My Old School

      1970s  "New School"                                                  Artist's Impression of "New" New School

Yours Truly

A year after I left my junior school they demolished its Victorian buildings and built a new one a quarter of a mile away. I recall thinking it was a bit of a shame but the new site looked fabulously modern, and that those younger kids were really lucky (while I was now ensconced in the altogether more scary and dark secondary school 100 yards away).

On a visit last week to my Dad, who still lives nearby, I learned that this too was being torn down and replaced.

My initial reaction was to feel old. So old that the school which replaced my old school was itself now so ancient that it must be put out of its misery by the wrecking ball. That so many pupils had passed through its corridors since I was too old to do so, that it was just used up and worn out. Pretty depressing stuff, especially when you never quite think of yourself as a grown-up.

Then I figured it out. Should have been obvious actually. It must be down to poor building standards. The whole place was probably riddled with damp, maybe even asbestos, like in Our Friends in the North. Those poor kids were no doubt coughing and spluttering all day instead of learning. Just one of those things, really.

Yes, that'll be it.

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Famous First Words

I've had a bit of a fad on examining song lyrics of late, and whilst I don't think it's essential to the writing of a great song to have great lyrics (for example The Stones' Satisfaction), it certainly helps. Those that I'm most drawn to are the ones that paint a vivid picture, and it is often the first couple of lines which help to set the scene for the whole song, to draw the listener into this little snapshot of a life.

Here are 10 examples of opening lines which I am particularly fond of, for differing reasons. In a couple of cases it's simply that they make me laugh:

1. Simon & Garfunkel - The Sound of Silence

Hello darkness my old friend,
I've come to talk with you again

2. The Jam - Down in the Tube Station at Midnight

The distant echo - of faraway voices boarding faraway trains,
To take them home to the ones that they love, and who love them forever 

3. Marvin Gaye - What's Going On

Mother, mother, there's too many of you crying,
Brother, brother, brother, there's far too may of you dying

4. Stevie Wonder - Living for the City

A boy is born in hard time Mississippi
Surrounded by four walls that ain't so pretty

5. Fountains of Wayne - Michael and Heather at the Baggage Claim

Michael and Heather at the baggage claim, tired of playing the waiting game
Every bag has got a different name, Michael and Heather may never get home again.

6. Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young - Ohio

Tin soldiers and Nixon coming, we're finally on our own
This summer I hear the drumming, four dead in Ohio

7. Arctic Monkeys - When the Sun Goes Down

So who's that girl there? I wonder what went wrong so that she had to roam the streets
She don't do major credit cards, I doubt she does receipts. It's all not quite legitimate

8. The Beatles - Penny Lane

In Penny Lane there is a barber showing photographs, of every head he's had the pleasure to have known
And all the people that come and go, stop and say hello

9. Happy Mondays - Kinky Afro

Son, I'm thirty. I only went with your mother 'cos she's dirty
And I don't have a decent bone in me. What you get is just what you see, yeah

10. Ben Folds - Bitch Went Nuts

The bitch went nuts. She stabbed my basketball
And the speakers to my stereo

So those are my 10, though I could have come up with a lot more. How about yours?


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The Battle of Good Versus Evil

You will see from my profile or from the Twitter thingy over there > that my name is Simon. I wasn't that keen on it at school (Simon the Pieman! Simon Templar! Simon Smith and his Amazing Fucking Dancing Fucking Bear! etc.), but I've come to accept it more in later years.

I'm mindful however that there are people in the public eye that share my name, who are responsible for some pretty terrible things. So in order to keep the cosmic balance of the universe, I feel I need to demonstrate that for every Evil Simon there is a Good Simon. This I will do in a series of short posts, starting below.  

A bit random, perhaps. You don't get this kind of shit from your mate Baz on Facebook do you?

Good Simon No.1

Simon Wiesenthal

By Horego (Own work) [GFDL
(www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html) 

A survivor of the Nazi death camps, Simon Wiesenthal dedicated his life to documenting the crimes of the Holocaust and to hunting down the perpetrators still at large. "When history looks back," Wiesenthal explained, "I want people to know the Nazis weren’t able to kill millions of people and get away with it." His work stands as a reminder and a warning for future generations.

Evil Simon No.1

Simon Cowell

Wiki edit Jonny at en.wikipedia [GFDL
(www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html) 

The Dark Lord himself. A simple list of his "achievements" should suffice:

Sharon Osbourne; Leona Lewis; Jedward; making mentally ill people a laughing stock; telling people how to vote on election day; not knowing a decent song if it slapped him in the face; making kids more interested in Karaoke than being in a band; fucking street dance.

Here is how I like to think of him.



***STOP PRESS***
And now he's sacked our Cheryl - Britain's sweetheart. The evil bastard.

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