A musician colleague and I email each other frequently about pieces we are working on and we sometimes amuse ourselves by breaking the rules, to (we hope) comic effect.

Sometimes we follow the Spooner tradition of switching the first part of two words. Instead of writing ‘the tricky bit in the last line’ we would write 'the bricky tit', etc.. We invent words. We spell them phonetically and break them up, as in ‘Idaho pew-end joy jorolody’. (Have a go at that one.)

He once sent me a very long sentence written backwards. The sentence was a straightforward question to which he needed an answer. My answer was No, so, to follow his lead, I replied ‘On.’ He said it took him eighteen hours to work that one out.

Ever realised how powerful short words can be? Try to imagine Tony Blair sounding convincing if he did not plant the little words ‘I mean’ and ‘you know’ at exactly the right points. They give his propositions the confiding, the intimate sound. And the casual listener feels that here is a chap who, I mean, you know, really understands.

And sometimes you can achieve wonders without using words at all.

I was in a bus. We needed to turn left from the stem of a ‘T’ but couldn’t because another bus wanted to turn right into the road from which we were trying to emerge. The junction was tight and both roads were narrow, all three packed with stationery traffic piled up close behind. It was deadlock. And yet both bus drivers simply moved their hands at each other in various ways so that within a couple of minutes everyone was on their way with not a single word spoken. Well, perhaps just one. It was said by our own driver. It was very short and probably afforded him some relief.

Young children’s words sometimes confuse. Take the child who asked his mother for a bedtime story. She went downstairs, chose an attractive children’s book about Australia and took it up to him.

He pulled a face.

‘Mum,’ he said, ‘What did you bring that book to read from about down under up for?’

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Text and illustration ©Paul Wigmore 2010

I plan to end this blog in November. If anyone has any suggestions about material for a further series, please do email me. (Click on CONTACT, home page.)  I should be more than pleased to consider them.

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In the mid-1950s I was newly-married. We had just arrived at our new house and I was starting to battle with the novel experience of creating a garden.

It had been a paddock, with much of the original cobbled stone yard still visible above the soil. All of this, of course, had to be routed out before any thought of planting began.

Slogging with pickaxe and spade on my first free Saturday afternoon I heard a slight cough and mellow Surrey voice behind me.

‘Er - g'd afternoon!’ The voice sounded tentative, as though afraid to intrude. I looked round. The paddock had a very desirable old redbrick wall running along one edge and above this had appeared a man in shirtsleeves and battered hat. He was holding out a basket piled with apples. He was obviously our neighbour’s gardener.

'Oh! Good afternoon!' I wiped my brow. I was glad of the break.

‘Like some apples?’ he said.

‘Well, thanks very much,’ I replied, and added, ‘Very kind of you. I suppose it’s OK with your boss?’

He regarded me kindly. ‘Oh, yes, he said. ‘I am the boss.’

He was not the gardener. He was our neighbour.

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Text and illustration ©Paul Wigmore 2010

I plan to end this blog in November. If anyone has any suggestions about material for a further series, please do email me. (Click on CONTACT, home page.)  I should be more than pleased to consider them.

I detested him. He was five years younger than me. When you’re twelve, all younger boys are squirts.

My parents and his were close friends and during the occasional visit by one family to the other I was expected to play with him. Actually play with him. A complete squirt. I could barely look at him.

It was our turn to visit them. On the half-hour Green Line bus journey to Streatham I would plan ways of avoiding him.

We arrived, and he began. He raced out to their garden yelling for me to follow him because he wanted to show me something. It turned out to be his new trike. He got on it and pedalled furiously round and round the lawn, making silly faces and sillier noises. He then jumped off and began being an aeroplane and when he tired of that he started doing his head-over-heels routine. I expect I just stood there, caught between the Scylla of boring adults and the Charybdis of this undersize monster. I followed my usual tactic of being as unpleasant as the situation permitted.

The invitation was for the usual high tea. During the meal his voice was practically continuous and his helpings of cake and jelly and blancmange were masticated loudly as he tried to tell jokes while eating.

After tea he begged me to go up to his room to play with his electric train set. I trailed after him and probably made uh-huh noises as he showed me what it would do. After this he said he knew a practical joke and would I help him. It turned out to be a case of me going downstairs again and waiting outside the front door while he lowered black thread for me to attach to the door-knocker and go upstairs again. From his window he then made the brass knocker do its thing. Eventually the door was opened, closed again and his father called wearily from the hallway not to do that again, please.

The time came to leave. They walked to the bus stop with us.

The boy danced all the way, running round and poking me. At the bus stop he did his aeroplane act until the bus arrived. As it drew up the adults made their farewells.

