Skip to main content

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!

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Airport amusement

There is no doubt that airports can be quite amusing places. That is apart from being told by a burly security supervisor at the x-ray gate that thanks to the only contribution Yasser Arafat ever made to society, I had to remove my belt, shoes, watch and place my AK-47 in the tray provided. Watching people going around their travel ‘business’ in airports and on board the aircraft is hilarious. There are those who are plainly not very good at it, continually checking all manner of minutiae with the other members of the party. “Do we go to the gate?”, “Have we time for a beer?”, “I MUST get a pizza”. There are those who have plainly not done it much before and like their fellow travellers to be made fully aware of the exact opposite, as they point and gesture to the monitor shouting out their destination and boarding gate at every passing opportunity to one and all around them. There are those who think they are something special – despite the fact they are travelling via bu...

Are Camelot dim, dysfunctional, liars or just plain greedy?

There can be no denying that UK lottery operators Camelot are on to a good thing. Especially the overpaid management. They have been reaping the benefits of the franchise for years now - a franchise that in essence, has been licenced by the government to print money. However, I can't quite make up my mind whether the management of the Lotto are dim, dysfunctional, liars or just plain greedy, although the cynic in me answers the question when I consider the chief Executive of Camelot was complaining last year that the annual bonus on her not inconsiderable 7-figure salary had been reduced (conveniently forgetting her 18 year sojourn to date at Camelot has produced a pension we mere mortals can only dream about. How about the poor soldiers, CEO Dianne Thompson, who come back from the far-east minus a leg and have to legally fight for compensation that doesn't even touch what you earn less than a month? And they don't receive CBE's for their troubles either !). Irres...

Why your kids never reply to your mobile communications

A frequent topic of conversation among my own peer group of retired and semi-retired wrinklies is regarding Millennials (born 1981 to 2000) and early Generation Z (2001 to 2020) and their ability to be glued to their mobiles 24/7, yet never replying in a timely manner to a communication from their older kith and kin. They don't reply, yet will gladly get it touch immediately with their own peers to ask, "Do you follow Chardonnay Moron on 'Insta' - she's soooo cool". Yes, cool, but otherwise clueless, and usually an inept, Beluga-lipped, tattooed moron who prefers to spout total crap on 'soshul meeja' on topics they in reality know absolutely nothing, using this as a job, instead of actually working gainfully for a living. " Like, follow and share " are the only three words these wastes of space know. Yet they are the new Messiahs of the Millennials and Gen Z, and woe betide any Millennials or Gen Z who might miss one single word - spelt wron...