Cocktails and Records

My long-standing hair dresser has a new apprentice. Young, blonde and shameless, a recent five-minutes at the sink in her hair-washing company did not help with my inevitable post-birthday misery:

Her (bopping around, waving the shampoo bottle over my head): ‘Do you like Girls Aloud? This song is so great… (starts singing) Jump, Jump for my love…Jump in…‘

Me (cautiously): ‘Er, they’re ok… they have some good tunes.’

Her (finally getting around to introducing the shampoo to my hair): ‘Yeah, some of these old groups have really good songs, don’t they?’

Me (nostalgically): ‘Yes, I used to like The Pointer Sisters. We had to do aerobics to this song at school…’

Her (baffled, stops massaging my head and waves her soapy fingers distractingly over my face): ‘Who??’

Me (equally baffled): ‘The Pointer Sisters, the 70s/80s girl group. This is a cover of their song ‘Jump’, isn’t it?’

Her (still in soapy suspended animation): ‘This is a cover from the 80s?!’

Me (bemused and wishing she’d just get on with it): ‘Yes, I’m sure it is. From around 1984.’

Her (enthusiastically dousing me in luke-warm water): ‘Wow, I like old music. All my friends think I’m weird though – but I say you can listen to anything you like, even old stuff. You know another really old band I like? Shakespeare’s Sister!’

(Well, I wasn’t expecting that)

Her (continuing along merrily with the conditioner now): ‘They must be from your time… Hey, you look like them! Just like them!!’

(No, I bloody well don’t)

Her (taking the idea and running with it): ‘Yes! Yes, you do! You look like Shakespeare’s Sister! Some of those really old bands are good aren’t they? You’re vintage, y’ know…!’

Me (thinking): ‘You’re definitely not getting a tip.’

I see that it’s almost the end of the decade.

I’ve been too busy lately to reflect terribly hard on this fact, but reading the current issue of The Word on the train this morning did get me thinking about what the naughties ‘means to me’.

So putting aside climate change, 9/11, people routinely degrading themselves on national television, ongoing threats to bio-diversity, the global collapse of the banking system, the disintegration of feminism, the re-emergence of religious extremism, the widening gap between rich and poor, the ongoing imminent collapse of civilisation etc. etc. one of the biggest impacts of the past decade for me has been the cementing of instant gratification culture and its evil twin, information over-load.

Once upon a time, I scoured second hand record shops, fairs and garage sales for records I knew I couldn’t get anywhere else, I traipsed into town to look for books I’d read about in the single paper I’d read that day (and if the shop didn’t have it they’d order it for me and I’d wait patiently), if I forgot to set the video for a TV show I thought I’d lost it forever and I didn’t ever think that I would see childhood favourites like You Can’t Do That On Television again*. Once upon a time I wrote letters.  Once upon a time I actually feared that I would either run out of music or run out of space in my house to put it in.

Faster internet speeds, email, DVDs and the like were beginning to make all these fears redundant around the year 2000, but information was still manageable. Over the past ten years though, almost everything has become available – and instantly available  if you want it.

It’s lunchtime as I write this, I’m sitting here at my desk and I’ve just read the headlines of three international newspapers, WBGO a radio station from New York is playing in the background and two Twitter accounts** are constantly updating me on ‘stuff’ from around the world. Last night I watched a Canadian sitcom on Youtube, looked at my mate in Vietnam’s latest photos on Flickr, ordered a DVD boxset from the States and listened to a record I’d tracked down on ebay after years of unsuccessfully searching for it charity shops. And there is so much more I could have done – waded through all that music on Spotify, read even more newspapers online, listened to some of those podcasts I’ve got queuing up on itunes…

I’m not complaining you know. It’s just an odd sensation to realise that in the course of ten years I’ve gone from craving more knowledge and more music to almost drowning in the stuff.

*Surely no one in their right mind would put this show out on a video/DVD boxset?
** I changed my mind alright. I blame work.

As much as I don’t delight in work, sometimes the office is a welcome refuge from the outside world, or at least the outside world of the pavements surrounding it.

I have worked in some of the busiest parts of central London and Glasgow over the past decade and have become used to the constant flow of heavy traffic, madcap cyclists, dawdling pedestrians shouting into mobile phones, noise pollution from lousy buskers and the inevitable lost tourists. This doesn’t bother me (much). What has been grinding me down over the years though is the ongoing assault on my ability to walk unharassed down the street.

