This arrived in my letterbox today courtesy of my mom in England. I'd heard that there were facsimile copies of some old comics being given away with The Guardian last week, and asked my mom to get me whatever she could find. Although it's been fun receiving my copy of Bunty, I do feel a bit guilty about this, as The Guardian cost my mom a pound and she most definitely is not a Guardian reader. Then there was the postage to Australia on top. And for a summer special that, given I was 10 in 1972, she must have bought me before many years ago!

But if I did read it back then, I had no memory of the stories at all. Of course, The Four Marys were there, in an amusing story in which a cottage in the St Elmo's grounds has been taken over for training the girls in 'housecraft' (a splendid storyline and one which I wish I could use for Cotterford, as I'm sure Juliet and Amber could do some very illicit things in a cottage). The girls have to compete in teams of six, and it's no surprise that the Four Marys are teamed with those school snobs Mabel and Veronica, who are "utterly, utterly" appalled that they are expected to do "a charwoman's work". "It's all right for Mary Simpson, I suppose," says Mabel. "I mean, she is of the lower classes - " Mary Radleigh sticks up for Simpy by being quick to raise her fists - now I don't actually remember Raddy being like that, but she tries to punch Mabel's lights out twice in three pages in this summer special, so she must have been the fiery one - but only ends up losing ten points for her team. Mabel and Veronica do everything they can to avoid the domestic chores and also have fun sabotaging the Marys' valiant efforts - until Simpy has a brainwave that results in the two snobs having to do their bit. At the end, the girls win the prize - a trip to the Ideal Home Exhibition in London - but Mabel and Veronica go down with mumps and can't go. Hurrah!

The other stories are all complete, and include another amusing one called 'Tommy the Tomboy', in which a feminist mother sends her daughter to a 'we'll-teach-anything' school and asks the owner to teach Thomasina (Tommy) to be a man. "It's a man's world, but we are working for equality for women," declares Tommy's mother. "And the only way is for women to be the same as men, able to take over all their jobs!"  So Carol, owner of the school, decides to teach Tommy such manly things as chopping wood, boxing, and stoking the boiler. Unfortunately, though, Tommy is no George Kirrin or Tom Gay - for a start, she wants to be called Thomasina. Anyway, just as Carol's getting somewhere, the mother reappears wanting her daughter to become girly - a rich uncle has died and Tommy will inherit everything as long as she's feminine and hasn't been contaminated by her mother's involvement with the Feminine Freedom Fighters (known as the Three Fs , ahem ... ). It's all looking bad for the inheritance when the solicitor comes to check out Thomasina's feminine behaviour, but Carol's quick thinking and a little mouse save the day.

I won't go into details about the rest of the stories, but there are a couple with 16-year-old girls who run their own businesses as main characters. Another sign of how times have changed since 1972, when the majority of 16-year-olds did have jobs. 

But the biggest surprise (apart from Raddy's fisticuffs)? The summer special is only 32 pages! Now it seemed to me back when I was 10 that summer specials had many, many more pages than that ...

I spent a very enjoyable two hours last night wallowing in sporting nostalgia on YouTube. The first thing I watched was camcorder coverage of some of the women's gymnastics at the 1980 Moscow Olympics and the second was a documentary looking back at the Steve Ovett/Seb Coe clash at the same Olympics.

I remember the Moscow Olympics very well. I'd finished A levels, was waiting to see if I'd got into university, and spent the two Olympic weeks in front of the television. I was really only interested in the gymnastics and track and field. I wanted Nadia Comaneci to win the women's gymnastics and Steve Ovett to beat Sebastian Coe. Like most people, I thought Coe would win the 800m and Ovett the 1500m, but would have liked Ovett to win both. In the event, Ovett won the 800m and Coe the 1500m. Comaneci came very close to winning the gymnastics all-around title (which she was defending from Montreal), but lost out to the Soviet Union's Elena Davidova, after Comaneci's beam mark was held up for about half an hour because of a judging dispute (the coverage was on ITV at the time and they even delayed the ads to wait for Comaneci's score ... those were the days).

Last night, watching these, and remembering that I was disappointed with Ovett's 1500m bronze and firmly convinced that Comaneci had been robbed of gold because the Olympics were in Moscow and she was Romanian, I felt annoyed with myself with just not appreciating the talent of the time. To have both Ovett and Coe representing Britain then was just incredible, and it was a pity that the papers took sides so much and encouraged the public to do so. And, as the camcorder coverage shows, all the East European women gymnasts were fantastic back then. Davidova's routines were highly original and she deserved her gold. But there were just so many other brilliant gymnasts around at that time, some of whom didn't even medal individually, so high was the standard. I don't enjoy watching women's gymnastics today, because there is no artistry and the routines seem less fluid. The camcorder coverage is really interesting, because you get to see lots of gymnasts (though part 4 seems to be missing) and I certainly never realised how noisy the crowd was!

Very entertaining! It took me right back in time to sitting in the "front room" with my dad, in front of the telly, while my mom sat in the "living room" on her own, whingeing about the fact the Olympics seemed to be on every channel!