The Jumble Sale and other stories

 The queue outside the nearny church yesterday afternoon reminded me out the leaflet that had come through the door. The major horse racing having been abandoned due to the weather, and me not having been to a jumble sale certainly in this millennium, I decided to have a look. They haven't changed much, most of the stuff is really the most desolate tat but there's always some weirdo who'll buy it.

Among some deservedly very rare books were copies of The Iliad and Ulysses. But you simply can't give CDs away these days. Best of Bowie and Elvis Costello's Armed Forces at 20p each. I've never had Bowie on CD. 

Disc 1 of Bowie is just about what it says on the tin if you b/f Heroes in place of maybe John, I'm Only Dancing but whether Space Oddity's re-mastering is an improvement is open to doubt. Look, we want it how we remember it. There is no improving on nostalgia. But what a catalogue of genius that disc is. Again, the time and place is all important and those of us born in, say, 1959, have every reason to think Bowie as important as The Beatles if maybe not Tamla Motown. I'm playing it now just so that I have played it because quite honestly I know it inside out.

I had to phone someone so I picked on you.

 

Not long after he died, the late afternoon sun was setting behind the traffic passing on the M27 which caused shadows to flick across the open-plan office. It's David Bowie trying to send us a message, I said. Quite what his message had ever been, I wouldn't like to say but it was 'state of the art' art.

As was Elvis Costello's which at the time seemed to be from another generation but from Hunky Dory to My Aim is True was six years which now counts as no time at all.

--

A subsidiary reason for going to the jumble sale was on the off-chance of a new table lamp, for reading by in the front room. The other evening it just went out. A new bulb didn't help, neither did a fuse in the plug. In a plot that could have come from Terry and June I broke the lamp in trying to dismantle it. It looked like being thrown away after all these years which was going to be sad. I looked at Amazon, Argos and other internet places and found nothing quite so disarmingly, charmingly not trying to be an artefact in its own right.

But this morning I bought some superglue and, after further comic set piece scenes, it is amazingly in one piece and working and, even more amazingly, I'm not electrocuted.

It wasn't the fuse in the plug that goes into the wall that had gone, it was the fuse that goes into the extension and all that heartache was caused by my unwordly impracticality and not thinking of that which is why it's best if other people do the useful, technical things and I write essays about poems.

Whether it's the superglue or sheer will power that's holding the lamp together for now is hard to say but as long as I'm gentle with it it should last until the bulb really does need replacing.