My Top Ten

Thursday, 10 March 2022

Memory Mixtape #13: Kitchen Sink

This is the kitchen of the house I grew up in. When I was in Sixth Form, we sold this house and moved into the much smaller barn next door, where my parents still live today.

The boy in the photo is my eldest nephew. He'll be 46 this year. Only four years younger than me, he was much nearer my age than my own brother: all four of my nephews were. Consequently, I'm closer to them, even now, than I am to my own brother. (One nephew died back in 2001. It was an awful thing. I still wonder what he'd be like today.) But this isn't a post about my family, other than to say that, looking at how old Neil is there, I must have been about 8 when I took this photo.

My mum and dad still have the chicken in the window - it's a bowl to keep eggs in, with a chicken lid. The egg boxes on the opposite side of the counter are part of living on a farm. I like the old Fairy Liquid bottle, and I'm guessing that's an upside down basket from a chip pan on the draining board. Does anybody still have a chip pan, or are they another relic of the Health & Safety nightmare that was our childhood? I've no idea why there's a vase on the draining board, or why there's a huge piece of wood propped up in the window... other than that the whole house was wood-paneled, by my dad, so probably it was leftover from an ongoing joinery job. I can just see the top of the old washing machine to the right of the sink... although this was probably quite a new washing machine at the time, as the one I remember from being really little had a mangle on top. And yes, I remember trapping my fingers in it. But that could be apocryphal.

Looking out the pre-double glazed windows that would ice up with scary, frosty patterns in the window, it looks particularly murky out in the garden. I seem to remember two distinct types of weather from my childhood: long hot summers, and gloomy, foggy, drizzly schooldays. I know my first day of school was exactly like that. I cried for most of it.

I must ask Neil if he actually has the photo he appears to be taking of me... because, for the life of me, I can't remember what the opposite side of the kitchen looked like.

Wednesday, 9 March 2022

Reasons To Be Cheerful (ii): Good Vibrations

The world is what it is at the moment, and I'm not going to try to persuade you otherwise. We have to take our moments of joy where we can... even if they involve a little schadenfreude. Here then, are three more things that have made me cheerful this week...

1. A heated wheat bag for my stiff neck

As I write this, I have a stiff shoulder/back/neck combo going on. It's more annoying than painful, but it's a blessing having a nice warm heat pillow on it... and I relish the smell of slightly burned wheat when I microwave it for slightly longer than it says on the packet.

2. The Bad Place gets its comeuppance?

Remember how I told you we had a brief visit by the Ofsted folk last week at the new job? Well, guess where they've gone this week? In full force.

Look up schadenfreude in the dictionary and you will see a picture of me, along with a number of my former colleagues (Ben included), warming our hands around a fire.

3. Good Vibrations

Here are The Vibrations, from 1972 (that's 50 years ago, for those of you who are counting... under two weeks to my birthday now), with one of my favourite tunes of the moment. It's like Let's Clean Up The Ghetto, only even more amazing. If so such a thing were possible. Which it probably isn't, but it's close. Very close.

This is what happens when the Vegetable Man goes on strike. God help us if the Chicken Man follows suit... he don't want no butter beans, that's for sure.

Tuesday, 8 March 2022

Record Collection Recollections #2: Full Circle

When I first started buying records in the mid-80s, there weren't many places to buy them. Not in Huddersfield, at least. Our Price hadn't opened yet (although it soon would), which left me with Woolworths and Woods Music Shop. There may have been other places to feed my newfound habit, but these were the only ones I knew about, and to be honest, I only knew about Woods because that was where I went to buy music for my piano lessons or valve cleaning products for my tenor horn. I remember they had a small selection of contemporary albums alongside a much larger choice of Classical. But for most of my early purchases, Woolworths was it.

I mention this because after many years of being spoilt for choice in terms of where I buy my records, it feels like the actually physical marketplace has shrunk back to where it began. In Huddersfield now, there's Vinyl Tap, a pretty well established independent record shop (of which, more later) and HMV, a shadow of its former self, more concerned with selling T-shirts or those pop culture models with the big heads, than actual music. And the charity shops, of course, if you want some Robbie Williams or Daniel O'Donnell.

I miss Woolies.

Here's a track from one of the first albums I bought, on cassette, from Woods Music Shop. Not as contemporary as it might have been, but I've always spent more money on older records than new.

Monday, 7 March 2022

2022 Contenders: Unboxing Biscuits

One of many mysterious, inexplicable phenomena of the modern age is the fascination young people have with watching Unboxing Videos. This is where someone buys something - it could be a piece of high tech hifi equipment, a child's toy or computer game, or a rare mint condition slabbed copy of Amazing Spider-Man #121 - then films themselves opening the box it comes in and admiring / utilising said new acquisition. And thousands of people with nothing better to do with their time watch said video on youtube and give it the thumbs up.

(I chose the Spider-Man comic as an example for a number of reasons. As a former obsessive comic book collector, and still a die-hard Spidey fan, even I wouldn't watch a video of someone opening a parcel containing an old comic they'd just bought. Especially not a slabbed copy which, for the uninitiated, is a comic encased in an unopenable plastic box so you can only look at the front and back covers and never touch or read the comic inside... because in doing so, you might lower the condition of the book and affect its value. Imagine that: you spend a fortune on a rare item you can't ever actually appreciate. But at least you can film yourself not being able to do so. And some idiots will watch you not being able to do that.)

I mention all this as a lead in to telling you that I received the new Half Man Half Biscuit CD on the day it came out, as a gift from Louise, for our anniversary. I didn't film myself opening the parcel, but I really ought to have filmed myself listening to it for the first time. You could have watched the tears rolling down my face and heard the uncontrollable fit of laughter that overcame me in response to a number of the tracks, particularly this one...

...bear in mind I was doing 70 on the M1 at the time. How I managed to keep control of the car, I do not know.

It's the story about the monkey that did it.