Readers have been sharing memories, jokes and unexpected encounters, from schoolroom German phrases and football banter to a childhood meeting with the Bee Gees in suburban Sydney.
Lisa Clarke of Watsons Bay said she was “still waiting to use my high school German” phrase: “Football? No. Lemonade? Yes.” She added that she would “much prefer the football”.
Ned Snow of Lilyfield said his own remaining German was less useful. “About all that remains of my time in German class at school is ‘Ich kann meine Gummishuhe nicht finden’ – ‘I can’t find my overshoes’,” he wrote. “I have to admit it hasn’t been very useful over the many years since.”
Marita Lennon of Enfield recalled a Christmas Eve in the 1960s, when she was eight and sitting in the back of her family’s Holden in a quiet Strathfield street.
While her mother and aunt talked in the front, Lennon saw the Bee Gees appear with another performer from Bandstand. The group stopped, sang a long note in harmony, walked up the steps of a terrace and rang the doorbell.
“Their mum (I assumed) answered the door in her apron and they entered,” Lennon said. The screen door remained closed as they began singing Silent Night. “My heart soared. Best concert of my life. Superb. It had to be because it stopped my mother chatting mid-sentence.”
Genevieve Frederiksen of Roseville had a separate musical memory involving Andy Gibb, who performed at lunchtime at Santa Sabina College in Strathfield.
“I remember the principal standing at the back with her fingers in her ears,” she wrote. When the bell rang, the principal began filing pupils out row by row, although Gibb was still singing. Frederiksen instead ran backstage to seek his autograph because she thought he would become famous like his brothers.
There was also a darker entry from Vicky Marquis of North Sydney, who recounted a friend’s decision to have “DNR” tattooed on each arm.
John Weir of Bigga offered his own joke about whale migration, asking whether “Pauline and her confrères” would stop it. “They have no respect for either borders or visas,” he wrote.
