as days pass by, by Stuart Langridge

Blimey, I go away for four days and all sorts of exciting things happen. Firstly, though, I went to an 80s club this weekend. You know the sort; pictures on the wall of women with spiky hair and mountains of blusher and legwarmers, that sort of thing. This one even had a plastic foreshortened 3d model of the front of the Knight Industries Two Thousand. Anyway, the music choice annoys me: they only really play 80s synth-pop. Duran Duran, Tiffany, Robert Palmer, chart stuff. What about all the other things that were being done in the eighties? Hip-hop, say? Metal? 70s clubs annoy me for the same reason; it’s all disco. There’s very little funk, no punk at all, so on and so forth. Substitute in your own favourite maligned musical genres.

However, all that said, it was great. Really. I forgot how much I liked all that music. Yeah, yeah, kitsch, whatever. In 70s clubs, OK, I can sing along with the music, but it doesn’t really mean anything — not the lyrics, but the sound of the thing. There’s no evocative memory, no nostalgia, which is unsurprising for someone who was only four when the seventies ended. But the 80s stuff: a memory on every chord! Dancing really fast with Paula Busby. I wanted to be wearing a tie so I could put the thin end outwards. I spent half the evening thinking about and talking about people I haven’t thought of in years, like Julia Newbury, who I fancied rotten nearly fifteen years ago. So, in general, suppress that anti-kitsch urge. It’s great.

On to more mundane matters:

• Sign Builder: produces PDFs of all those warning signs you get in warehouses and whatnot with your text on them (via someone, but I’ve lost the link)
• I ended up condemned to Dis, one of the cities in Hell (and final resting place for heretics and heresiarchs), in the Dante’s Inferno Test (via someone I haven’t lost the link for)
• Danny O’Brien is justifiably worried that Beverley Hughes, the Minister of State for Citizenship, has quoted a figure of 2000 responses received for polling in the Government’s solicitation exercise for the introduction of identity cards, when at over 5000 (mostly negative) responses were sent through STAND’s Fax Your MP service. I do hope that this is just an innocent mistake, although our beloved civil service does appear to make a lot of these mistakes in their own favour on issues like this and very rarely makes one in our favour.
• Sam Buchanan quotes the American government saying that Canada “places too much emphasis on civil liberties”, and acerbically observes that he is “interested in why concern for civil liberties has become a threat to freedom”.
• I got 136 on the BBC Nation IQ Test 2003, which I was pretty pleased with. Even if I didn’t get the one about litres and kilograms.

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