them. 
that I realised that families with less than 4 kids even existed. A feature of huge families is that the oldest child of parents who are themselves oldest children, and started their own parenting young (as was the case with both my parents) may have an Aunt or Uncle who is only a few years older. I have one of each; my Aunty Mary (only four years older than me) on my Mother’s side, and my Uncle John (five years older than me) on my Father’s side. Because of the minimal age difference between us they often felt like my older siblings more than anything else, and some of my earliest memories of playing with other kids were of playing with my Aunt and Uncle. 
One day, while playing in the front yard of our house, I hit upon the splendid notion that it would be very interesting to see how far it was possible to run with my eyes closed. This was at around the age that “running” was a new and wonderful super power that had only been recently discovered (between two and three years old, I’m thinking). I wanted to see what the new limits were, you understand. Realising immediately that our garden was not big enough to do the experiment justice, I went out the front gate and, closing my eyes, ran as fast as I could down the pavement that paralleled our street. Thankfully, rather than running out into the road and being hit by a passing car, I instead ran full tilt into a concrete telegraph pole, copping a fearsome smack to the forehead from a big rusty metal bolt that was embedded in its surface.
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