You are allowed to enjoy this…

Recently I have realised that I have become a snob and a far from ideal socialist. The reason for this is that we have new neighbours. Our previous neighbour was an old lady who had lived at the address for a very long time, but her declining years and the pressure from her sons forced her to move to sheltered accommodation somewhere else in the district. She didn’t want to go. We didn’t want her to go – but change comes whether you like it or not.
The house next door is a big, nicely kept two-bedroomed semi-detached (like ours) and I was expecting a young family or similar to be rehoused there by the council. In fact, I was kind of looking forward to it. What we got was a middle-aged gentlemen with a bad leg and his 21-year-old semi-retarded son (a young man so dense that when his father had a spasm in his leg, he went indoor and let his father descend the concrete stairs on his behind – a guy so lethargic that even his father has said to the Missus that he needs a good kick up the arse). I spoke to the father soon after they moved in and he seemed friendly enough, but like all people, I quickly became irritated by their imperfections.
Their first sin was the fact that they brought three cars with them. And these aren’t nice shiny cars, but right old bangers, meaning that our spacious little street now looks like a breakers yard…and one of these cars is of very dubious origins. It has been left outside our other property to basically rust – having not been moved – but the tyres have been allowed to deflate and oil to leak over the road. OK – they like cars and you don’t – so get over it, you whinging creep. But I hate car owners in general. I even moan at The Missus for having a car that we don’t use much, so no-one is safe from my anti-car bias. (Of course, I happily allow myself to be driven to the aquarium shop and to music concerts – the hypocrite).
The next thing I had an issue with was the fact that these fellows didn’t seem to have any concept of putting the rubbish out for the weekly refuse collection on a Thursday. Recently, temperatures have been in the 30s and there’s nothing better to spoil lunch in my garden than the pungent stench of rotten rubbish to come wafting down our shared alleyway where they’ve left there rubbish (we leave our bin bags there too, but I put them out every week to be taken away). The smell got so bad that I took matters into my own hands and put their rubbish out for them last week….all four bags of it. No, no, no…don’t thank me. I was doing it for myself and my own nostrils. Me and Mr Bluebottle have become firm enemies and I even had to chase one out of our bedroom at midnight last week – such was the pong eminating from the alley. Or maybe he was attracted by the hum from my socks…?
Of course, while this goes on the front and back gardens have been left to overgrow. Now the previous occupant loved her garden and used to employ a gardener to keep it spick and span, despite being a pensioner of limited income. But now the grass is high like the Serengheti plains and I half expect a tigress to come bounding out after a startled wildebeeste. It kind of depresses me that things always seem to change for the worst and never the better.
So why does this bother me? Well the way people treat their homes whether they are council rented or private owned/rented is a good indication of what those people are like. Our example don’t seem to care much for the garden, which is a shame and I can see a future when old car engines will litter the front lawn and a broken down Jeep is worked on out the back garden. You might think this a joke, but I’ve seen this in other council properties in the area. It is the creeping cancer of the underclass – those without any commonsense or pride in their environment.
So there you have it. I am officially a snob and I don’t like my unemployed neighbours. I resent them for not keeping their council property clean and tidy while I am asked to fork out £100 a month on council tax to keep them in it. Of course, I just wrote a cheque to the tax man the other day and this has left me feeling a little sensitive too. But I’ve said to the Missus that this is a drip-drip-drip kind of decline and things will soon get a lot worse. She isn’t a big fan of them either as they look at her in a funny way that only women can detect and they officially give her the creeps. (This is unusual as it usually takes a lot to phase out The Missus).
But the line in the sand was drawn tonight when I was talking to Alex the Wonderdog through our kitchen window. I was cooking the dinner and Alex was in the garden being cheeky and I said: “Whooseagoodboy?” or something and he barked back and kicked up some grass and I said “Whooseagoodboy?” and he did it again in canine joy and a little doggy smile on his face. That’s the kind of owner-pet relationship we have. From a window next door a loud, uncouth “Shuddduppp!” echoed in our general direction. This was from the son, who ruined a perfectly peaceful Sunday afternoon yesterday by revving a petrol driven engine for a remote control car for 30 minutes until he got bored. No, you shut-up, fuckwit.
No-one bad mouths Alex the Wonderdog and gets away with it…

