Baby's First Youtube Embed

I'm long used to my favourite bands splitting up. Madness split when I was 10, for example, a useful early lesson in the lack of permanence of everything. And so it's been ever since: Kenickie, Bis, The Dismemberment Plan, McLusky, Stereolab... I know that my current favourites will go the same way sooner or later, that one day Los Campesinos! will decide that they want to get proper jobs and that Falco will get fed up with looking on indulgently while Kelson hurls himself into the crowd, but that's fine. (And anyway, I suspect Half Man Half Biscuit will outlive us all.)

Chas & Dave haven't been among my favourites at any point in the last 26 years, but the 7 year old me would probably have been a bit sad that they've called it a day and, particularly for the reasons given, so am I.

(NB: The phrases 'Snooker Loopy' and 'LOL' will not appear in close proximity at any point in the following. Although I do recall being on the bus coming back from swimming and a mass singalong of it starting, primarily for the excellent opportunities for saying the words "nuts", "balls" and "screw" that the song provided. This what being a 10 year old growing up in Dagenham is all about.)


Look! On the Rockney label and everything! With my infant doodlings on the label to boot!


I'm not sure quite why I liked Rabbit at the time. It might have been the incongruous nature of being a song called Rabbit (not that I would have been using words like "incongruous" at the time; I don't use words like that very often now), or possibly it was the ending, the "yep yep rabbit rabbit yep yep rabbit rabbit bunny bunny jabber jabber" bit. Listening again I can't imagine that it fitted in with my understanding of pop music as it stood then and I think that this rather suited me, despite only being 5 or 6; some sort of interest in the different (or some strange sort of musical snobbbery) that I've never really got over. (I was going to attempt some sort of conceptual link to listening to Fuck Buttons while walking in the park and feeling rather giddy, but it wouldn't really wash.) These days I wouldn't say it's as splendid as Jake Thackray's treatise on the same subject, or that my experiences with women suggest that the problem they describe is a common one, but I do admire it's use of the word "incessant" in a rockney sing-a-long. S'not as good as Gertcha, mind, but then I don't have a copy of Gertcha.

I don't have a copy of Chas & Dave's Christmas Jamboree album either, but I definitely wanted one. I recall a family party where a copy was present and my insisting on it being played. Looking at the tracklisting I can still remember bits of it; there's no other reason why I would know how Robert E. Lee goes, although I am rather foggier on the subject of Too Fat Polka. Sounds like a good 'un though. A pity Spotify only appears to have a re-recorded Best Of.

I eventually saw Chas & Dave at the Ian Dury Memorial Concert thingummy. I seem to recall that there was some sort of spurious justification for them being on the bill; I can't imagine Ian Dury being a fan, but maybe he was, some sort of non-authentic Cockney thing maybe. At the start I think there was a lot of the aging geezer equivalent of "Snooker Loopy! LOL!", and I wasn't expecting much, but by the end they'd charmed the crowd. Or maybe they'd just charmed me and I just assumed that everyone else was charmed as well, that seems more likely. They ended with this, and it was lovely, although I could do without the soft focus/sincere look close-ups in the video.

Write things down

The man from the mortgage company is sitting in my armchair. (Mine as in the armchair in my flat, obviously; I was sitting on the sofa.) He is quietly tapping away on his laptop. I begin to wonder about the man from the mortgage company. I know he's married with kids. I wonder how old the kids are - not very, I guess, if they've broken the lid of his laptop. I wonder how he met his wife. Was she buying a mortgage? Or did they meet in some other social situation? As he taps away I try to imagine him on the dancefloor somewhere, wowing the womenfolk of (I'm guessing) Essex with his moves. He doesn't look like the type, but then how would I know what the type looks like if I've never seen them?

I've been thinking about this sort of thing a lot lately. It's probably not healthy.

The man from the mortgage company likes certainty. He recommends the fixed rate rather than the tracker, because that way you know what you're going to pay. (And because taking out a tracker when the interest rate is low and only likely to rise is plainly a bad move, but that doesn't fit with my my narrative, so sod that.) He recommends the insurance policy that always pays a set amount rather than decreasing because that way you know what you're going to get. I like this. I'm all for certainty.

He taps away quietly. Apart from the two-finger tapping It is deathly silent. I had turned the radio off when he arrived in case it disturbed us (and to stop me from worrying about him judging my choice of radio station). Even the people downstairs seem to have stopped arguing for a bit. Occasionally a motorbike roars down the road nearby, but that's all that can be heard. There are no attempts at small talk. Possibly this is because he is very serious and needs to concentrate, or possibly it's because he's realised that I'm horribly out of my depth when it comes to both mortgages and small talk and doesn't want to have me floundering again. He concludes our business, we shake hands again and I show him the way out.

Also, I seem to be worryingly close to buying 35% of a flat. Fuck!

This is my world of today

It had been a good day. Things have been rather getting me down of late - talk to me about affordable housing and I'll bite your head off. Possibly literally - and a long walk around some eroding coastline, breathing the undeniably fresh air and then eating chips on the seafront was precisely what I needed. The journey home was swift and I arrived back at the station feeling that if all wasn't necessarily right with the world, then at least the bad things weren't so bad that they couldn't be dealt with. To add to my air of contentedness, the bus came around almost straight away.

A woman had sat in the seat in front of mine. This was not a problem. At the second stop, two young women with a pram boarded the bus. This also was not a problem. One of the young women was holding on to the baby rather than having it in the pram. She recognised the woman in the seat in front of mine and began to talk to her. This was a problem, because when the bus moved off she was in the awkward position of not being able to grab hold of anything to steady herself. The sensible thing to do would be to take a seat.

However, despite the seat next to the woman in front being closer, and despite the seat next to the woman in front being next to the woman in front who she knew and had started talking to, she decided to take the seat next to mine. However, this didn't stop her from carrying on her conversation. Which, this being Essex, was conducted at such high volume that I could hear it over my headphones and, this being Essex, was unbelievably banal, taking in trips to Lakeside, the possible availability of work now that the students have gone back, the child's resemblance to its father, and other details that I really, really, did not want to know.

I tried an exasperated glance at her. It didn't work.

I considered my other options. I could have asked politely why she'd chosen to sit next to me when the person she wanted to speak to was sat in front, but I suspected that this might go down quite badly. I could have pointed out that actually talking over someone in this way was quite rude, but this would also have gone down badly. I could have questioned what was likely to become of the unfortunate infant cursed with at least one plainly rather stupid parent, but this might have resulted in punching from two sides. So I looked out of the window, increased the volume of my headphones to a fairly painful level and hoped one of them would get off soon. They lasted about half of my journey, which was still far too long.