Retail Therapy

Shopping for stuff you don’t really need is so much more interesting than the weekly trawl round Tesco, dodging loose children with armfuls of sweets their parents are going to make them take back. It’s even better if you don’t spend any money! I quit my job just before Xmas. It was just time to move on. My last day was a week ago last Friday. I was touched to get some Virgin Vouchers and book tokens. So, yesterday I took a wander out to spend them. This is what I got;

Black Books, Boxed Set Series 1 & 2

Isn’t Black Books just one of the funniest thing that’s been on TV for ages? If I won the lottery and could just do something as a pastime rather than needing to make a living, I’d have a bookshop. It would probably only open between midday and one every other Saturday, but it would be mine.

Morrissey – You are the Quarry.

Morrissey has been a hero for longer than I care to remember. I was driving to work some time ago and Hand in Glove was being played on the radio. As it ended the DJ said “That’s Hand in Glove from The Smiths, released 20 years ago today.” It cut me like a knife, I felt very old. Before The Smiths I was a rancid head-banger. After I was a Wilde reading dandy. Since The Smiths split in 88, Morrissey has sort of meandered. His first solo album was as good as any Smiths release and spawned some great singles – Every Day is Like Sunday for example. Then came some mediocrity, he moved to LA and many thought that would be it. Last year though he popped up in an hour long TV documentary, looking and sounding like his old self. His humour is misunderstood by many and he can be pompous, but after the release of Irish Blood, English Heart the fact that he still had to say, and hadn’t lost his poetic way of saying it was clear. It’s good to have him back.

Tommy – Richard Holmes

The First World War fascinates me and I’m not entirely sure why. Most books on the war (like John Keegan’s superb The First World War) focus on the high level facts and figures, how and why it happened, the ebb and flow of the battles, the appalling brutality of it all. This book is slightly different. Holmes has studied the personal effects, diaries and papers of hundreds of the ordinary troops in the trenches. As he says “There is something unutterably poignant about a diary entry written by somebody who didn’t know whether he would be alive to eat his supper that day.” Indeed there is. From these papers he pieces together what the day to day life was like for ‘Tommy Atkins’ on the front line. It’s dreadfully moving, and makes you wonder how anyone returned to a normal life after witnessing something like

.. a bridge, composed of a compact mass of human bodies over which I gingerly stepped. I was not at all squeamish, the sight of dead men having lost its terror for me, but making use of corpses, even enemy corpses, for bridge building purposes seemed about the limits of callousness.

It’s hard to disagree.

Thanks to everyone who contributed to my vouchers.