I know that ‘the street’ is public space, but over the past few weeks for example, I have been interrupted by:

1. gung-ho types trying to sign me up for a chain of gyms I particularly dislike
2. even more gung-ho types trying to get me to play Paintball
3. street teams pushing free samples of vile Orangina in a manner that wouldn’t shame Mrs Doyle from Father Ted
4. a miserable lone student on a bike trying to promote a Farmer’s Market
5. noisy and whistling Climate Camp protesters
6. TV crews filming the Climate Camp protesters
7. desperately enthusiastic chuggers trying to sign me up to Oxfam, Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth, Red Cross, Barnados and the NSPCC
8. sulky teenagers collecting for a local project for young people
9. bored sods aggressively thrusting copies of London Lite, The London Paper, City AM, Epoch Times, Sport magazine and the Hotcourses newspaper at me
10. enthusiastic sods handing out leaflets for dating agencies
11. shiny young men flogging miracle hair products
12. the usual assortment of panhandlers and Big Issue sellers

All this within the five minutes it takes to walk between the station platform and my office. Sometimes, particularly around the station, it’s like that scene in Repulsion where all the hands are coming out of the walls grabbing at Catherine Deneuve as she collapses down the corridor – only on this occasion its worse because they’re also waving copies of London Lite and photocopied flyers for the local pawnbrokers.

Usually I just smile, say a polite but firm ‘no thanks’ and scurry onwards with my head down, but I fear that overload is killing my politeness. I have been feeling increasingly tetchy about this constant assault on my privacy over the past year and in last month I’ve snapped – I’ve already had two arguments with chuggers and yesterday I gave the paintballing man what must have been a much darker look than intended, as he looked instantly guilty and backed away apologising. And today I’m fantasising about getting a t-shirt printed up saying  ’Don’t waste your time’ that I can just scowlingly point at when people approach.

What’s happening to me? London is turning me into the kind of person I hate.

My mother called on the weekend. After the usual ‘what have you been doing?’ type updates she informed me that my father had been cleaning out the garage. I knew immediately what this meant.

‘No’ I shouted ‘You can’t throw them out!’

She sighed. ‘Well, we can’t keep them forever. You did move out of home [pause, counts] 17 years ago.’

‘But it’s history, social history! I can’t get rid of them, they’ve been around this long so it would be absolutely criminal to throw them out! And I will come and collect them at some point.’

‘Yes, I know… [sigh]… I’ll go and talk to your Dad.’

We are referring to my magazine collection. I’m not usually a hoarder, but when it comes to magazines it’s a whole other area. Scarred from an early brush with ‘decluttering’ where I stupidly, foolishly, terribly chucked out some old Smash Hits magazines, I’ve practically clung onto everything ever since.

This means that tucked away in a tiny, tiny corner of my parents absolutely massive garage is a rather fine collection of magazines I acquired when I lived in Australia: Girl, Jackie, Dolly, Just 17,  Countdown, Number One, Smash Hits, Jukebox, NME, Melody Maker, Select, Vox, Q, Rolling Stone, Mojo, Uncut, Cinema Papers, Sight and Sound… And as if this journalistic account of 80s and 90s pop culture wasn’t enough (which it wasn’t), I had also saturated myself in the past, scouring garage sales and antique shops for ’women’s interest’, music and movie magazines going back several decades.

So if you looking for 1930s knitting patterns, live reviews of The Senseless Things, photo stories about the tragedies of falling out with your best friend over a boy,  articles about how smoking can help with weight loss, scandals about Morrissey, blow-by-blow accounts of the Queen’s 1954 tour of Australia, pin-ups of Herman’s Hermits, quizzes testing whether you really are a Brosette, tips on how to make the most out of powdered egg, exclusives on the new Stackridge album and advice on how to get Doris Day’s new look then you know where to go. My parents’ garage.

I tell my partner that my parents are hassling me about the magazines again. He is unsympathetic: ‘Are you ever really going to read those boring interviews with Neds Atomic Dustbin and Chapterhouse again? And how long are you planning on keeping all those Q and Word magazines that are in our loft anyway? And what about those 3-year old copies of The Economist over there in the magazine rack?’