So tonight was the last night of Top of the Pops. Now while many will be cheering from the sidelines about its demise, it was very sad to see the Sir Jimmy Saville (jangle, jangle) switch off the lights of Studio 3. For me, TOTP was a consistent part of my life and a good barometer of popular culture throughout the decades. I get misty-eyed remembering crashing out in front of the Xmas round-up-of-the-year, stuffed with turky and pudding, and waiting for my favourite artistes to appear.
A lot of people have said that the advent of the multi-channel TV and mobile phones and the Internet have been responsible for the lack of interest in the show, but I think it has more to do with the empty-heads who were left holding the baby. They had a format which they didn’t know how to drag forward into the 21st century and it was silly because TOTP was always event television. It was about getting the biggest bands of the day on the screen and having some fun and that spirit was in decline throughout the 90s when pop music decided it wanted to be taken seriously.
Who can remember seeing their first glimpse of a pop video (Bohemian Rhapsody) or Bowie in space alien mode or the very first appearance of gender-bender Boy George (is it a boy or a girl?). Mods, rockers, hippies, punks, new romantics, goths, grunge, baggies, Brit-pop, rap, dance, even folk have had their moment on the TOTP stage and was the platform for getting the teenagers of Britiain growing/cutting/dyeing their hair, adopting a new fashion trend or inspiring them to pick up a musical instrument.
Unfortunately, popular culture in Britain today is no longer based around music. Where are the great musical trends gone? The last one was possibly Brit-pop and now it seems that our youth are more moved by reality TV, mobile phones and MySpace. This means that popular culture is now on the decline. Where are the great individuals that coloured our youth? Where have the Bowies, the Boy Georges, the Pistols and the Dylans gone? The great teen spokespeople have been replaced by the Crazy Frog and Coldplay – what a sick fucked up world we live in. And so it seems that music is no longer the potent force it used to be and the world is a duller place for it. I still remember seeing my first punk in Oxford Street when I was about eight years old. It was my birthday treat to be taken into London by my grandparents and I still remember him with his black spiky mohican. Once there was individualism, now it is follow the flock with our kids wanting to be anonymous and don the hoodie of invisibility.
What does this have to do with TOTP, you say? Well I would say that the programme was a barometer of the time and because there is no youth culture to speak of now – just a series of consumer trends – when the youth culture dries up, so must the programming. With the TOTP brand being so strong and the archive being so far-reaching, it wouldn’t surprise me if ITV or Sky bought the licence to the franchise and kick-started the show again on one of their digital channels, especially as last-night’s finale got a projected 4 million viewers – not bad for a Sunday night on BBC2, eh?
It is a real shame that they axed the show because it could have still had an audience. But heck, the BBC can spend our money on yet another dull reality TV show and shovel “I Am A Consumer Slut” and “Look At My Fat and Unruly Kids” down our throats for five-nights-a-week. Cheap TV = dull TV. Top of the Pops took effort to make and so it had to die. R.I.P – you will not be forgotten. And I will bet my left testicle that it will rise phoenix-like from the flames before you can say “Doctor Who’s Third Series”.

Daniel Hoffmann-Gill comments yesterday: “Sorry for not posting what you want me to post, I shall stick to making videos of myself playing guitar…”
Now I feel the need to explain why I make videos of myself playing guitar. It is because music is all I’ve got. Yes, I really am that shallow. My guitar and my music brings me joy. And I hope that maybe some people who visit this site might see the videos or listen to the tunes and say: “Hey, I kinda like that”. I might be pissing in the wind, but at least I know I am pissing in the wind. Commenting on world politics over which I have no control is a an exercise in futility. I’d rather keep an eye on local politics, on the events that actually shape and affect my world – that’s why I rail against the BNP becoming local councillors and HG doesn’t. Call me selfish, but I know that even after I am worm food that the Arabs and the Jews will still be killing each other, Mr HG. Life is just too damn short for me to worry or care about it. Also, I recently wrote a guide about putting video onto the web for a consumer computing magazine to which I regularly contribute and so I guess I got a little bit inspired by my own advice. Here’s the article here – you can see my Ashbory Bass clip in the bottom panel.
On a seperate and more joyful note, I am pleased to announce a second batch of baby mollies in the fishtank. This time they are gold and black mottled mollies. They are still small, but I managed to capture some video footage of them swimming around. They are the orange specks moving in the background.

