WAS it wearing flares in the seventies that made young men in Glasgow vandals? I think there may be a link.

This is the then notorious Blackhill housing scheme in Glasgow in 1976 where a group of local chaps are entertaining themselves by tearing the wood off boarded up windows and throwing them on their makeshift fire.

Glasgow was going through an era of upheaval then with unfit housing being knocked down. This is a picture from the Evening Times when reporters were often writing such stories of tenants being left in flats while folk around them had been decanted, leaving the area prey to rowdyism as gangs roamed the wastelands.

This is one such tale in February, 1976, when there were only a few tenants left in Maryston Street, but were worried about security as the empty flats around them were being broken into and vandalised. As one tenant stated: “Most people in Blackhill are good and decent. It is only the minority who give the community a bad name.”

Goodness that must be in the top ten of quotes in the journalist’s lexicon back then.

Since then the vandalised flats have been bulldozed, and private housing, which looks rather attractive, has replaced it, although the area rarely gets referred to as Blackhill these days.

Who knows, perhaps one of the flare-wearing fire-setters later sought gainful employment and is here behind the mask, eight years later, as Bananaman. The cartoon character from the Dandy is pictured at the Savoy Centre in Glasgow’s Sauchiehall Street giving out bananas to children.

The reason why he was doing that has been lost in the mists of time.

And finally we can’t get enough of the old Calderpark Zoo. Here is a crowd in April, 1960, agog at seeing sea lions. A great day out in anyone’s book.