George, Jon, Mikey and Roy

I’ve got fantastic memories of being 12. That time before teenage hormones and adult expectations start to burden us is a golden time of our lives. It’s the time of unfettered enthusiasm and energy and so many formative experiences – first kisses, crushes and adventures. Horizons are expanding as we seize on ideas and assert our identity.

Anyone who remembers me from when I was 12 will probably sum me up with the words ‘Boy George fan’. I was glued to the radio, TV, magazines, newspaper and records featuring the wonderful George.

Most of my schoolfriends had yet to declare their preference for a particular sort of music or allegiance to a band. This was to be the time of obsessive fandom. Duran Duran, Wham, Spandau Ballet or Culture Club – you couldn't like them all. I was the Boy George girl.

Internationally renowned Boy George fan

As well as all their music, I had badges, posters and stickers galore. I made fabric cases for my complete collection of singles and albums (including some imports and picture discs), and covered my Culture Club scrapbooks with montages of quotes and photos snipped out of magazines.

I regularly wrote to – and even visited – the fan club. A few times I hung around outside George's home where I met up with some of my similarly George-obsessed penpals. I'd work George into conversations, quote his quips in my essays and discuss imaginary dreams of hanging out the Jon Moss and the Duran Duran hunks with my classmate Jo.

Another of my classmates paid tribute to my obsession by dressing as George with a hat trimmed with coloured plaits for a drama performance. We held a fundraising three-legged race along the seafront (actually a 17-legger) and I donned a customised man's shirt with huge coloured letters and symbols, like my idol's. Once I celebrated George's birthday by making a cake decorated as his famous BOY cap.

Inevitably, my favourite band's fame waxed and waned after a few years and the band eventually splintered as George's drug problems became apparent. I continued to follow his every word and went to as many solo gigs as I could. My cunning move to London made it all the easier.

My admiration and love for George has grown and aged along with us both. We've had our ups and downs and have evolved into quite different people from when I first declared my interest in the 'flamboyant cross-dresser who sings blue-eyed soul' back in 1983.

But my love for Culture Club isn't the same. The group reformed for a couple of years at the start of the century and it was wonderful to see them back on Top Of The Pops and in concert. Teenage over-excitement came flooding back and with every heartfelt lyric I was transported back to being 12. Then they disappeared again and George went back to DJing and pursuing various musical and fashion endeavours.

This week, Culture Club played to a packed house at Heaven nightclub underneath Charing Cross station. It’s the very venue where they play their first London gig on their first tour and is an iconic club for anyone who loves the 80s. I was there – as was a poster asking ‘Duran Duran who?’. It made George chuckle when he peered at it.

Culture Club being back is brilliant. Their ‘oldies’ as they call their back catalogue still stand strong and they’ve got some great new tracks for their new album. The enthusiasm with which Roy Hay attacked his guitar and played the rock god all over again was immense. The whole band’s delight at playing together was infectious. As for me, I loved being transported back to my first Culture Club gig in 1984 and being filled up anew with energetic verve, fearlessness and simply enjoying an all-consuming unaffected love.

Zingy Lime Muffins

I'm a great one for seeing what we've got in the vegetable drawer or fruit bowl and making up recipes based on them. The internet makes it really easy to find successful combinations that other people have tried, but I often end up winging it on the ingredients front. 

Our great local market (a proper one rather than a fancy artisan farmers' market) sells great value, great quality fruit and veg. For simplicity, items at Lewisham Market are priced a £1 per bowl. "Pound a bowl! Pound a bowl!" comes the refrain. Last week, I needed both lemons and limes and ended up with a mixed bowl from the market of about six of each.

This week I had a few leftover limes that I knew wouldn't keep until we get back from a few days away. I was also wondering if I could rustle something up that we could munch on our long journey to Devon.

At first I thought I’d make a lime drizzle cake as an easy alternative to the lemon drizzle cake that's become a bit of a standby. But I didn't really want the hassle of eating slices of cake in the car and it's not long since I made lemon drizzle cake anyway.

Lime Muffins seemed like a good idea instead. There's a really easy recipe online for the basic mix. Better yet, it uses vegetable oil rather than butter. We slather butter on toast, so rarely have enough left over for baking. Here's a summary of the Taste Of Home recipe.

2 cups plain flour plus 2 teaspoons baking powder

Half a teaspoon of salt

1 cup of caster sugar

Third of a cup of vegetable oil

Quarter of a cup of milk

Two eggs

3 tablespoons of lime juice

Teaspoon and a half of grated lime rind

Beat the eggs and stir in the wet ingredients, then mix them into the dry ingredients. Spoon into 12 cupcake cases and bake in a cupcake tin at 200 degrees C for 18-20 minutes. Cool in the cupcake tin. 

I added a whole juicy lime's worth of juice to the mix rather than the three tablespoons the recipe suggested. I also added a whole zested lime rind.

The cakes took the full 20 minutes to bake and rose nicely. I'd used self-raising flour and half a teaspoon of baking powder rather than the plain flour and 2.5 teaspoons of baking powder in the original recipe. The cakes had a nice rise – but they looked rather plain. 

Tangy icing-topped lime muffin

Time for a nicely iced topping, I decided. As you'll surmise from the photos, I've not used a piping bag for at least 15 years. Nonetheless, I mixed up 4oz of butter, a cup and a half of icing powder, some milk and a bit more lime juice and zest to see what transpired. The taste was glorious: both sweet and very tangy. 

The extra juice made the icing runnier than ideal and I should have added a mite more icing sugar to make it a little stiffer. It piped easily but didn't set into swirls. But it was the taste rather than the look that I was really after. 

I'll add another tablespoon of icing sugar next time – which probably won't be long given the price of limes at Lewisham Market.

