Couple of months ago I vowed to myself that I wouldn’t commit my usual Christmas f up of not doing anything about buying presents for my nearest and dearest until the last minute. I figured this would save me some grey hairs and that doing my shopping in late November or early December would allow me to neatly sidestep the rage fueled world of the panic buyer. I started to write a couple of lists of possibilities, didn’t come up with anything too brilliant and figured, oh well, you’ve made a start, lets have a think about this again in another week or two.
Now, four or five weeks gone, I am back faced with the predicament again. Old father time has scooped up the period of sensible planning, strategic action and careful selection and stuffed it in his mouth and now I am doomed to fight my way round the West End like a confused water rat, well out of my pond and shaking my fists at the rotarians.
Yes, yes, collective audience of unmade acquaintences and Nigerian Spammers, rejoice, for Bolo is back. Although I did go through a really long spell of total blogapathy, I never stopped having a cheeky click on to bolo to see if any dubious gems of wisdom, outlandish rants or keen observations about the potential benefits of using Boris Johnson’s face as a urinal had been proffered up. This is just one of those corners of the web I would always come to. Therefore its absence due to legitimate bandwidth concerns and automated web plumbait fuc$ery left a bit of a gap. But let us rejoice this day, for the wait is over! And no doubt as a result of bolo our collective talents will soon be “discovered” by those in the know and we will all be fast-tracked to positions of extreme fulfillment within society as a whole.
I moved into a new shoebox flat a few months ago and gradually between late night rinseouts and general prevarication have been exporting the accumulated baggage of the last 10 years of my life away from Prubast’s yard. Fortunately, Prubast has thus far been pretty benevolent about the whole thing, occasionally reminding me that ‘you’ve still got a bit of stuff round at mine’, rather than scooping it into the nearest skip, for the neighbours and wandering Eastern European rag and bone men to pick over.
Still, I have been remiss in getting it out of there and as luck or lack of luck would have it, my room for laziness has run out. Prubast’s mum is applying the pressure for him to move his stuff out of her house and into his, one of his cupboards has gone damp and moldy and these two twin pressures mean that as of last night I was round there stuffing ancient handkerchiefs, flat caps and assorted debris into black sacks.
Half of these 6 black sacks now sit in my new bedroom (the other half are still in the car). I’ve yet to bring myself to root through them and yet I must. At the moment, the room is so full of boxes, bags and potential trip death hazards that I am navigating it by taking a series of short strategic hops – hop to window to close blinds, hop to bed to pass out, stub toe on cupboard, curse, fall back and nearly smash through 19″ old style CRT monitor, but bounce off onto antique battery operated pinball machine. Going through those sacks frightens me. I know that amidst the tat (the majority of the content) unstirred memories from a turbulent time lie. What’s that peaking out of that corner. Ah of course a Commodore 64. What’s that bit of paper? A long lost set of lyrics to a half finished tune. What’s that bright green shell suit top. That’s the thing I wore to the early 90s party. What’s that watch with no battery? Oh, Ninglate got that for me for my 21st.
Strange days, strange fears and no doubt above all far too much hoarding. Yes, it must be faced, mostly got rid of and the best pieces boxed up and sealed for all eternity in the attic archive. Either that or wake up suffocating under a collapsed sack of minidiscs, N64 games and lever arch files. I may have to catalogue the collection for a future post, then burn it in the garden as some kind of cathartic, heathen antic. Most of it certainly can’t be kept.. well apart from the box of lego, the set of Micro Machines, the Keep Harrow Tidy tshirt, the Oasis at knebworth programme, the poems Coybag wrote in GCSE German, the recording of the White Line, the ever growing sneaker library, my Grandad’s boots, the books, DVDs, CDs, rubber ducks, russian dolls, postcards of dinosaurs, the kinder egg toys, the stickers from Stussy, the Yamaha keyboard manual, that painting of sheep I did when I was lean, the beer towel from the Isle of Arran, the collection of hats, amusing bags, monkey related characters, chinese calligraphy set, tennis racket, skittles set, backgammon and travel car games. All these things are essential and I’m starting to think I might be in big trouble….
Curse all hackers, malingerers from spam land and crazed purveyors of herbal ecstasy, weaving their convoluted and largely automated way across internet land. Bolo, already stricken by the busyness of its staple contributors was contaminated by people looking to fill the site with links to cheerleader websites, credit card phish nonsense and shovel loads of monkey dust.
Its apprehensive and occasionally proud father, I attempted to save it, clearing out the worst of the filth and keeping an eye on the bandwidth, watching for spikes of viewing caused by security breaches, but they came too thick and fast. Too many weasels in this world these days and not enough time outside of the credit crunch design company late night, rinseout hours to put pen to paper, to tap fingers on keys.
So it went, but now its back. Shielded by the finest in plumbait protection, anti-perspirant of the spam jacker variety and a shot of methedrine in the praxial nerve. Temporarily without design template, but exact and still resounding in words, ideas and thoughtless Saturday night rib breakings. Cast up, hear ye me hearteys as Captain Haddock no doubt never said, rolling up your sleeves for a brand new month, the end of an insipient year and the last shadows of twenties zeitgeist with better trainers, but far too few remaining brain cells.