Ken Hoffmann Being Different No 3 or Tall Tales No 1-the latter methinks!

This post is sparked by a Ruth Blades tweet.

I told many of the kids at The Stair that my father Ken Hoffmann could fly! When they asked how, I said that he had brought a magic carpet back from India from one of his sailing adventures with the Ben Line and got his mother, Nana Hoffmann, to turn it into a pair of shorts. When they asked me to prove it I said he was out for a flight (!) just now, but could I show them a photo instead?

Ken Hoffmann 'flying'!

I showed them the photograph but of course had to keep my thumb over the diving board.. He regularly used to dive off the bridge of ships and before you ask, yes I think he was sober! The additional photograph below gives an idea of the height! When Will and Tom were young, whenever we crossed a bridge they would always ask me 'would Grandpa Hoffmann (who they never met) have dived off this bridge?'

Ken Hoffmann on far right.

Postscript: I'm discovering, like novelists that despite the author's best efforts to paint the characters in a certain way that they end up taking on a life of their own-Ken's coming across as too much of a character!

The Pensieve, The Wrecking Ball and Hunting Christ

Unlike Dumbledore, who had the particularly useful tool of the Pensieve, which allows him to siphon off memories and examine them at leisure, each previous resident carries around their own memories of The Stair. Some are particularly strong ones while others are more ephemeral and ebb and flow. One of the benefits of producing this blog is that it records a way of life, in a written and pictorial format, before it vanishes for ever. It's too easy to assume that these shared memories will always be there and yet nothing's permanent. A significant feature that's gone is Hunter’s Tryst School which no longer exists.

Hunters Tryst School (Mick Travis March 2008)

The school was combined with another local school, Comiston and named Pentland Primary School. When I discovered the building was also being knocked down a few years ago it gave me quite a shock. It must have been there for over half a century-fifty years times tens of thousands of individual memories, before facing the wrecking ball. The school had been an integral part of the day to day life of the community. 

Almost as tragic is that the school name, Hunters Tryst no longer exists-such a lovely name for a school. Tryst was never properly pronounced i.e. ending in the sound '...ist' This created some problems for me. When I was very young and in P1, my Nana Hoffmann from Stockbridge asked me the name of the school I was now attending? Pleased with myself, I rather proudly replied, ‘’Hunting Christ!''

The Oxgangs Diet

I'm thinking of promoting the Oxgangs Diet-the ultimate answer to those seeking to lose weight. Fifty years on it’s only just dawned on me how relatively sparsely we ate, but probably relatively healthily.

When we were quite young, each day and each week hardly varied, unless with the season-breakfast was corn flakes, sugar and milk (hot milk in winter) served up with a mug of sweet tea (from a pre-school age)-sometimes we varied the cereal with a slice of toast; my children didn’t have tea until they were well into secondary school! 

Lunch was either school lunches (free if my father was out of work) or a visit home where we were served up, in a small Buchan’s Pottery bowl, stovies or stew and potatoes (sometimes Irish stew), or mince and potatoes or tripe. 

At tea-time, this time on a small Buchan’s Pottery plate, we enjoyed a slice of toast with Stork margarine and a small helping of either scrambled eggs, tinned Heinz spaghetti or beans, all washed down with a single mug of sweet tea. 

Out-with these meals there were no extras or nibbles-in later years a treat was a small cheap two shillings pack of custard creams bought at the Store (St Cuthbert's Cooperative, Oxgangs Road North) on a late Friday afternoon and finished before evening came. I suspect the average calories consumed each day could only have been around 1200 to 1500 absolute maximum.

I was an energetic kid and it didn't seem to hold me back. Each of us (Anne, Iain and I) could be described as being slightly below average in height-I was 1.78 (5'10") until I lost my hair a few years back and old age crept up on me-however compared to my two young sons who are six feet and six feet one, the boys regularly remind me I’m the smallest male in the household.

The only tweaks to this were on a Sunday when we visited our grandparents at Durham Road, Portobello-much more of this in a later blog; also for periods of time my father's mother, known to us as Nana Hoffmann visited us on a Wednesday afternoon and brought fish along. Also from her work as a housekeeper or at a school there would be a coffee cake which we hated and biscuits, which out-with the Empire biscuit were inedible too.

I'm unsure what other families served up-Mrs Hanlon served up a treat for her four boys Michael, Boo-Boo, Colin and Alan of treacle pieces-if I were in the vicinity she very kindly gave me a piece too, but I could never manage to eat it and used to slip it down the chute when no-one was looking!

Chute provided  on each landing for rubbish to descend to large wheeled bin (Peter Hoffmann)