But the boy did something extraordinary. He leaped up at me, wrapped his legs round my waist, pushed his mouth very hard against mine until our teeth clashed and gave me one long, wet kiss.

On the bus I sat in a state of shock, revulsion, fury, bewilderment and disbelief. It lasted for weeks.

The next time we met was some forty years later over lunch in a Guildford restaurant. Cruelly, I reminded him of the event. He raised an eyebrow, smiled wanly and said he had no recollection of it.

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Text and illustration ©Paul Wigmore 2010

The other young copywriters around me were of the same mind as me and late Friday afternoons were seen as the legitimate time to loosen ties and have fun.

One of them, a lovely man who knew how to build amplifiers - and did so for me once - came out of the darkroom next to the office carrying a stuffed pigeon. It was a prop for some recent publication that had not yet been taken back to the studios.

‘How about,’ he said, ‘sticking this up on that pipe?’ He pointed up at the hefty bit of pipework that ran along one wall, close to the ceiling. ‘And then ringing Maintenance and saying we just noticed it and we can’t get hold of it. Then just sit back and watch the fun. Yes?’

Five minutes later we sat looking in awe at the smallest and most athletic one climb onto a small table and up onto a chair just small enough to stand on the table. Slowly he attached the bird with tape and adjusted it to a most lifelike attitude. He then found he couldn’t summon the courage to climb down again but, with some help, he did.

The instigator rang Maintenance. ‘We’ve just noticed - up on the ceiling - on a pipe, there’s a pigeon. Can you do something?’ They said they’d be round in a few minutes.

Two of them turned up, preceded by one end of a ladder. The younger of the two, a mere boy, appeared to be an apprentice. The older one, heavily moustached, looked up at the pigeon and rubbed his chin.

‘Ah, yes,’ he murmured to the boy. ‘We’ve had a lot of this sort of thing.’ Very slowly they positioned the ladder against the pipe and a couple of feet from the bird.

‘You hold the ladder. Now, see, we do it like this.’ He went on, half whispering, ‘We go very, very slowly like this so that. . .’ and he began gingerly to climb, his voice fading as he concentrated on the target, getting closer and starting move his left arm outwards.

We sat with hands clamped over mouths and not daring to catch anyone’s eye. He stopped, and his left arm moved closer and closer to the bird. Then he pounced.

For how long he stood there gazing at the cold lump of feathers in his clasp I don’t know. Eventually, he turned and looked down at us and gave us his opinion.

‘It’s stuffed!’ he said.

Fortunately, the boy produced such an explosive snort of laughter that it smothered our own and we began expressing to each other our disbelief at the lengths some people will go to for a laugh.

I am grateful for many things and I've just discovered one that I'd never thought of before: my surname is not Willys.

Whether or not John Willys (1873-1935) liked his family name I don’t know. It doesn’t matter; the Willys Jeep appeared in 1941 and was a blessing to military units anywhere and everywhere.

Find the steepest hard-baked field you can, have it scattered with crevasses and just go. The Jeep could carry a quarter-ton over this sort of terrain with ease. Of course, things could go wrong. Not many, but when something as reliable as a Jeep goes wrong it does take you by surprise.

I was in India, between jobs and making myself useful as Driver.

‘Get this lot over to Armoury,’ said the Flight Sergeant, pointing to a stack of crates. ‘Take the Jeep.’

And so I met the Jeep. It was 1944. The terrain from Transport to Armoury was virtual wasteland. Well-baked wasteland. I loaded, got in, checked the feel of the gears and clutch, found the ignition, started up and went. It was great. I got the feel of it and I began to like it. My bottom and the seat parted company frequently.

And then it happened.

I felt the gas pedal leave the sole of my shoe and drop to the floor. We leaped forwards, engine screaming at full revs. I glanced down. The pedal was just lying there.

Now, you’re thinking,‘Why didn’t you just switch off, you idiot.’ But that isn’t what I was thinking. No. I am a straightforward thinker in these matters and, to me, the obvious solution was to lift the pedal and keep my toe under it. While looking ahead, I felt around for the pedal. I could feel it but I couldn’t get my fingers under it. It was flush with the metal floor.

By the time I had thought of the ignition we were quite a long way past the Armoury. I braked, we stopped. I got out, shaking, and walked back to the workshop.

A heavily-sweating Armorer was carrying an M2 Browning gun over to a bench.

I had my speech ready but as I opened my mouth it struck me that I couldn't say it. It was too silly. After all, to say ‘There’s something for you in that Jeep over there on the horizon - and can I please have a lift back to Transport?’ is just not on.

