It ain't what it used to be...

OK, thanks for that vote of confidence, Madame B. To deal with your points: I'm an author myself, although an unusually unsuccessful one, and I know quite a few others, and I haven't noticed the knobbishness quotient being particularly high - certainly not in a world that features investment bankers, Premiership footballers and members of the Burmese military junta.
As to why two people can read the same thing and construe different meanings: I studied this at university, and could put a pretty resonable explanation together for you. But, trust me, your eyes would glaze over in seconds as soon as I started droning on about critical discourse analysis, semiotics and syntactics, and linguistic philosophy. The quick answer is that some people are stupider than others. That's all.
And does God exist? What an absurd idea. We all know our lives are ruled by the Flying Spaghetti Monster, right? (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flying_spaghetti_monster).

As to doing stream of consciousness. OK, here goes:

The office in which I work is mainly filled with people who are much younger than me – I’d guess that the average age is about 26 or 27, which I waved goodbye to quite some time ago. Mostly this is fine; I do a lot of mentoring, answer a lot of questions on procedures and stuff, and see myself as a kind of wise but kindly trendy uncle-type. They don’t ask me about My Chemical Romance and I don’t tell them about Wishbone Ash, and it’s all good.

These youngsters decided to organise a trip to a club last Friday which specialises in 80’s nights. Apparently people enjoy wearing skinny leather ties, burgundy cardigans, white socks, leg warmers, ra-ra skirts and harrington jackets, while listening to shit music. Yeah, I was mystified too. But they all wanted me to come along.

However, I was handed a lucky escape. A guy started playing a bunch of 80’s songs on his computer – ABC, Spandau Ballet, Europe, Kajagoogoo, Culture Club - and I was forcefully reminded of how much I loathed them, and so I sidled off quietly into the night when no one was looking.

The whole thing was apparently much like those School Disco nights. Now I’d rather stab myself in the face with a radioactive knife than dress up in a school uniform and dance self-consciously to music I hated when it first came out. But then I’m not in the market for getting off with anyone, and even of I was, I wouldn’t want to do it to the soundtrack of my adolescence. It was bad enough then. As the philsopher Satayana noted, ‘Those who don’t remember the past are condemned to repeat it,’ and I’m sure as shit not going to repeat the 1980’s. Once is enough.

The 80’s are when I actually did a lot of my growing up. When I look back at the 80’s, I think of the Falklands War, the Miners’ Strike, O and A levels, Greenham Common, cheap speed, going to university, falling in love for the first time. Stuff that was important, then.

But why do these kids, who are bright, and interested, and thoughtful, want to revel in a decade that they don’t really remember? Perhaps that’s the point – they don’t remember it, so they can colour it in any way they want. It still seems like a complete waste of time to me, a commodification of culture to be sold to people who don’t have any connection with it. Maybe I just work with very dreary and unimaginitive people. Get off my lawn, pesky kids!

NotHouseHusbandNot

Flattered as I am that the always-fragrant Madame B and hhn think that I could fill The Master’s boat-sized 16-hole oxblood Doc Martens, I’m in two minds about it. For starters, if I wanted to write a blog, I could have started my own long before now. The fact that I haven’t is due to a natural timidity, or modesty, which people who normally only see me when I’m in a socially enthusiastic mood – which, to be fair, is most evenings – might find difficult to believe.
But I don’t think I’m particularly egotistical. So I usually restrict my ranting to people who know me well enough not to care about it. And out of the five readers here, I’m afraid that that won’t work, and you’ll all peel off and not come back and hhn will never forgive me. My second reason for being chary about taking on hhn’s mantle is that the two of us work in rather different ways. He is a natural orator, a folksy, genial communicator. I’m more - I dunno – considered, detail-oriented.
The way this blog works is that hhn turns out 500 words of charming nonsense, Madame B manages to remind everyone that she has a clitoris, I point out how little hhn knows about a particular kind of mammal, and we’re all happy. I don’t know what you’d like me to write about if I tried to take over. Maybe if you suggested some subjects I could come up with something. Or not.