That was the day done and I still had my George Bernard Shaw assignment to finish for English. I had arrived at the school a few weeks into the term, days after the assignment had been handed out and the library’s stocks of Shaw plays raided. I was used to school assignments focusing on a set play or book, but this one was free choice. I’d heard of Shaw, but any play of his I’d heard of was already gone. I was left with a book of one-act pieces and went with the first of them, Great Catherine: Whom Glory Still Adores.

‘Give an account of your selection of play’ was the first direction on the assignment sheet.

Every day we went into central London our snot ended up black. With my third attempt at justifying my play choice stalled, I blew my nose and it had happened again, all that foul exhaust piped out of cars and trucks and buses, hazing the streets, making my throat dry and rough, my nose burn. I had never thought that air could do that, not air that people lived in. Chose to live in.

I turned the record over. Music didn’t make the Shaw assignment any easier, but it was still music. The B side of Nightflight to Venus had finished with a cover of Neil Young’s ‘Heart of Gold’, the A side opened with the title track and ‘Rasputin’. Boney M’s new single, the medley ‘Mary’s Boy Child/Oh My Lord’, wasn’t on the album, which was fine. It was being played all over the place.

I had Love for Sale too, brought from home. My two Boney M albums were together on the K-Tel Record Selector at one end of my desk, with Love for Sale at the front, though the cover was a regular distraction. It wasn’t always easy to focus on maths or science or Great Catherine with that band photo, the four members of the group all bare cinnamon skin, gold chains and, in the case of the one guy, a kind of gold foil codpiece. He was standing but the women were arrayed on the ground, arms and chains and angles obscuring the body parts that needed to be obscured. I couldn’t read a single one of their expressions, though somehow they were all different. It was arousing and disturbing at the same time – I wasn’t sure which it was meant to be. Maybe both.

When they saw that cover, my parents had to listen to the whole record before I was allowed to keep it. I told them the cover was art, and that they didn’t understand.