Any Trouble

Straight into the alternative

I passed a very young guy today, puffing on one of those e-cigarettes. He was so young, that he could only ever have smoked the newfangled version of the old-fashioned cancer-stick.

There will be a new generation of 'smokers' hitting on those plastic tubes with various liquids floating about in them, I guess.

Any Trouble

After last weekend's Dr Feelgood voyage of (re) discovery, I looked up Stiff Records on line and was reminded that these guys were on their roster. I saw them a few times, somewhere in Kingston, I think, maybe the King's Tun but it was so long ago I'm really not sure what the pub was called.

They put out an album that got rave, front page reviews in the music press (then I picked up the weeklies: The NME (naturally, that was the daddy of the rock press); Sounds (bit of the new kid on the block); and Melody Maker (the staid one, with the older writers), and Any Trouble, and, I think, Where are all the nice girls were suddenly plastered all over the place picking up five stars from the live and album reviewers, before, in that classic “build 'em up, knock 'em down” media hype game they disappeared again, back to the small pub circuit.

I'm going to have another listen, over thirty years later, to see whether I've my rose-tinted ears on (again).

The DWP

If ever you doubt that you've fallen asleep and woken up in Terry Gilliam's Brazil, here's the letter from the DWP, sent to my mum, not copied to anyone else (my mum doesn't know a letter from a teabag from a hole in the ground at the moment, nor is ever likely to again, that's why they're involved in the first place), with the lines:

If you have speech or hearing difficulties, please contact us using a telephone on...

And:

If you want large print or Braille in the future...