chrisp65

Our careers advice was one part of one lesson. The advice was, if your dad has a job, get him to ask his boss if they can get you a job. The comp I went to was there to find a rugby player, if there was no chance of you being that rugby player, you didn’t even have to turn up. That really isn’t very much of an exaggeration. Any interest or ability in anything beyond rugby was an inconvenience to them.

Look at that wonderfully awful cover.

I keep a tab on everyone so I don’t accidentally talk to someone that isn’t one of the cool kids. He’s regularly referencing indie bands like The Pooh Sticks, supports straight up power pop, mentions k pop. He’s almost made me listen to Spacemen 3.

Nobody burned down a golf club, it was shoezone, citizens advice, greggs. The areas with a Waitrose appear to have been largely unaffected. Poor people told for generations that poorer people are the problem. Poor people with the basic education and health provision sufficient to make them ok for crap jobs and soldiering. Trouble is, the guys that have been here a good few generations think they deserve a home, whereas the new arrivals will live ten in a house. Ten in a house increases landlord yield and reduces wage demand at the workplace. When the state religion is GDP and the devil is inflation, things begin to get a bit tight for Wayne and Julie.

Barry Island beach today will have coaches of visitors from the Midlands. Those people from Wolverhampton and Dudley will be having the kiss me quick experience, sat on the sand with their packed lunches, trying to resist the kiddy pressure to buy a £5.99 bucket and spade. It’s been like that for 100 years. Except now, for the last couple of decades those Midlands bus trippers are predominantly of Asian origin. Someone doing a survey of Whitmore beach could very likely get a stat that it’s 25% Asian on that one beach. Meanwhile, walking distance away, I’m sat eating a £1.50 cannoli with my flat white in a nice cup, and there are 3 electric Volvos being charged and all the other people here appear to also be tourists, but Dutch. Looking around, this is pretty close to 100% white. I don’t think it’s that Asian mum’s and dads don’t like pebbles. I don’t think it’s that the Dutch don’t like chips. I think this beach has EV charging points, and the other beach has paper cups. We’re being filtered by budget, not religion.

I think the population of London is about the same as the combined total population for Scotland, N Ireland, and Wales so I’m not sure it could be described as small. I think we do have issues around the ghettoisation of populations but this likely comes more from money than skin colour. New arrivals with no money will naturally end up in the poorest areas, traditionally the east end of London, now just as likely to be Leeds or Bradford. It’s probably the obvious visual queues of skin colour that make people think that maybe Bradford has more immigration than some other area of nearby Leeds. Then you get a story on the news where the riot or disturbance in Leeds was around the Roma and east European community. Just as much an immigrant as a Bangladeshi, but a bit less brown. It really will depend on where you go within an individual city too. If you have tourist money and visit Cardiff you will likely go down the bay. The 100 metres that hugs the coast is white tourist land. But a 5 minute walk will deliver you in to one of the UK’s largest and oldest Somali communities. What would once have been dockland has been gentrified with office worker apartments where once the West Indian community of Tiger Bay would have been dominant. There are still black people around Bute Street, they rarely have the financial clout to be buying up the new waterfront apartments and then letting them out as air BnB. So they are two streets back, out of sight. I can’t imagine this is the exception, I’d expect a similar pattern of geography pretty much everywhere. Money as the driver. Rather than religion.

One of the eBay shops I follow regularly has used hifi equipment priced in the thousands, and I don’t mean a hifi set up, I mean a cartridge, or some cables. I think that’s just a whole different hobby that feeds in to this whole audiophile thing. Personally, I like records, if I had good ears and an interest in perfection I’d surely be going digital and building an acoustic listening room. But I’ve got tinnitus and solid bouncy walls and a giant dining table in the room and I’m listening to records that were recorded whilst someone chatted in the background. So yeah, I’ll happily pick up the Nice Price version. That was basically the conversation in Spillers yesterday when I returned records I said were fine to be sold. The question was, as someone of a certain age that buys vinyl, was I happy with the quality of those records or would I have returned them if I hadn’t been warned. They were absolutely fine and anybody not cleaning a record and then expecting perfection is just that pretentious dim knob.

Ok, well I only checked today, the BBC was 2 days ago, and I wouldn’t entertain bothering with Sky.

What ‘news’? Ive just checked all the way down the BBC news page and there is nothing, I went on the Nation website and there was nothing, and a quick look on S4C and ITV News including world news and politics all for today…there is nothing.

Out of genuine curiosity, in that I have twitter and don’t see any of this stuff, how are you guys without twitter seeing this stuff? What social media is feeding you this?

Any used record shop will give you a decent copy of this for under a tenner. Discogs has them for £10 including postage. I paid £6 for an as new perfect copy. HMV:

First home game of the season, so meeting up with friends and talking absolute shite for a couple of hours. With obvious sympathy and soothing words for the one that writes the programme and managed to give us a team consisting of Evan Press twenty times.

Oh it is one thing to arrange some sort of meet up, but to actually have an unplanned encounter out in the wild, that’s like getting a shiny in your first pack of panini stickers. Excellent story. Anybody fancies meeting me in the wild, I’m outside Greggs in Walsall today shouting about getting my country back. Come and say hi. I’m 50’s, balding, less aggressive than I look.

Yep, them’s my roots, parallel parking knackered old cars in terraced streets. Morris Marina, VW Beetle, ‘68 Spitfire just parallel parked with the one palm of the hand waving magic on the steering wheel. Got an automatic now, with sensors, and a camera, and auto braking. Oh, and a double garage. My parking ability has deteriorated somewhat.

There’s a very strong campaign here at the moment, No Farmers, No Food. It feels a little misdirected. Nobody has suggested there should be no farmers, everyone appreciates that post Brexit they need some sort of subsidy. But what they appear to want is free money with no strings, whilst being a major cause of pollution. Personally, I strongly believe national security starts with food. The food sector from field to your bin, is spectacularly wasteful.

it’s part of the deal to get your farming grants you have to put up to 20% of land aside, for things like water slow down, bugs and wildlife, trees, and a buffer zone between chicken shit run off and rivers. The river Wye is dying due to the run off of nitrates from intensive farming, something has to be done. The farmers were hoping for free money to replace the EU money post Brexit. You don’t have to set aside, you also don’t have to accept the money. The waste in the industry makes 20% set aside look like small beans.

It’s been a hell of a 35 days. What legislation have the introduced that has destroyed our ability to produce food? Genuine question. Personally, I think that long before we starve, we’ll probably learn to consume less and to waste less and not to have quite so much land dedicated to feeding our food to other animals and we might even realise people are already starving whilst we are buying food for 36 million pets. Have we considered eating illegal immigrants?

Look, I’m a gonna call this 10” an album. It plays on 33. The Flamingods, Hyperborea. Just a whirling thirteen minutes of joy, limited to 250 numbered copies back in 2017. With something close to motorik drumming behind the swirling guitar, so a real bonus. But I’ve currently got a couple of them, they have a die cut and numbered sleeve and no inner sleeve so subsequently they are covered in paper off cut and dust. So the deal is, I play them, keep the best one, return the other to the shop if it’s saleable quality, or I bin it. Two played, both fine after a quick wipe. I mean, personally, I’d expect to get a record home and clean it.

If I don’t have a landline, how on earth would Microsoft India fix my computer when I’ve been hacked?

or both!

That’ll be me.

Laugh, or cry?

I’m no grass, but plod will be along soon to tell everyone there’s a headphones topic in the tech thread.

Are we absolutely sure the person doing the news in mime wasn’t the BSL interpreter?