Small Town Boy

THIS is one of the best tunes of the 80s, and I'm grizzled enough to remember it first time round... but I never knew what it was called until Gary Crowley played it on the radio just now and namechecked it...

... nobody seems to watch my videos any more. But please, someone, clickonthis and tell me if you remember it and if you like it too...

BRONSKI BEAT: SMALL TOWN BOY

Brrr!

OK I HAVE BEEN IN HIBERNATION. Every time I wake up I feel like I'm on day 2 of a skiing or adventure holiday. How inconvenient. Acheing all over, like I've fallen off a horse, I hobble about making cups of tea or gassing the place out with (fried) quarter lb-er beefburger sandwiches... I got a really chavtastic cheapo, thin, sugary-vinegary tomato ketchup ~ just the way it should be ~ from Iceland. It's fantastic. Only my bread is bourgeois: Warburton's Seeded Batch: £1 for a tiny loaf. But exactly the right size toasted for one 1/4-lb-er or 3 fishfingers drowning in said "red sauce"...

Hey do y'all remember back in the 1970s-to-early 80s when colour television was still something of a novelty or at least luxury. In this country we never had those whizzy colour tellies with turny-dials (I've looked all my life for one, only ever seen colour ones on American films), just four or five channel selectors, sticking out like giant silver cigarettes from a teak effect box with a screen like a giant goldfish bowl. The older ones used to ping! back into a quickly vanishing white dot that lingered in the end....

... sometimes I think that white dot tells the story of my life...

... even older tellies (even colour ones) worked via valves not transistors, which meant when you knew you wanted to see something you had to ensure the box was switched on a good 10 minutes ahead of time. Sound came almost immediately, frustratingly... from deep underwater greenish figures emerged, clothing themselves in layer upon layer of sparkly pixxels until (hopefully) at the set time you had Coronation Street or Opportunity Knocks! Aww, the 1970s. I do feel some privileged sense of nostalgia for having lived through these brown-swirly times.

Me and my brother used to nudge each other and laugh when we went to more vulgar people's houses who always had the colour turned up way too high! ~ do you remember that one? That was a chavtastic form of budget psychedelia for those unwilling actually to drop LSD...

What on earth I was going to say here has escaped me...

O, except my robos look like their nest has been hit by a cat-5 hurricane! Some cleaning bug has seized them and all empty toothpaste boxes (etc) are piled wigwam stylee in a corner. When I shove my head in the tank and say "oi you swines: come out!" three mini-gremlin faces emerge from said bundle of sticks looking surprised (hamsters nearly always look surprised, it's the look they do best...)

And that's about it. I don't know what I was gonna say but I'm going back to bed?

VIDEO:

#1 the candy selection featuring Leo DiCaprio and the All Saints: Pure Shores (music from The Beach)...



#2 Now this is something rarer: 2001 A Space Odyssey to the tune of Orbital's Halcyon:

I always thought Halcyon was a nasty banned sleeping pill from the United States... or >Halcion Days... some old novel..?
No! Halcion Days was a "text based multi-user adventure game" ... being I've never PLAYED a text-based multi-user adventure game but have only heard of ONE: ie British Telecom's "MUD" "multi-user dungeon" how on earth the phrase got so deeply embedded in my subconscious I've not a clue...
No it isn't. "Halcyon days" is a piece of cultural coinage, ie a expression, a cliche, if you will. The Halcyon game which I knew I'd not have heard of till just now, is some geektastic thing from times past...

Two Ladies in my Life

YESTERDAY I was catching up on lost sleep and, when the time came to post it was already too late. So here I am tomorrow morning!

What I did start to doodle on a piece of paper was some of the story of my life which began, as far as my public consciousness was concerned, with the Queen's Silver Jubilee in the summer of 1977 when I was 5.

I don't remember the street parties (though surely we had them) but I do remember the silver commemorative double decker bus I kept in near-mint condition. My brother (younger by 2 years) bashed his one up!

But I remember as a 5 year-old seizing on this anniversary year and wondering what and where I would be when the next royal jubilee came round ~ this being the Golden Jubilee in 2002 when I would be 30 years old. That 21st century date coupled to such a milestone age seemed impossibly futuristic.

When the biggest day came six years ago I was on the street begging money for my gear. It passed me by in such a haze I could barely remark on it, for it made almost no impression on my inner consciousness.

Had I been able to feel anything I suppose I would have wept for all the opportunities missed, the promise lost ... but I was far too lost then to indulge in tears.

The next woman to dent my public consciousness was Margaret Thatcher. She came into power in 1979 when I was 7 and was thus the first Prime Minister I remember. And she stayed so very long, till I was 19 that when she was eventually shoved out of office by snakes in her own Conservative ("Tory") party, I felt vaguely frightened. She was the only Prime Minister I had ever known.

How I loved Mrs Thatcher as she reigned over us! Before her appearance Britain had been a dusty, sluggish grey place marked by terminal decline (hey I'm nearly quoting her memoirs...) What Britain needed, so she believed, was a good kick up the backside. Get rid of the unions' stranglehold over British industry by eliminating practices like public ballots by show of hands. In the future only "proper" secret ballots into the box or by post would be allowed. Thatcher struck a crushing blow against union dominance when she smashed the longstanding miners' strike over pit closures. Unprofitable mines ought to be dispensed with. And so they were.

For all her faults, Mrs Thatcher did "get Britain working" again. And she made this country a businesslike place to be.

She started an international trend by privatizing national utilities: telephones, oil and gas, water, electricity and railways. Looking back I see this as national theft. Of course it's one of the most classic cons in the book to steal something off somebody and hoodwink him into buying it back and that's what she did with all her share offers. With the possible exception of telecommunications, there isn't real competition and choice in any of these businesses. Privatized electricity does not mean competing companies offering to wire your house. It just means they buy huge bulk blocks of the national supply and offer to sell dribs of electricity on to you cheaper (hopefully) than the competitors. This is a nonsense. Why not sell straight to US the public at the discount wholesale rate ~ THAT would be true democracy.

The great flaw in Thatcher's policy, which DID get a revived, modernized Britain moving again was that she seemed to view everything in the model of a business. Make a profit out of something and it's inherently worthwhile. But anything that just costs money is a "loss" and should be eliminated.

If she'd had her way, Thatcher would have got rid of the BBC ~ one of the jewels in our cultural crown. I think she was at heart a republican. The talk was always of how insufferable the Queen found her and "who does she think she is?"!

Now before Gledwood gets too boringly political here's some video entertainment from the magic era when my political sensibilities burst into life:



THATCHER UND DIE DEUTSCHEN

THIS IS TYPICAL entertainment from the best policial TV show of the 1980s: SPITTING IMAGE. See how lifelike those dummies are...




THE POLITICAL ASSASSINATION OF MARGARET THATCHER