July duly descends and we enter the second half of the year with gusto, or a grimace, depending on how well you are coping with the heatwave. Yesterday was a humid, muggy day, too hot to handle. But what am I doing talking about the weather when there is so much else to cogitate? So we mark the passing of the first six months of 2009 and welcome the sextet which stands before us. As apparently has been the custom in many years past. For the first day of July seems to be a day for new beginnings: Way back in 1916 the Coca-Cola company introduced the coke formula that is still used today. Makes you want to start singing, “I’d like to buy the world a coke...” That said, some may recall that on April 23, 1985, Coca-Cola, amid much publicity, attempted to change the formula of the drink with "New Coke". Follow-up taste tests revealed that most consumers preferred the taste of New Coke to both Coke and Pepsi, but Coca-Cola management was unprepared for the public's nostalgia for the old drink, leading to a massive backlash and the company gave in to protests and returned to the old formula under the name Coca-Cola Classic on July 10, 1985. Coke is also widely credited with creating the contemporary imagery of Santa Claus, but I guess that thoughts of Christmas need to be locked firmly away for a few months yet.

1 July 1937 is also a date of note as on that day Britain started using the 999 emergency phone number. In the UK you can also use the pan-European version, 112. So why 999? Well, this was mainly because of the design of public coin-operated phone boxes, which already allowed you to dial 0 without inserting any money (0 for operator services). It was relatively easy to convert these boxes to also allow the preceding digit, 9, to be dialled for free. Also, at the time, the digits 2 – 8 were used somewhere in the UK as the first number in a subscriber’s code. I remember as a child I was shown around the telephone exchange in our home town, Newmarket. I think it was on Station Road, where it intersected the High Street. I guess this will have been somewhere round 1974. Our phone number was just Newmarket 3554, my Grandparents were 4038. The exchange was, as per any vintage film, banks of plug-boards with flashing lights and teams of operators, all women, with headphones, mics and remarkably big hair-dos. The depths of the building contained acres of clicking machinery, cogs, wheels, miles of wire; a long way from our wireless network and digital exchanges these days. I have very few nostalgic memories of Newmarket, but that is certainly one. Remind me later and I’ll tell you some others. But I must just mention the fact that I lived next door to the National Stud! (And THAT is a guaranteed route into an inferiority complex!)

Today also marks the anniversary of the introduction of the Sony Walkman. I think I had a cheap equivalent, the size of a brick, guaranteed to chew up and spit out any tape you cared to feed it, with a battery life slightly less than the average cassette album and sound quality so poor that people for yards around benefitted from better acoustics than the person wearing the headphones. I remember making mix tapes and recording the top 40 off the radio. There was an art in pressing STOP a millisecond before Jimmie Saville or whoever jumped in with “That was Black Lace sliding down the charts to number 11 with ‘Agadoo’”. I had no means to edit, beyond actually splicing the tape (and yes, I DID do that, with a razor blade and special cassette-wide sticky tape). We had none of this digital malarkey, no graphic equalisers and pitch control. You sat there with your C60 tape in your Mum’s recorder with a plastic microphone banged up against the “music system’s” speaker, watching the cog-driven counter and hoping that you’d been clever enough to zero it at the end of the tape. Stereo? Yeah right! We were pleased to get the same mono signal coming out of two speakers! I remember nearly wetting myself with joy when I bought my first cassette player that had a 5-pin DIN socket and meant that I could connect it straight into the ‘gramophone’ and record “LPs” straight to tape without the need for a mic. This was high-end, high-tech, hi-fidelity! I remember one of the first albums I bought was “The Sounds of Star Wars” by The Sonic All-Stars (Nothing to do with a blue hedgehog, I promise). I still have it in the loft!

Which brings me neatly to a quick birthday mention for Dave Prowse – in my early youth he was the Green Cross Code man, reminding children everywhere to cross the road when they saw a little man flashing. He is probably more widely seen as the chap who played [the physical] Darth Vader in the original Star Wars trilogy – see the link there? You’d almost think I planned this crap! That was back before episode IV was renamed “A New Hope” and all nine instalments of “The Journal of Whills [the Whills eventually turned into The Force]” were planned. I make the ‘physical’ distinction because Mr Prowse was indeed the man in the black mask, but his voice was never used. He was over-dubbed by James Earl Jones on account of DP having a distinct west-country accent. “Luke, you are my son, my lovely”... Attacking the rebels on an Imperial Combine Harvester whilst drinking Cider?

Happy do-dar-day to dead Di (did Di Die with Dodi?) who would have been 48 today. I could write pages about Di and the events leading up to the funeral, which I found absolutely fascinating, not least of which being the public reaction and subsequent out-pouring of imagined grief. To digress for a moment though, my best friend at the time, Malcolm, who is sadly no longer with us, was in hospital at the time of the ‘incident’, having open-heart surgery. I’ll never forget his fury when, still pumped full of morphine, he woke up after the op and heard about the deaths and plunged into a massive sulk, proclaiming, “Today was supposed to be about ME! Nobody’s talking about ME! They come into my room and they don’t ask, ‘How are you, Malcolm?’, they say, ‘Have you heard the news about Di?” I don’t think he ever forgave her for stealing his thunder. Now I like a good conspiracy story as much as the next man, in fact I’m quite enjoying all the ones surrounding Wacko Jacko at the moment. But Di did, and does, seem to offer opportunities for such questions to be asked. Let me ponder a couple of things. How was Di recognisable? Her hair and her fashion. Put her in a frumpy frock, dye her hair brown and cut it differently and she would not stand out from the crowd. Stage a tragic accident and whip her off to a remote chalet in Switzerland, with enough cash to keep her quiet and a promise that she could see her kids whenever they holidayed in the Alps. No conclusive photos of the crash. Sealed coffin. Discredited driver. The power of one of the richest families alive. Just a thought. And my second consideration is that of the parentage of young Harry. James Hewitt? You tell me!

My final thought for the day, as I wilt in the heat (I was going to say ‘melt’ but will restrain myself in deference to 20% of the Jackson 5, who must, by now, be looking decidedly waxy) is that on this day in 1997 we returned Hong Kong to China. Britain gained control of Hong Kong at the end of the First Opium War in 1841 – gotta love those opiates! Actually, when I was ill in hospital, morphine did nothing for me. The nurses kept saying things like, “we’ll give you a double-dose and you’ll be asleep in seconds” and I just lay there for hours waiting to feel any benefit at all! So Hong Kong is no longer a British colony. How’s that for a Chinese Take Away?