Never did finish that book . . .

. . . and it's practically a novella:

Once again, from the Facebook vaults. 

Take away the tanks . . .

. . . it does explains why I have not gone out of my way to make a 'new' friend in 49 years:

Wait for it . . . wait for it.

. . .

Bog Standard Socialist Propaganda

Never been there, never done that.

Should I have gone with the other title of 'A Socialist Splash'?

Calling On (ex) Youth

It's the " . . . and Other Lies" that nails it for me.  Hat tip to the late Mr. Borland for the borrowed and reworked song title as post title.

It's obvious, I know, but another jpeg courtesy of a folder trawl.

My Favourite Waste of Time . . .

. . . is scrawling through unnamed folders on the laptop and finding random jpegs saved from months previously, and thinking 'Why the fuck did I save that? What was the point? What will I do with it?' 

Of course the self-interrogation reveals no answers and I'm left with no other recourse than to either bin it - and I've binned thousands of said jpegs - or randomly post them on a blog that should have been blow torched years ago.

Apparently- no apparently about it you dunderheid, it's posted below - Charlie Nic' once appeared on the front cover of the NME. (All the more shocking because it wasn't Stuart Cosgrove who is on the byline.) It dates from 1984, so I would either have been reading Smash Hits or Number 1 at the time, so it passed me by. Nowadays, Charlie Nicholas is considered a blow hard dickhead for those of you have access to a subscription to Sky Sports. I don't have a sub, so I still cling on to the happy memories of him being a brilliant player for Celtic circa 81-83. By November '84, when he appeared on the front cover of the inky music press he was what is best described as a mercurial playmaker in a so-so Arsenal team. By '84, for Arsenal, the FA Cup finals were long gone and George Graham was yet to appear on the horizon but they kept Nick Hornby busy and, for me, YouTube clips of Nicholas, Woodcock and Mariner will always take preference over the dull shite that Arsenal became when they were winning titles and breaking scouser' hearts in the late '80s.

Why was Nicholas on the front cover of the NME in 1984? I don't have a scooby. Sadly, the interview/article itself is not online and, short of winning the lottery, I'm not forking out 15 dollars on ebay to find out why. I never pegged him as a 'trendy' when it came to matters relating to  music. That was Nevin and McClair's niche. And the Owen Paul haircut doesn't help matters. 

Never mind. Charlie and I will always have Switzerland.

Divinyl Comedy

I wish I was the same. I just stare at our book cases and I'm overcome with a sense of self-loathing at all the unread books staring back at me. The bastards are taunting me.

Shelf Bores

When you finally get round to reading a book and, in the main, you are enjoying it and you then make the mistake of reading the reviews  . . . and they are shitting all over it. Yeah, that.

So It Goes . . .

The "It" being both my short and long term memory. Thank christ for Marky Z. and the eggheads over at Facebook to remind me from time to time as to what I was thinking - or in this case, dreaming - on this day in history. Poor Marky Z has been getting the proverbial kicking these past few weeks because of his cheeky data harvesting gig but if it wasn't him, it would have been MySpace Tom . . .

A half-formed memory from six years ago:

Murphy's Mob by Michael Saunders (Puffin Books 1982)

Dunmore United was a lousy football club. They were bottom of the fourth division, and they had almost lost their place in that last season, but when Mac Murphy saw they were looking for a new manager he was in no position to be choosy. He'd been demoted himself, sacked by the first division club he'd been managing when they were relegated last season. His wife, Elaine, was all in favour when he mentioned Dunmore United. And so the two of them drove down to the Midlands one drizzly summer's afternoon to keep an appointment with Dunsmore's new owner, Rasputin Jones.