Glorious Royal Wedding Memories

Lincolnshire potato does impression of Royal Knob

Today’s parade in London of chinless parasites witlessly waving at streets lined with gormless, flag-toting celebrants thriving on subservience to a dynastic vacuum brings to mind many fond memories of past occasions when the populace of Britain cheerfully stopped work for a day in favour of raising a toast to the future marital fuck-ups of serially dysfunctional aristocrats.

July 29, 1981: Chip and Di
Aged 16, Kev, Tim, his cousin Rob and I had just got our first ever 'proper' jobs, on the back end of a potato harvester sorting out stones and clods of mud from a passing conveyor belt of Lincolnshire’s signature vegetable. It was tedious, back-straining work, and the machine was towed up and down the fields by a tractor driven by a skinny, grinning YTS delinquent who cheerfully admitted that he was getting hitched the following Saturday because “ah got me bird up the spout”. His marriage probably still had more chance of surviving than the Wales’s.

Anyway, the day before the wedding (Chip and Di’s, not the tractor driver’s), our farmer

Books of the Year, Part 2 - Non-fiction

Some books,
 earlier today.

I used to read nothing but novels. Then I veered in the other direction, until I realised that much as I enjoyed biographies and history books, I could never remember much about them once I’d finished. So now I mostly read fiction again, and the non-fiction I pick up is only stuff that I really, really want to read. And that’s why this list is shorter than the Fiction list. And why I don’t know as much as I should do about important historical events, but I can tell you the names of all the albums that The Raincoats released on Rough Trade records.

Document and Eyewitness – An Intimate History of Rough Trade by Neil Taylor (Orion Books)

Clearly you’d have to be more than interested in British indie-pop in the late 70s and 1980s to get much out of this. But the anecdotal rewards are deep if The History of Rough Trade would be your chosen specialised subject on the fading leather jacketed saddo’s version of Mastermind. Once you’re past the ponderous intro (and I’d rather have had an index than the footnotes), the stories and their characters take you right back to a time when you didn’t have to give a shit about anything besides drinking, music, and appearing to know what you were on about (I gave up on that one in the end).

'Small Town England' by Tim Bradford

Friend of Bandy

It’s a bad job when your friends bring out a book and you can’t even get around to plugging it on your blog. Not that a mention on here has been historically proven as a shuttle ride to the bestseller list. But still, Small Town England by Tim Bradford (published by Ebury Press earlier this month) is not only a book by my oldest mate, it’s principally a memoir about the time we grew up together in Lincolnshire during the years 1978-1983. I feature throughout as a character called Bandy (I wasn’t called that, but it’s a fair description of my legs), perhaps more generously portrayed than I deserve given that I was a feral, foul-mouthed, deeply insecure adolescent who thought he was right about everything, apart from when the lights went out or I was drunk, when I thought I was probably wrong about everything, and that I would never, ever get a girlfriend.

I am hailed in the acknowledgments as a person “whose memory is a spectacularly efficient database of facts, anecdotes, football scores and mundane events.” You’ll note there’s none of the useful stuff in there, like geographical data, chemical symbols, mathematical formulae, an encyclopaedic knowledge of the English Civil War, or the correct way to mix and shake 101 head-crushing cocktails. Somehow, my memory evolved into a vault of useless clutter that I’ve never bothered clearing out to replace with something new, functional and up-to-date. So if something goes wrong with this computer, I won’t be able to fix it, but I can tell you all about the day I watched Lincoln City beat Northampton Town 5-4 in 1977. This at least made me a valuable oral consultant on several incidents described in the book, but now that period has been documented and illustrated by Tim, the call for my services could well be facing a barren stretch.

Why, you might ask, would anyone want to read about what it’s like to grow up in a small town in Lincolnshire between 1978 and 1983? It was interesting to me, because I was there. I’ve yet to meet anyone who wasn’t there, but who’s had the chance to read the book, so it’s hard to say how wide the appeal might be. The author is of course highly entertaining in the way he describes and illustrates all the crappy little bands we were in and the terrible gigs we played, and all the times we got drunk and ran away from fights and got crushes on all the wrong girls, and that the experience of being snared as a teenager in a dull country town is broadly universal. You can’t wait to leave, but 25 years later you can’t help but return with a little retrospective insight to take a look at all the mistakes that helped set you off on the path to nowhere.