Ooh what a night, late November 1968...

It's been a bit of a week, with our boiler giving up on heating water and consequently having to bathe kids and a grumpy spouse via bucket chains from kettles and saucepans in the kitchen at the other end of the house.

It wouldn't have been so bad if I hadn't burnt out the shower trying to fill the bath from it last weekend.

Could be far worse, though - the heating could have packed up as well. I didn't live anywhere with central heating until I was in my thirties, and now seem to have turned into a great big southern softie.

It really does become very easy to take for granted things which one used to live happily without.

For years I lived without either a fridge or a television. I've resisted the coming of each new white box into the house, but always relent in the end, except for answerphones, which - if not the work of Satan - only seem to exist to further increase slavery to communication.

When these records were released, I think that our family owned a fridge, a cooker, a radiogram (record player and a vast valve radio which didn't pick up anything much despite having a great big ugly aerial in the form of a long trailing pink plastic ribbon hanging out the back and rising up through the room on the next floor, ending up in the roof) and a black-and-white television.

We used to have to switch the TV on about five minutes before the half-hour of kids programmes in the morning, or the half-hour of kids programmes in the late afternoon started, so that it could 'warm up'. Likewise with the radio. I used to switch it on in the evening and turn off the main light, playing records by the green and orange glow of the great machine.

Our smallest took my solar-powered/wind-up radio a couple of weeks ago and put it in the bath to see if it would float.

It didn't, and neither would it work again afterwards. That's his Christmas present sorted out, then.

It almost made me wish for the days when it would have taken several large blokes to move a radio a few inches to the left or right, and you would have needed to dismantle the aerial and unplug speakers (themselves the size of small wardrobes) beforehand.

Our aforementioned two-year-old is quite capable of turning on computers, and is also adept at finding the button which makes parents (and our local librarians) shout when he presses it and switches them off, losing any unsaved information in the process. I was thirteen when pocket calculators first reached the shops, and my first pocket calculator was the size of a small box of chocolates, and certainly wouldn't have gone into any pocket I had ever possessed.

From those simpler times - when electrical items were almost always solidly encased in big heavy wooden boxes - for your listening amusement, is the third and final batch of hits from the UK top 40 of November 1968.

I'm struggling to track down some of the hits of December, but if I can find most of them I'll cobble together another compilation next month.

Part Three, tiddly-dee

Aphrodite's Child - Rain and Tears
Billie Davis - I Want You To Be My Baby
Betty Everett - It's In His Kiss
Johnny Nash - Hold Me Tight
Marmalade - Wait For Me Marianne
Diana Ross & The Supremes - Love Child
Foundations - Build Me Up Buttercup
Cream - Sunshine Of Your Love
Cliff Richard - Marianne
Gun - Race With The Devil
William Bell & Judy Clay - Private Number
The Band - The Weight
Cupids' Inspiration - My World
Four Tops - Yesterday's Dreams
Tom Jones - Help Yourself
Kassenatz Katz - Quick Joey Small

Part the Third - (removed by Rapidshare, others are still active though).

If you missed the others and can't face scrolling down to look for them, here they are.

Part The First

Part The Second

Part the Two-th, November 1968

Here's the second batch, thirteen more from November 1968. The first batch are below, just scroll down a bit, the third part will be along in a few days.

Tracks are:

Long John Baldry - Mexico
The Hollies - Listen To Me
The Tremeloes - My Little Lady
Jeannie C Riley - Harper Valley PTA
Marvin Gaye & Tammi Terrell - You're All I Need To Get By
The Scaffold - Lily The Pink
Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick and Tich - Wreck of the Antoinette
Love Affair - A Day Without Love
Locomotive - Rudi's In Love
Mason Williams - Classical Gas
Lulu - I'm A Tiger
Dave Clark Five - Red Balloon
Gary Puckett and the Union Gap - Lady Willpower

Weeeee'llllllll drink a drink a drink....

Tonight Matthew I'm going to be a Tiger...

I've spent a great deal of time this week trying to get computers to function properly. Anyone running Zone Alarm 8 and wondering why their PC is running like Steptoe and Son's carthorse would be well advised to uninstall it and go back to version 7 - your 'puter will probably start to function as you'd expect it to again.

