Ever had that feeling that you were somehow getting out of touch with modern developments, and that contemporary culture was passing you by?
I’m not merely talking about the endless plethora of sub-musical boy-bands which manage to fade seamlessly into each other as one after another they disappear back into the dark. There are times when I feel a sense of brotherhood with the High Court judge who legend insists hadn’t heard of the Beatles.
During the course of today I was talking to a young lady who wanted me to fill in a questionnaire. I suppose that could be misconstrued, but actually it was a competition where if I correctly graded four fat bullocks from their photographs, I’d win £200. Anyway as part of this questionnaire she rather shyly asked my age. When I told her, she said how much she wished that she to had been born in the 1950s and had lived to see the 1960s in the flesh rather than just hearing stories about them.
Actually I suppose the ‘60s might have been special somewhere, but frankly even those of us who were in our early teens at the end of them probably heard stories about the interesting bits rather more than we experienced them.
Personally I reckon the 70s had more interesting music, and as a tribute to the 70s I still dress now pretty much as I dressed then. No flairs obviously, no tie, and the hair isn’t as long as it was. Still, after chatting today one regret is that you cannot get the interestingly patterned shirts that we had back then.
I suppose that once you’ve found something worth having, you’re unlikely to abandon it for the next transient craze. Well not if you’ve got any sense. So currently I’m listening to ‘Shine on you crazy diamond’, from 1975 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8UXircX3VdM rather than some ‘emo music to cut your wrists by’.
I suppose it’s easy to fall in with sentiment so beautifully expressed as “Change and decay in all around I see,” and drift semi-detached to whatever is this week’s version of ‘modern culture.’
But this evening we had a discussion about comments one can make to telephone cold-callers. Here I mentioned my suggestion to one of them that they might wish to take up the post of honky-tonk pianist in a bordello as it brought with it a chance to work in a better ethical work environment than their current job.
But it was pointed out to me this evening that even this suggestion is based on cultural references that will doubtless mean nothing to somebody working in an Asian call-centre.
Did they put the phone down on me because I’d offended them or because they were simply bemused?
And do bordellos even have pianists any more?
(Note you may not want to answer that question even if you know the answer lest it in some way incriminate you.)
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Now that it’s feeling autumnal, it’s the perfect time to sit beside a fire contemplating the mysteries of the infinite. But between ourselves I’d prefer a good book.
Enjoy the quiet life of a middle aged cartographer. Well it was quiet until somebody finds the naked body of a young woman hastily buried in a marsh. The journey to discover her identity and hunt down her killer leads our protagonists across the Land of the Three Seas, through ambush, civil strife and even light opera.