But don’t ask me what I did say because I’ve forgotten.

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Text and illustration ©Paul Wigmore 2010

I have always been keen on skies. Dawn, sunrise, storm, sunsets - anything but the flat grey panoply that’s only good for portraits.

Of all of them, sunset and sunrise are the most universally attractive to the person with a camera. But they’re also far from easy to shoot. Because of the speed with which they develop and disappear you need to be a good sprinter if you’re any distance away from the right spot to shoot from. And a good pair of lungs, a sound heart and the mental serenity of a Cistercian monk.

(And, listen: do beware of the sun. I'm convinced that it's got a grudge of some sort against all photographers. Give it half a chance and it'll do the wrong thing.)

Last week’s slight unwell-ness included an interesting change in the pulse rate and a tendency for the room to start circling round me. It reminded me of one late afternoon in Greece when the photographer asked if I would be kind enough to carry his tripods while he ran ahead up to the top of the hill from which he was about to shoot a stunning sunset. By the time I reached him he would have found the right spot.

I started up the narrow track. It was dried mud, formed by thousands of years of rain torrents and goats. The next minutes of pounding from mud gully to grassy clump at roughly the angle of your average house roof was tiring. I don’t remember much of the climb except feeling my heart coming into my throat with a sort of salty taste and knowing that death was imminent. But I do remember reaching the final rock ledge, heaving the canvas bag of tripods towards him and seeing him run at me.

He got the picture, and at dinner that night he said my red face rising slowly above the surface of the flat rock had reminded him of the picture of a Mexican sunrise he had once shot for the National Geographic.

Ever been to the Taj Mahal? Taken snaps of it? And from which side of it, the East side or the West? I think it more likely that it was from the East side. If the sun was setting it was setting behind that magnificent central dome. Right?

So to shoot the rising rather than the setting sun you will have worked out that you have to go round to the West side.

One photographer did just that for me. I was not with him. When he flew back he came to see me and show me the results.

I was stunned to see the pictures.

‘It wasn’t easy, Paul,’ he said.

‘No?’

‘No.’

‘In what way?’

‘In the way that, in order to get the sun behind the central dome, the only possible spot to stand was, um, not very pleasant.’

‘No?

‘No. I had to stand knee-high in sewage.’

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Text and illustration ©Paul Wigmore 2010

Have you seen my Recent Posts? See column on the right.

Remembering last week childhood days of gruesome clothing and swimming gear in particular, I was reminded of an incident that occurred many years later while I was a freelancing photographer.

I was commissioned to join a film crew for a few days and to write an illustrated piece about it for a magazine.

On location, I found the very young and gauche Second Assistant Camera trying very hard indeed to behave like a veteran. This was quite obviously for the particular benefit of the girl playing the part of a student model. It was comical to watch him hovering near her whenever he found an excuse to do so.

However, there was something he did not know: although the director had auditioned for a teenage girl the eventual girl, who appeared to be a shy seventeen from drama school with her innocent, wide-set eyes, was in fact an extensively-practised 22-year-old. She was a very busy model girl.

We were all turning in for an early night in preparation for an early start the next morning. I was in my room sorting my baggage. The door was still ajar. I caught sight of the girl as she walked past toward her room. She was followed by the young assistant. They halted at her bedroom door.

I heard her say, ‘You wanted something?’

‘No! Yes! I mean, look, love. A little word in your shell-like ear. About these scenes tomorrow. The Bikini scenes. Now, there’s something you won’t know about filming in Bikinis.’

‘Oh? Really?’

‘Yes. You see, Bikinis, in your actual camera, well, they show a bit more. . . you know what I mean? Yes? Mm? So, what you’ll have to do tonight is to, um, remove the, um.’

‘Oh! Really? I see,’ she said.’ Well, I think you’d better show me, don’t you?’ and I heard her door gently opened, and then closed.

He still looked surprised at breakfast.

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Text and illustration ©Paul Wigmore 2010

Some boys stopped doing it when they grew up. The rest of us carried on. The occupation? Practical jokes. Like making apple-pie beds for your enemies.

The apple-pie bed became impossible with the arrival of the duvet. It thrived in the years when beds were a matter of an undersheet, a top sheet and a couple of blankets. And possibly an eiderdown. If you're under 40 it'll be news to you.

What you did was as follows: while your victim was out of the way you went to his or her bed, stripped it, folded the bottom-end of the undersheet backwards to the pillow end. This turned the bed into a small bag.

