Nostalgia Part 2:

Posted the other day about how much I hate nostalgia or at least I think I did.  I can't seem to find the post.

Anyway...

In bed with the lurgi yesterday I spent a lot of time propped up on pillows doing my best to look wan and interesting - and as ill as I felt. I always feel such a fraud when I'm not well.  After a while I got bored with looking as pathetic as I could so I started reading Roger Fulton's massive Encyclopedia of TV Science Fiction, and marvelling at the vast number of long forgotten television sf shows that had been made over the years.  Some I was familiar with: Baylon 5, Star Trek, Quatermasses, Doctor Who, some I had heard of but never seen: Quark,  Space Rangers, some I had never heard of but wished I had seen like Star Maidens (Anlgo-German SF comedy), and some I had heard of seen but wish I hadn't: Lexx, The Starlost, Jason of Star Command, Jupiter Moon etc. and then... and then... and then I came to Phoenix Five, a cheapo sixties Australian Star Trek knock-off.  And I was suddenly awash with nostalgia. Pure grade A finest-kind pure uncut nostalgia. My god! Phoenix Five!  I hadn't thought about Phoenix Five in years....  suddenly I was seven again.  Non-specific warm cuddly deja vu washed all over me.  How the hell could I have forgotten Phoenix Five?

I pulled out my phone and went searching on Youtube:

Five minutes later I'm totally baffled.  I've never seen this before in my life.  I have no recollection of this at all. Total Blank. I had never seen an episode of Phoenix Five - I was suffering from Mistaken Nostalgia.

 I came to the conclusion that I didn't need to fake it.  I was iller than I thought.

Here We Go

Here's my entry for this month's What's the Stupidist Thing you Did This Month? competition:

I went to plug in my phone to recharge it and noticed, not for the first time, that the plug on the phone end of the USB cable was broken.  The little plastic casing had just come apart.  I thought I would fix it.  So, I got some superglue and glued it back together.  Then plugged it into my phone.

An hour later...

I know it's a bit late but I just came across this:

  

The bereft inhabitants of Leeds (population of 750,700, the third largest city in the United Kingdom) turn out to share their collective grief during Thatcher's funeral.

This is horrifying. Well I find it so. Prompted by Doug Savage of Savage Chickens fame saying nice noises about my cartoons in an email to Merriol - she knows all the best people - I went and had a look at the cartoony blog. I was stunned to see that it is TWO years since I did the last cartoon there. I could have sworn it was only matter of a couple months. So I drewed a new one:

I really like the designs on Tesco's own-brand, low-budget basics 'Everyday' range. They're interesting and to me combine just the right mixture of cheapness (subtext: we're not spending a lot of money on the packages) but without being cheap (subtext: the working-class oiks most likely to buy this stuff have no design aesthetic).

 

Maybe the people at Tesco's have noticed that us oiks do have taste - or, more likely, they've noticed that  the middle-classes are broke too and are as likely to be found shopping at Lidl's and Aldi's these days. For whatever reason, they've put some thought into the new look.  Much better than their old designs which did look cheap and tatty.  A real design vacuum.  Hardly inspiring.

And I'm not the only one who likes the newer ones: introducing the Post Office's Everyday Dangerous Goods leaflet:

Not quite sure why you can't send snow through the post but I'm sure Lord MacPostOffice, or Amazon, or  whoever owns it these days have their reasons.

I got away from everything the other day.  Went on one of my round-Scotland, crappy-book-buying days out. (to be honest it's less of a round Scotland than an across Scotland: back and forth, from here to Inverness and back via both sides of  Loch Ness.)  Next time I go I'll have to find a new route as my main  stop, The Shed at Kingusie, is closing.   I loved The Shed.  The books used to be stacked in piles along one side tottering, sometimes mouldering, piles of books in front of a wall of crammed shelves.  For the last  few years used to visit once or twice a year and move the whole lot  - once coming away with 70 trash treasures.  This last trip I brought away a few Penguins for the old long-term obsessive pre-ISBN Penguin collection (currently at some 639 books) and a couple of old Pans for the more recent, and as yet less well defined, obsessive old Pan collection (pre-decimal edition certainly but I'm swithering about including pre-decimal ones with ISBNs...* )

The point of this waffling is that I was reminded, on my travels, of something that happened to me last time I went walkabout like this. I meant to blog it at the time but I never did.  It was one of those moments when I really realised why it is that I love Scotland so much.  I was in a charity shop wanting to buy a couple of very cheap books. (There's a surprise!) I'd never been in the shop before and, as it turned out, I only had a ten pound note on me.  The woman behind the counter opened her till and rummaged around for a couple of moments:

"Are ye sure don't have anything smaller?" she asked. "I'm awfy short of change here."

"No," I replied. "Sorry.  That's all I've got."

She looked at her cash drawer again as if willing a few fivers to appear.