I start to sigh now. What am I going to do with my magazines? Spread over two countries, neglected and lying unloved in garages and lofts,  I just can’t part with them. They are social history, the social history that people so often throw away (or used to anyway). And more than that, so many of them are my history as well. Call me mad, call me selfish but my parents are going to have to hang on to them for a bit longer and well, our ceiling is not about to collapse just yet.

You know how sometimes, against all odds, you find yourself clinging to irrational beliefs? Well, I have this stupid and quaint notion that musicians,  scientists, academics, writers etc. should have some credibility, or at the very least pretend to have some.

This foolish, naive belief came into sharp focus over the weekend when I was watching the BBC4 documentary on the history of London based record company/shop/endless-pit-for-me-to-hurl-my-money-in that is Rough Trade. Although by all accounts, success helped turn this idealistic collective of music lovers into an unwieldly compromised mess, Rough Trade have still manged to hang on some semblance of integrity.

I’m not quite sure how they did this, mind you. Their mastering of the hype machine, although launching The Strokes and The Libertines on to the world, arguably helped turn old ‘indie’ into new ‘landfill indie’. Geoff Travis, the man behind Rough Trade,  ultimately embraced the ways of the major labels that he so hated. ‘Nice guy’, I found myself thinking during the programme, ‘I can see why he did it – more people needed to hear the music.’ But of course, the old irrational spark in me had to have the final word,  spitting out ‘He’s still a sold-out traitor though!’

And so, after watching this tribute to independent spirit, I switched over to More4 and what do I see? A head-shot of our second favourite tiresome rock ‘n roll crusader, Sir Bob Geldolf, talking about safe investment opportunities at NS&I (aka National Savings and Investment). He was  quickly followed by Stephen Hawking,  Germaine Greer and Alan Sugar, all extolling the virtues of  buying premium government bonds in a new ad bankrolled by the Treasury.

Now I know that there is every reason in the first place to doubt the ‘credibility’ of the man behind The Apprentice and the academic who appeared on Celebrity Big Brother, and that world-famous scientists still need to make a living just as much as starving musicians and Rough Trade label bosses, but I still felt that old inner turmoil.

‘Oh, they’re doing an ad for NS&I?’ I wonder ‘Perhaps they feel that they are coming to their countries aid in this time of recession? Maybe they were just offered a sack of money and wanted to buy a new HD-TV? Fair enough.’

But it isn’t long before my irrational mind boots its way in: ‘Sell-outs! They’re just as bad as Rough Trade employing swathes of PR people to package up rock rebellion for the yoof (no matter how good the bands might actually be). They’re all working for ‘the man’! And how much money could they possibly need anyway?! Tossers!!!’

See what I mean. Somebody help me. I need to kill my inner hippy and strangle its twin – inner marytred indie-kid. And anyway, it just doesn’t reconcile with my love of the truly credible Fleetwood Mac and lear-jet owning Eagles.

BTLP warned that this site – www.ladybirdprints.com - had a touch of the Proustian rush about it, but how could I have forgotten how fabulous the illustrations were too? And how much the four year old me liked the look of that toy shop…

So here are some of my favourite images of 70s Peter, Jane and the ever-faithful Pat the dog from 1a: Play with us.

Work’s a nuisance at the best of times, but it has been more irritating than usual recently. This is because it is starting to make me feel old. You see, I have been working with some younger colleagues on a writing project for our organisation. And to put it bluntly, although they can formulate sentences, their grammar and punctuation are woeful. I find myself tutting over their work and wondering how they got through the education system with their impoverished use of commas. Most dangerously, the phrase ‘I would never have got away with not knowing this in my day’ has crept into my mind. I’m not nearly old enough to be thinking this way.

Or perhaps I am.

Because it was with a slight pang that I read in the Guardian obituaries on the weekend that Douglas Keen has passed away. Mr Keen was the Editorial Director of Ladybird books and the man who commissioned educationalist William Murray to put together the Ladybird Key Words Reading Scheme, otherwise known as the Peter and Jane books. 

