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Sadly, I appear to be getting old

I was totally dismayed this morning. Those of a certain age (in the UK) will remember the weekly ritual of popping into the newsagent (for those on their phones 24/7, a newsagent is a place that sells newspapers and banned substances such as cigarettes and cans of sugar masquerading as fizzy drinks - if you want to know what a newspaper is, google it on your phone) on a Friday for their weekly fix of the New Musical Express.

Diving into its tabloid newsprint multi-ring, nitrogen-containing compound (dyes) covered pages that on the one hand ensured you were fully-up-to-date on Alice Cooper's follow up to "School's Out" and whether Debbie Harry was shooting a calendar topless, while on the other, you covered your shirt in ink. You could also check when and where Ian Dury tickets were going on sale, a mere four weeks before the event, by ticket collection in person, at the price on the ticket and with no booking fee (as was the case for all major acts in the 70's).

But alas. Totally devastated this morning. Or as the English-language killers and quiz-show hosts and guests on TV would say, "guh-id" (gutted).

I was given one free and for nothing (it is free and for nothing all over the country I am lead to believe by the chesty - but not coughing - young maiden who gave me a copy of it) in Sainsbury's this morning. And it's now reduced to a small magazine that you might expect to ignore amongst your plastic-bagged Sunday newspaper supplements. Even smaller in dimensions than Hotlist. And even more incomprehensible than Hotlist, which alone I would have thought quite a difficult feat to achieve.

Yes, apart from an advertisement for Manic Street Preacher concert tickets (for next May, plus booking fee from those nice Robbing Hoods Ticketmaster), an article by the extremely irritating and  never-off TV quiz show guest Katherine Ryan, nonsense from tax-dodgers Amazon Prime and Vodafone, a picture of the Epiphone Dot Studio guitar (£239) and a Seiko watch advertisement, where Seiko seem, for some strange reason, to think that the fact they have millionaire tennis player Novak Djokovic wearing one it might encourage me to buy one, there was absolutely nothing in NME that I actually understood.

Oh dear!
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