Friday was Children in Need day in the UK - when the BBC is given over to celebs trying to get folk to part with their money in aid of a very good cause - helping poor kids around the world get a better life.

I don't have a problem with Children in Need, I don't have a problem with the cause, and I certainly don't have a problem with raising money for it.

What I do have a problem with is the guilt trip that goes with it. And all the other "dress up/dress down" fridays given over to being 'wacky' and 'zany' in the name of helping some or other good cause.

The guys in the Call Centre along the corridor from where I work would be ostracised if they failed to pay up £2.00 for the privilege of wearing something other than they'd usually wear to work, plus extra for cakes, plus more for guessing the name of the teddy bear, plus goodness knows what else.

Having had the trip laid on us by the kids, we had already coughed up about seven quid by breakfast time, so as I walked into the building wearing my shirt and work trousers just as on any other day I was more than ready to let anyone trying to lay guilt on me know that the time had come to announce to the world that enough is enough!

As they all know that I'm a stroppy so-and-so when roused, only one did. Perhaps they saw me coming, maybe they had all seen through it this year as well.

A friend at work told me that this year her children's school had banned raising money for charity by having dress-down/wearing your clothes back-to-front/painting your head with black and white stripes and dying your hair yellow so that you look like a belisha beacon days, and there appeared in my mind a glimmer of hope that the world is finally coming to its senses, although listening to the applause afforded John Redwood on Any Questions on Radio 4 tonight I think that it has not filtered through to all levels of society just yet.

Another problem I have is that these events focus attention so firmly on already very wealthy causes to the detriment of the equally deserving but less fashionable ones.

For seven years I devoted practically all of my spare time to a particular charity - a very well-known one, but for whom dressing up in silly clothes and being overtly jolly regardless of how one actually feels about it inside would be considered grossly inappropriate.

With the coming of Children in Need, this huge national charity whom everyone in the UK will have heard of saw its revenue drop dramatically with each Wogan-driven telethon. And if this particular charity was struggling as a direct result, then I have no idea how the small, really unfashionable charities were coping.

Having got that off my chest, I saw a couple of weeks back on another blog a list of singles from the US charts from November 1968, and practically gasped with the thought of what a great time that must have been to have been musically aware. This is not as far from the point I've been making above as you might be thinking here - in the days when I listened regularly to music radio, they were always celebrating 1967 (and rightly so, in my opinion), but - just as for my generation the couple of years after punk broke everything fragmented and turned back into the disco (Blondie) and prog (The Damned) and rockabilly (The Clash) it was supposed to do away with - 1968 might as well not have happened.

Being a Brit, I've used the UK charts, but I pulled out what I considered to be the over-familiar (Hey Jude, Joe Cocker's With A Little Help From My Friends, Magic Bus) and ones which I can't stand (Jose Feliciano's Light My Fire, Val Doonican, a couple of others) and present part one of All The Hits of November 1968 (apart from Eeny Meeny by the Showstoppers, which I haven't been able to track down anywhere - and indeed, don't think I've ever heard. If you have an mp3 of it which I could use to complete the set I'd appreciate a link!)

I'm splitting it into three approximately 45 minute parts, which will go up when I get round to it. I'm considering carrying it on with new entries, but haven't really thought that one through yet. If you like the sound of that then please leave a comment, it might spur me on.

The order is loosely based on popularity in terms of chart positions at the start, middle and end of the month. I've put it in a separate post so that if the music gets deleted my inane ramblings will remain.

Hope you enjoy it!

1968 - The First Dozen

Hugo Montenegro - The Good, The Bad and The Ugly
Barry Ryan - Eloise
The Isley Brothers - This Old Heart of Mine
Jimi Hendrix - All Along The Watchtower
Mary Hopkin - Those Were The Days
The Marbles - Only One Woman
Johnny Johnson and the Bandwagon - Breaking Down The Walls of Heartache
Leapy Lee - Little Arrows
The Turtles - Elenore
The Casuals - Jesamine
Nina Simone - Ain't Got No/I Got Life
Engelbert Humperdinck - Les Bicyclettes de Belsize

here it is pop pickers!