There was an awkward pause.

"Look," I said. "Why don't I just go to the Post Office down the road and get some change?"

"Oh, that would make things easier," she said.

She reached into the drawer. "While you're there you wouldn't mind getting me some change too would you?"

And handed me, a total stranger, a ten pound note.

*Christ! I miss sex.

I love books. Tatty old paperbacks especially.  Sometimes I buy them because I like the author, sometimes because they're  'I have always meant to get round to reading it' books, but, to be honest,  I mainly but them for the lurid covers.  I mean, who wouldn't be happy knowing that their bookshelves contain masterpieces of art like these:
 

 

 

Most of my collection of mouldering pulps are Science Fiction (or what passed for it in the good old days, ferinstance: these days no publisher (in their right minds) would read  beyond page three of the  manuscript of The Master Weed  which details the thrilling adventures of a Captain Video-like space-ranger and his identical, remote-controllable simulacrum robot. In the book they thwart the evil plans of a mad scientist whose dastardly scheme to take over the planet Mars hinges upon everyone on the planet simultaneously smoking drugged cigarettes. So cunning is his plan that they all do just that! He would have got away with his cunning plot too, if it hadn't been for our meddling hero who turned up at the fateful smoke-in event as a robot and therefore immune to the doped ciggies. Even then he had to pretend to be drugged until he could rescue the token semi-naked space bimbo which he did by skewering the villain to a control panel with a casually discarded screwdriver and then electrocuting her head.

Only in the last few years have I come to appreciate the joys of crappy books' cover art from other genres.  Here are a couple of recent buys I really like:

 

  

 I have even started looking at the 'romance' racks at the local charity shops and discovered gems like:

 

I love the cover of this one but the book is brilliant: a laugh-out-loud, tosh, Gothic romance, reworking of Jane Eyre set in contemporary America - in which a plain English girl becomes heir to a vast American fortune. She flies over to find a transported Irish castle, atop a 'mile high' mountain, owned by the mysteriously Byronic Benjamin Hollister, a tortured musical genius with 'long tapering fingers' and a secret, hidden in the locked tower (not a former wife, but mad cousin Gwenyth who is a werewolf), he also has a mute servants (tongue cut out by mob) with a pet wolf, and a Hungarian scientist working on 'secret experiments' in the laboratory. There's an incredibly convenient 'quicksand pit' destined, from its first appearance on the page in chapter three, to be the setting of the dramatic climax, and lots of disgruntled locals ready to form a convenient torch-wielding mob for the ending and enough tedious 'who married whom, and why, and when they didn't marry someone else' backstory (all related in mind-numbing detail) to keep the average soap opera busy for years. At one point our heroine is convinced she is not only in love with a mysteriously Byronic werewolf but that he is also her half-brother to boot! Oh the hand wringing!

I especially loved those moment where the author started paragraphs with sentences like, 'But alas! It was not to be...'

Basically there are whole new vistas of bad books opening up to me. (Though why people ever read more than two Westerns is still mystery.)  Yesterday, looking through the nasty plastic-coated, metal book spinner on which I found Gwenyth many moons ago, I found:

 

Swithering ensued.  It was only a quid but.... The cover didn't grab me and scream "BUY!"  It was okay but it didn't have that certain, killer something that makes me know I have to own a particular book.  (The certain something that would leave people battered and bruised if they ever came between me and a copy of this:

  

I'd never heard of Ruby M Ayers before.  I turned the book over to read the blurb. (This is, I guess, the way most people buy books.)  The blurb told me nothing about the book, but a lot about the author.  Born 1883, died 1955... 'wrote more than 160 novels'... 160! - my interest is piqued.  I have a current project to try books by once popular, prolific authors I have never read:  John Creasey, Erle Stanley Gardner, Sax Rohmer, Leslie Charteris,  people like that.  People I'd heard of but had never actually got round to reading.  Could I be bothered to extend my vague project to include authors I hadn't heard of just because they were prolific - and presumably once popular?  Tempting but if I followed that line  I would pile up thousands of authors before I got anywhere.  (Following the original course I have just realised would mean I would have to read a Barbara Cartland novel before very long - horrors!)

 I was swithering all the way until I read the final paragraph:

Her attitude to writing was entirely professional.  When questioned about her methods, she said "First I fix the price.  Then I fix the title.  Then I write the book."

Which I think is one of the most extraordinary things I have read on a blurb.  'Buy this book,' it was saying,  'This book was written by a solid professional cynical book writer.  None of your enthusiastic, amateur literature here just good old British workmanship!'

I had to buy it.

I may even read it some day.

Another Gag for the Stand-up Routine I Will Never Perform

Best Bela Lugosi voice:

"I am the hypnotist for the UK downhill bobsleigh team..."

(Makes mysterious hypnotic hand passes.)

"You are feeling slippy.... very slippy...."

I am NOT giving up my day job.