At the beginning of the year I made a promise to myself and The Missus that I would somehow pay-off our combined credit card debt. Now I wouldn’t say that we are heavy abusers of the plastic, but we had a certain amount shuffled around on those zero-percent interest cards for a while. We are good zero-interest whores and moved our debt around when the going got tough. We realised that this amount had been with us since our wedding way back in 1998 and was just there, hanging over us. It was an average amount of credit card debt, but I knew something had to be done. And so I sold off various nick-nacks and CDs and whatever and after much effort and belt-tightening the final cheque for £1200 heads off to Capital One. We are now debt free (with the exception of the mortgage, naturally).
Of course, things never go to plan and this week I noticed that Soundslive (a rather excellent online music shop) had a number of Boss RC-50 Loop Stations in stock. Now these doo-hickeys are as rare as rocking horse shit in the UK and so I purchased one. Don’t worry, most of my music gear I pay for by selling off other instruments. It’s survival of the fittest here for the gear at Studio Lock and I am selling my old RC-20XL and some other stuff to cover the amount. The pedalboard arrived on Wednesday, but it was too hot in Studio Lock to have a fiddle, instead I waited until we had a thunderstorm and the cooler weather to arrive.
The RC-50 is a great bit of kit – it allows me to loop in stereo (at last) and its sound playback is superb. You can also record three different loops and let them organically run alongside each other. Anyway, I made my first attempt at a recording today and it isn’t like my usual looped material. Enjoy!

Well it managed to hit 33 degrees C in Studio Lock yesterday. I took refuge downstairs and did very little. Even at midnight, the temperature of the top part of the house was 30 degrees C, so we threw the quilt off the bed and slept with a thin sheet. During the night, the weather cooled and I awoke with a stiff neck. Oh well, that’s what I get for sleeping in a draught. You have been warned…

So you look backwards to go forwards. One of my own favourite lyrics was a for a song I recorded fourteen years ago when I started messing around with a 4-track recorder. In those days, I wasn’t much of a player and it was more about getting ideas down onto tape than anything else. However, I did used to enjoy scribbling lyrics and coming up with these little songs. OK – they weren’t very good. I know that, but it was my hobby and I was learning my instrument. Some may say that what I do at the moment isn’t very good either, but again, it is more about impressing myself than impressing you. Like all of my creative endeavours, I do it for me and no one else.
So the lyric is written and I really like the spirit of the original recording and when I decided that I was to put together a vocal CD for my new set, I knew I wanted to have another crack at this song. I’d been putting it off for many years mainly because I have a poor memory for my own tunes and once they are recorded I often forget how to play them – because I am not a professional player with no need to remember these follies. But with this tune I had to crack it. For the first time, I actually put down the drums and sang a guide vocal so I knew where to put the rest of the instruments. Then the bass and guitar went on next and then the lead instruments. I’d never recorded like this before and was surprised that it worked. Anyway, here is an early mix of the track for your delectation and below that are the lyrics so you can sing along. There is a deep meaning to it and is supposed to examine the omnipotent idea of maleness and one man being able to experience the feelings of all men, but I don’t know if that comes across. Ooooh, to be 21 again and be totally pretentious. 🙂

For those of you who are regular readers of this, you might remember me blathering on about my dog Alex being attacked by a mastiff in March. Well I’ve been keeping a regular log of other attacks caused by the dog involved in our attack and last night my mother told me of yet another. One of her customers told her that she was attacked by the dog the previous evening as she walked with her partner. They are friends with Mr G, the owner, and have two greyhounds themselves. They were walking these dogs when they saw Mr G with the mastiff. She went over to say hello and the dog reared up and lunged for her, ripping her cardigan. Luckily, she wasn’t bitten, but she said that was only down to her own quick reflexes. As you can imagine, she is pretty annoyed and fears for her own child when he walks the greyhound. She says she will contact the RPSCA, but what will that achieve?
Now I’ve been saying this from the beginning that it was only a matter of time before the dog attacked a person and with the summer season well and truly upon us, I often see small kids taking the family dog for a walk on the green spaces in the area. My deepest fear is that this mastiff will attack and kill one of these dogs (because a child will not know how to react) or even worse attack a child. If this was an Alsation or a Staff, I wouldn’t be so concerned, but because this dog is huge and could easily kill a grown man, I keep writing about it – it’s all I can do. My report to the RSPCA got a zero result – did he muzzle his dog, does he keep it in control? No – nothing happened. While we have a Dangerous Dogs Act, what we really need is a Dangerous Dog Owners Act.
No, I fear that my next report about this idiot will be of the fatal kind. I have my fingers crossed while typing this, but I can see the stupid inevitability of it all…