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Innovations – starts like this
That’s a relief: the world’s inventive minds are still at work and determined to bring us bargains and brilliant ideas. They come in small catalogues stuffed inside the papers and offer help for everything from sore joints to mouldering record collections.
I have been considering buying a record player. Yes, an old-style turntable that plays albums and singles. Not a contemporary, dead serious unit that will connect to the state-of-the-art hi-fi that I don’t happen to have, but a self-contained box that chucks out lo-fi sound.
Dansette is the name that springs to mind, and everyone had one before the magical notion of stereo chopped the design into three pieces.
It might even have one of those six-inch spindles on which you can stack up singles so that they play one after the other until a convex one lands on a concave one and just sits there, spinning counter-productively so that the needle can’t get a sound out of it.
Like millions of music-lovers around the world, I have a huge and heavy stack of old records lying around, redundant since the advent of the compact disc.
I remember an article in the late 1980s entitled ‘CD or not CD? That is the question’, and having made the move, I have hardly touched a piece of vinyl since.
There are some who claim that the sound of a record is superior to the crystal-clear tones of a digital recording played on digital equipment, but that is not the motivation here. It is mainly the fact that I know if I bought all this old stuff on CD, or downloaded it from the Internet, I would play it once and that would be it until the next wave of nostalgia kicked in in 10 years’ time. So rather than shelling out hundreds of pounds on getting up-to-date versions of everything from Thank Christ for the Bomb by The Groundhogs to those essential Jethro Tull tracks, why not part with less than £100 for a machine that will accommodate such occasional desires in one fell swoop?
I’m not at all attracted by the presence on these machines of a facility to play 78s, so that you can schhhhk play schhhhk 78s78s78s78s that don’t always stick but might jump as a form of light relief. But that is only because I haven’t got any.
And Casual Clothes goes like this…
You know you’re a fascinating mass of contradictions, underneath that familiar exterior. But look out when the world sees you out of your working outfit, dressed as… someone else.
There are few sights more ludicrous than seeing people you only associate with work dressed in casual clothes. You know, the office type who you would swear relaxes in the evenings by taking off his jacket and tie as a wild statement of freedom, with velour slippers as evidence of his love of luxury.
But there he is, wearing stripy shorts and a t-shirt proclaiming ‘You don’t have to be mad to wear this, just severely lacking in taste’.
Some people seem made to dress in a formal way, even when downing a devil-may-care second glass of Liebfraumilch.
Not for them that morality-eroding denim look – they know that a nice pair of slacks is what you need. It was good enough for David Niven and it’s good enough for them.
So you will often catch someone on a fortnight off, knees exposed for the first time in a year and looking as though they had just been dramatically miscast in a play.
Like John Major playing Robinson Crusoe or Dale Winton in The Frank Bruno Story, they just don’t come across all that convincingly.
It is all an illusion, of course. It’s just a question of what we are used to when we look at them.
Take someone whom you are accustomed to seeing with a wheelbarrow in his hands and put him in a dinner jacket with a gold bow tie: he could well look as though he had just mugged someone on the way into the function and stolen his clothes. Because he is playing against type, he could look like a bouncer rather than a guest.