Greed dreams

As i slump into deep and incurable debt i have these hallucinations about being a midas
of the blogging world. As if i had something to say that anyone would pay money to read!

Here goes:
1. My blog is basically an autobiography but turned into a day by day thing.
So it is 1963, i have run home from school, no one opens the front door, i am 9 and worried, i run round the back of the house to find my 15-year-old sister weeping. I never saw anyone so bereft before. She tells me they shot the President.
2. I do a blog about the best charity shops in London . THRIFT -- reviews with star ratings, the lot, nb the move by Oxfam etc to speicalise with media stores, bookshops, vintage clothes
3. Lavenderhillmob21.co.uk - a very (but hardly hyper) local service focusing on every single business between here and Clapham Junction, etc etc ...

Well, I have been busy have I not!

Bloomin 'eck.
Time for a fag and snooze.

Dying to move to Dulwich!

Was down at the funeral directors today, setting up the next one. I must have noticed this before but it had never struck so loud and clear - the coffins were named after local suburbs, and the prices reflect almost precisely the average property values in each area.

So the cheapest plywood , MDF and plastic handle job might be the "Catford" coffin, while your fur-lined, solid walnut with ebony and blond oak inlay & solid brass handles with leather stiched handle covers could well be the "Dulwich Village".

Was also surprised that the eco-freak option, the wicker basket casket, is almost as expensive as your St John's Wood polished rosewood job - I would imagine this is the "Stoke Newington" of the casket trade?

Oddly, I'd imagined this sort of thing had died out in the 1960s. Why had I not realised that of course it came back stronger and stronger in each succeeding decade, in the form of the property booms, postcode and suburb-name snobbery? Estate and funeral agents - catch the synergy! First you gentrify a district, then you sell them more expensive coffins!

Oh that the Lord...had not set his canon 'gainst self-storage

Oh Lock 'n' Leave! O joy of Big Yellow! O store away, store away, we all love to store away! Squirrels we!
Is this THE growth industry of this so far utterly dismal decade? Putting all your stuff into cardboard boxes (£3 a pop) and dragging them down to your local 50 sq ft in a converted warehouse (often, it seems run by splendid young Australians, taking a big step up from the man & van businesses they had in the 90s and which kept youngish Londoners moving between their ridiculously sexualised flatshares....).

A reason to be cheerful

They keep telling me this is the most depressing day of the year.
They don't need to tell me this.
Was drilling down the M11 Tuesday night, late, needing some city air after a day at the crematorium, needing some city sound as well, prodding the stupid incomprehensible buttons on the car radio.
I hit on it!
I found a new reason for loving London, or at least for living within its electromagnetic zones...
Not really new - it was just a radio station, one I'd known about for years, but had never got around to tuning up to 104.4FM.
This happy frequency hosts a radio station that - on that particular evening - had given an hour of prime time to a tape-recording fanatic, who was sharing her favourite street sounds from her trips to the Middle East.
It's Resonance FM, and , as I later learned, you don't need to live in London to listen to it.
You can stream it here.
I'm going to find some interesting things to tell you about Resonance, as well as some links and images, and this will be the optimistic, joyous indeed start to a rather tentatively-launched blog,. I was going to call this Old Bill's Analogue Blog - but someone had already nabbed that name. It was going to be unashamedly in praise of the old. Now I am having rather different thoughts....
I'll be back before long.