Zingy Lime Muffins

Toby the Tram Engine and his Belgian Cousin

The most money I've ever seen in one place was in a briefcase that my Grandad handed over to my Dad sometime in the mid-1980s. It was an actual suitcase of cash and it elicited the same sort of thrill that you might expect if you were in the presence of a suitcase of cash representing ill-gotten gains. I was about 13 and I was seriously impressed.

But this was no Great Train Robbery. The large sum of cash was needed to secure the purchase of an actual old train (perhaps one that hadn’t seen active service since the time of the Great Train Robbery, but that’s a fanciful detail I’ve just conjured up).

Right now, I expect you’re thinking something similar to what I was back in about 1986. Dad’s buying a steam train and it’s going to be amazing. Cue images of gleaming locomotives powering down the Great Western tracks, thick grey steam pouring out the top.

It wasn’t that unreasonable an expectation, either. My Dad’s train obsession goes beyond most people’s. By my teens he’d taken us on hundreds of photo reconnaissance missions in which he’d abruptly stop the car by the side of a bridge, hare up the side of the embankment and disappear for an hour with nothing but a camera for company. We’d go to monthly rail enthusiast meetings at which the members would pore over photos, project slideshows and show archive steam loco footage. Swap-meets for Hornby carriages and Dinky vehicles were used to furnish the meticulously assembled track layout in the loft, fully landscaped with its own handmade Forth Rail Crossing.

Every holiday managed to include visits to goods yards and preserved railway lines. (It still does, though these days my Mum also gets her fair share of wild flower stop-offs.) My Dad would always go beyond the public areas and make a nuisance of himself, nosing around where he wasn’t supposed to be. He wanted to know where ‘the good stuff’ was – the stuff that hadn’t been prettied up ready to be shown off.

Dad’s insatiable curiosity was legendary even in the 70s, when he got involved in the Isle of Man Railway. Even though we lived 200 miles away in the south of England, Dad managed to get himself, Mum and a toddler me to the island at least twice. He took a leave of absence to work the cranes there and made sufficient impression to be caricatured in a comic book about the island and its railway. My then two-year-old brother has never lived down his distressed reaction when ‘Kissack’ let off steam three yards away from him.

You see, my Dad doesn’t just spot trains – though his love of steam is meticulously recorded in many 1950s and 1960s notebooks. He chases it obsessively, and internationally. In the case of his very own steam train, he tracked it down to an obscure goods yard in Belgium. I can almost hear the story deflate as I write. Yet Dad and two other enthusiasts who wanted to salvage a piece of industrial history weren’t to be deterred by their quarry’s unglamorous resting place. They bought it, insured it and arranged for it to cross the Channel to Norfolk and be transported on the back of a flatbed lorry to a tiny hamlet where they could begin to cherish it.

Her name is Cockerill and she’s a hulking great steam tram. Back when I was still 13 and Dad and his cohorts were still full of enthusiast vigour, I helped scrape off all the grot and grease from her brass plate ready for it to be painted and her to be ceremoniously rechristened.

We thought it would be a few years before she would be ready to show her face to the world again, but probably no more than three, or perhaps five.  In fact, she’s been tucked away in a private station yard in the middle of Norfolk for the past 25 years. She was always at the back of my Dad’s mind (he’s worse than me for guilt-tripping himself about not making time to do absolutely everything he wants to), but periodic visits to tinker and do essential maintenance inevitably had to give way for more pressing visits to ageing parents.

By 2010 when my Grandad died, it was time to decide whether to let Cockerill go or make a go of a project we’d all hoped he’d have been able to see come to fruition. Time for a big push.

Lou and I went to visit her the day after my Grandad’s memorial lunch. She’s a big rusty beast, far larger than I’d ever realised. She’s an oversized Toby The Tram Engine, as it turns out, rather than a gleaming Gordon or James. In fact, she’s the closest cousin still in existence to the J70 tram that inspired Rev Awdry to create the Toby tram character.

Cockerill Steam Tram on show at Dendemonde-Puurs, Belgium Photo copyright: Vitaly Volkov (http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Steam_locomotives_of_Belgium)

Amazingly – and despite living a day and a half’s drive from where Cockerill is based in mid-Norfolk – my Dad has managed to keep the steam train revival dream alive. Between my Dad and Mervyn, the other remaining owner and an accomplished engineer and industrial boiler repairman, Cockerill has been slowly brought back to life. Last week she passed her boiler inspection, meaning she’s officially able to steam again.

This Friday, if the paperwork, road transport, insurance and a dozen other things get sorted out, Cockerill will have her first public display in the UK. She’ll be on show as an invited guest at the Mid-Norfolk Railway Steam Gala Weekend from Friday 27 to Sunday 29 June. We’re even holding out for her being able to haul carriages or wagons up and down the track. 

My first book!

Books glorious books. I've a flat bulging at the seams due to my love of them and now I'm going to have a book emblazoned with my own name on it. Back in November, I was approached by one of the commissioning editors at Wiley about writing for them. I'd already taken on the 3rd edition of their hugely successful 'iPad For The Older And Wiser' title and enjoyed the experience. This time, rather than being co-author, I'll be going it alone. 

I wasn't allowed to reveal the details of what I was writing when the project was first agreed. It was under wraps for a couple of reasons: it’s a new title for Wiley and they’re rightly proud (and a little bit nervous) about putting out something different. The second reason is that it’s a project with Tesco, for which it will be a first ever publication. Tesco is getting into books in a big way and is busy building its own digital bookstore, set for launch in spring 2014. This book, Hudl For Dummies, will be published around the same time.

Watch this space for more info on when it will hit the shelves.