Cocktails and Records

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.

We went to see Robert Peston, the BBC’s Business Editor, speak at the London School of Economics on Monday night.

Lets look at the good things first. Robert Peston is an excellent speaker who clearly, precisely and humorously detailed exactly why he thinks we are in the current economic predicament that we are.

Unfortunately, what he had to say was pretty depressing. To sum up his analysis of the causes of the world financial crisis in 3 over-simplified points:

1. Greed – we all wanted too much and borrowed too much. 125% unsecured mortgages indeed.
2. Ignorance – nobody, from bankers and hedgefund managers to politicians and journalists, ever really understood what the hell was going on. This is the ‘Grandma Test’, Robert Peston says, where if you can’t explain what a collateralised debt obligation is to your Grandma and how many you’ve got, then don’t do it.
3. Naivity – our illustrious leaders stuck their heads in the sand for too long, never believing that it could all go pear-shaped. i.e. they really, really did believe that Alan Greenspan was right, the City was great and that there would be no more boom and bust cycles.

Like how you learn the textbook causes of World War I and II at school, Robert Peston had no problems outlining step-by-step how we got into this recession. Yes, it’s all clear now. So why wasn’t it at the time? Economics always works best in hindsight, doesn’t it?

It’s been almost three years to the day since my Auntie passed away. She was killed in a car crash while driving home from visiting my Grandma’s house one Sunday afternoon.

It would be an understatement to say that my Auntie and I didn’t get along. She thought that I was a weirdo failure who’d proved my inherent stupidity by completing ’a Housewives Degree’ (that would be an Arts Degree) and who would be ‘quite attractive to decent, normal men - if it wasn’t for my nose’. For my part, I thought that she was a vacuous philistine.

It wasn’t always like this. I used to visit her large ramshackle share house when I was a kid and she must have been in her 20s. The house, my parents tell me, was practically falling down but I never noticed - I loved it there. When we visited she let me run wild in her massive overgrown garden, poured me drinks in proper glasses (made of glass, not plastic) and let me play with her precious collection of Snoopy dolls.  When I was a bit older, she happily taped her Bruce Springsteen and Phil Collins albums for me. Neither of us were ever cool.

For reasons that we’ll never properly understand now, the situation changed and she and my family (and therefore me) didn’t see eye-to-eye anymore. She got married, moved away and got a new life which we didn’t fit into. When we did see each other, bitchiness reigned. The last time we really spoke was a curt hello at my Grandfather’s funeral in the mid-90s.

But despite all this, I still think of her. Every now and again at random moments she pops into my head and I feel an inescapable sense of loss. There is a difference between not seeing someone because you don’t want to and not seeing someone because they’re not there anymore when they should be.