GROWING UP ON A SOUTH-EAST LONDON council estate might seem like a bit of an urban nightmare to some readers of this blog. But it really wasn't. The Milne Estate in Woolwich was quite genteel in comparison to the kind of sink-hole estates depicted in today's television shows and movies. For example, vandalism just didn't happen. We kids were all all too afraid that our families might be evicted if we committed such a senseless and selfish act. Besides, if any of us had been spotted daubing graffiti and our parents (or parent) got to hear of it, we'd be battered to within an inch of our lives. Growing up on a council estate, we had no sense of hardship - quite the opposite. It was a community. We lived in the top left flat, 30b. The up side was that we all had loads of mates to play with. The area itself was a wonderland for any child because Woolwich had suffered major damage during the war as the Nazis tried to bomb the Arsenal to rubble and, of course, there was a l
BACK IN LATE 1965 , while my reading interests were firmly focussed on Stan Lee's burgeoning Marvel Comics line, there were other distractions for a typical eleven-year-old like myself. The prevailing cultural phenomenon on both sides of the Atlantic was the spy craze, kickstarted primarily by the movie adaptations of Ian Fleming's James Bond books, which began in 1963 with Dr No . The first Bond movie I saw was Goldfinger , released in September 1964 in the UK. This movie introduced several concepts that would go on to be genre staples - the cool sports car with in-built ordnance, the laser death-ray and the exotic murder techniques, like death by hat and execution by paint. The iconic poster for Goldfinger . Inset: Bond discovers the body of Jill Masterson, while Oddjob prepares for some millinery mayhem. It really didn't matter that these plot devices were absurd, because when you're 11, you don't care about stuff like that. It turns out that covering someone in