I learnt to read with Peter and Jane in the 70s. Mum and Dad dutifully bought the entire series and went through them with me every evening. I remember enjoying them and innocently allowing the aspirational middle class Englishness that the series has been criticised for wash over me. Having said that, I only discovered recently that I actually grew up with a revised 70s version – in the original 60s series Peter and Jane quaffed sweets and Jane clutched a doll, but in the 70s they enjoyed apples and Jane was the proud owner of a pair of rollerskates.

So here’s to you Douglas Keen for helping me learn to read. Even if the thought of Peter and Jane, like certain young people’s command of the comma, does make me feel unnecessarily old.

A few months back I deserted my old gym on the grounds that it played some of the worst music of all time – on repeat and at a quite frankly obscene volume.

My new gym is the exact opposite. It plays incredibly good music (and at a reasonable volume). For example, over the past few months I have regularly heard tracks like:

1. ‘Nothing but a Heartache’ – The Flirtations
2. ‘I Believe in Miracles’ – The Jackson Sisters
3. ‘Money’ – Buddy Guy
4. ‘As’ – Stevie Wonder
5. ‘Push it’ – Salt ‘n Pepa
6. ‘Black Gold of the Sun’ – Rotary Connection
7. ‘It Takes Two’ – Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell

However, there is just no pleasing some people and the exemplary music taste of my new gym is beginning to disturb me (although not as much as the 10cc dance remixes and Pink albums favoured by the last one, don’t get me wrong). But this music is too good for the gym. By becoming the soundtrack to my showering and hair drying, it’s like the songs are being devalued and slipping away from me.

For the same reason, I am more than slightly perturbed by the fact that The Times is now giving away several of my very favourite albums of all time for free. For FREE!!!!  I don’t mind more people discovering the brilliance of Love’s Forever Changes through a national broadsheet rather than by some ‘cooler’ means, but there is something soulless about it being given out gratis to all and sundry with absolutely no emotional effort or expense from the listener.

I know I’m a music snob, but I don’t want soul classics becoming background music to sweaty bodies and stinky feet in the gym changing rooms, and the idea of someone hearing Joy Division thanks to a free CD give-away by The Times irks me. There is just no romance or passion to it – and that’s what music’s all about, isn’t it?

Once upon a time my friends and I used to write letters and postcards to each other. My school friends and I wrote when we went away to university, and university friends and I wrote to each other after we graduated and moved off around the country and then the world.

I remember the glee of finding a letter in the mailbox, hidden amongst the bills and junk mail, and smiling as I instantly recognised the distinctive handwriting of particular friends. Sometimes it was a postcard, with just a couple of lines on the back, which I would stick on the fridge until it fell off and slipped away underneath. Sometimes it was a big fat juicy letter containing photos and clippings lovingly cut out of papers and magazines. These packages I would put aside, and make myself a cup of coffee before settling down in a comfy chair to pour over their contents.

Gradually, we began to write more emails and some people began to write generic group letters, more reminiscent of the annual Christmas letters churned out by particular members of the family… ‘This year was a wonderful year for us; I got an amazing job, Annie successfully made it through rehab and little Steven saved the world’….  Still, seeing people’s names pop up in my inbox made me smile and I eagerly clicked on their email. It still meant something.

Now in 2008 hardly any of us write either letters or emails anymore. I don’t know why, but I suspect there are two main culprits behind this:

1. Other priorities: spouses, children, career crises, mortgage worries, general laziness etc. etc.
2. Facebook and the fact that I’m not on it.

Long time readers might know my feelings on Facebook, and I’m still reluctant to open up my personal life to this shallow form of communication.

However, I am beginning to increasingly feel like my Grandmother in her antipathy towards computers and email: something’s changing in society; we don’t really care very much for it but at the same time we feel like we might be missing out on something. Grandma’s lucky though, most of her friends feel the same way as her. Mine don’t. Am I in danger of losing all regular contact with my friends if I don’t give in to Facebook?

Whilst crushed on a City bound train this morning, I couldn’t help but notice a woman sitting nearby reading a weekly glossy of some description.

The two ‘readers’ stories’ she was pouring over went something like:

‘I spend £600 a month so that my 11 year old daughter can become a model.’
‘I made a pact with 15 other girls to get pregnant. And we did, isn’t it great!’

What I can’t figure out, because I’m quite stupid with such things, is whether these articles are meant to be sensational or aspirational.

Life’s confusing these days.