When your victim approached their bed, weary and ready to flake out, it looked like a very innocent bed and if you were listening closely behind the door you would hear a very satisfactory thunk! as their feet hit the bottom of the bag and then a great deal of cursing as he or she started stripping the bed and remaking it.

But it was risky. Playing the joke on delicate aunts could get you anything from a quick whack on the bottom to a week’s foreclosure on sweets.

Nowadays we have the duvet. The duvet possesses its own sense of humour and needs no help from practical jokers, old or young. It slides off in the middle of the night. It swivels round so that it is resting across you instead of along you. If you hang on too tightly when you turn over you end up like the sausage inside the sausage roll. Most comical.

The big joke on boys at the beach were those horrible bathing costumes. The beach holiday in the 30s and 40s was wonderful but, on reflection, we boys did suffer ignominy. Sensible swimming trunks did not exist. Not even the sloppy shorts of today, which are quite bad enough. We of the 1940s had to climb into something that completely covered the chest, the back and the legs down to the knees. It hung there by means of shoulder-straps. Some were made of wool. Yes, wool. I knew mothers who actually hand-knitted them for their darling sons. Their daughters, too.

Imagine coming out of the water on a chilly day and having to run up the beach to mum and dad with an icy cold, heavy and sodden woollen sack hanging and slapping against your body. Older boys were frequently made to wear the variety that incorporated a ‘modesty skirt’. This was simply a separate flat panel that stretched across from the front of one thigh to the other; its purpose was to hide the terrifying fact that you were a male of the species.

I recently found an old black-and-white snapshot of me, aged about fourteen, wearing one of these.

I promise you, it no longer exists.

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Text and illustration ©Paul Wigmore 2010

At the age of six or thereabout I happened to see my father handing over his wages to my mother and for the first time I saw real life. He drove London Underground trains not because he liked driving trains but in order to keep us alive.

Any remark or picture remotely connected with sex or the related regions of the body was out of bounds at home. All was unexplained and came only in scrappy hints and unreliable guesses of school chums. Ignorance of how it all worked caused bewilderment and embarrassment. My single most shattering revelation as a young child is now reduced to a comic memory. It comes later.

There were so many little hints. In the quick scanning of my older brother’s magazine, tucked not quite carefully enough under his mattress, I discovered what a woman’s body looked like.

The ultimate signal that adolescence had arrived came to me as a shock. For weeks afterwards I thought I was suffering from some unspeakable disease. In the local Public Library one day I discovered a book that gave me the facts. Quite possibly I ran out of the place crying Yippee.

School ended at fourteen and, like all other 14-year-olds, I was allowed to wear long trousers. Knee-length shorts were thrown away.

I became an apprenticed mechanical engineer. A curiously satisfying incident gave me my first actual feeling of becoming adult. I cycled home at the end of my first week with the engineering company, walked into the kitchen and handed my mother my first earnings.

There. I was now a man. I was doing exactly what my father did. I was helping to feed us all.

A real girlfriend materialised. Girls had already intrigued me while I was at school; organised events like the annual Hertfordshire Schools Singing Championship meant that we occasionally mingled with girls in their crisp summer uniform of pleated skirts and pastel shirts and ties, their shirtfronts in many cases curiously and pleasingly urged outwards in a way that stirred me deeply; it was delightful.

Then I came to know and actually to speak to girls, and excitement grew. But the tightrope-walking experience of having an actual, a real and publicly-recognised girlfriend, was, I suppose, the ultimate declaration of adulthood. It came when I was just into my twenties. I had little idea of how one should behave beyond being nice. Polite, generous and nice. But, yes, I really was a man at last. I knew all there was to know about life. Oh, yes.

I suppose I felt much the same one morning at the age of nine. I had been taken by two girls, one a year older than I, the other a year younger, down to the little fishing-port beach in Cornwall early one holiday morning. They had told me, with immense excitement, that they wanted to show me something. I wondered about this. Lobsters? Buried treasure behind the rocks?

Their parents and my own were probably still asleep. We had their blanket permission to run around the village and beach in the mornings, so this was all aboveboard.

They led me round the beach into a very small cave, our cave; barely a cave, in fact, more a dent in the cliff face. But it was our cave.

They told me to sit down and watch. I watched, dazed, as they peed in unison into the sand. When their little demonstration was over I wanted to shout for delight. The thing that had puzzled me for ages about girls was explained at last. I knew how girls do it! I knew! I knew! I could tell the boys!

I was ready for my breakfast.

They were not. ‘Wait!’ said the older girl, tidying her dress and sitting down beside her sister. ‘Now, show us how boys do it.'

Mercifully, the rest is a blank.

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Text and illustration ©Paul Wigmore 2010