Vinylrichie’s Weblog

 I saw some men on the TV news two nights ago. They worked in finance and were shouting each other like the way a normal person and a scientologist might do. The problem would appear to be that something or other to do with the economy had crashed – maybe one of them had dropped the other’s piggy-bank and had got irate. The newsreader sounded solemn and told us that no one has any money to spend due to this terrible piggy-bank catastrophe. I think the shouty suited guys may look after all our money and now it’s gone and rolled under the fridge where it can’t be reached.

This is my understanding of global finance. You would’ve thought that at 32 I may understand about stocks and shares and er, that - but I haven’t a clue. I have lived a sheltered life and I blame having spent too many years doing a job where these things never mattered. But now they do because I don’t have any customers! No one has any money for food let alone records. So this is where the panic sets in as the job market will need to be tackled and I’ll get found out to be the child I really am. Everyone else at my age is thinking of marriage, children, divorce, remarriage, re-divorce, ISAs, pensions, Life Insurance, buying sofas, holidays, choosing soft furnishings, buying cars and the like…

I’ve discovered that my record shop cocoon has dealt me a mortal blow: I’ve realised I can’t cope with the real world; I can’t drive, I’m totally ignored by women, so have no chance of pro-creating, cohabiting or spending the day buying cushions. I’m up to my ears in debt and my CV looks very small indeed and making the font bigger to use up more pages fools no one. I’m not really going to be sought after in any sphere, especially not the job market. And without a decent job I can’t afford anything, which makes me even more unappealing to the opposite sex and I can’t afford to learn how to drive. If I learn to drive I have more chance of getting a job, if I get a new job I have a slim chance of meeting some women (although they are all spoken for in my age bracket or just quite insane) and improving my CV and gaining confidence. Catch 22 or what? Maybe I’m wrong – I’m frequently told that I’ll be a good catch for some lovely girl. This statement is usually said by women – but funnily enough they are never interested either. My Mum used to say that I’m too fussy but I used to laugh sardonically at her. Fussy implies one might have a choice of whom to ’get it on’ with. She also said that I go for the wrong women. Of course they’re the wrong ones! They say no! I’m going to have to plough through the ads in the back of magazines for the lazy eyed and club footed 76 year old ’right ones’ with B.O methinks. Or someone who wants a British passport.

 And jobs? Oh dear. I applied recently to a book shop as I would like to indulge my other passion and also actually work with some other people. I didn’t even get an interview. It must be because I’m experienced, good at customer service and love books. Definitely wrong for the job without a doubt. People also say that I’m too negative but this springs from the fact that life’s favourite hobby is wrestling you to the ground and  farting in your face and accidently following through. Christ, even the people that write those cloying self help books are adulterers, alcoholics, workaholics etc. Why? Because they’re unhappy too - even though they tell people to cheer up and be positive for a living and get incredibly rich doing so. The biggest irony I can think of to illustrate this is this: reggae singer Bobby McFerrin wrote a very, very famous and chirpy song called ‘Don’t Worry, Be Happy.’ It features lots of whistling and positive vibes and is meant to fill one with strength and vim so the world feels conquerable…

A few years ago he killed himself.

I wonder what the b-side was? Maybe it was ‘Don’t Worry, There’s Always a Bottle of Vodka and a Tubfull of Pills Handy If All That Whistling Doesn’t Work.’

So what to do? I’ve been looking at jobs. Then I’ve been looking again and still failing to understand what the hell they want people for. Middleweight Web Designer? Surely it doesn’t matter who you can beat up when you’re supposed to be spinning webs? Strategic Conversion Analyst? I don’t even know what to ask about that except ‘Eh?’ It’s infuriating and I’d never be able to keep a straight face in a proper corporation when they started wittering on about ‘thought showers’, ‘blue sky thinking’ or ‘thought grenades’. My friend works for a big American company that even employs a chair specialist to teach people how to use chairs – or lower limb posterior reclining and rest units as they are probably called – how utterly idiotic is that? The thought of having to appear keen to get a job with people that talk that much through their arses leaves me cold and will probably see me sacked within days because I am far too cynical and am used to talking people using real language and everything.

Anyway, I’ll keep plugging away and might even put something funny in my next blog. Sadly (?) I’ve run out of record shop steam to keep this specialist blog going so this is the last post(bugles at the ready) on this particular theme. I will be back to talk about other things of which I know little about so you won’t get away from me that easily.

 Thanks to all that have read my witterings and laughed. Special thanks go to all that encouraged me, commented, recommended me to others and to the record buying nutters of this little town -without whom this blog and my depression would not have happened. Gawd bless ya.

This post has been withdrawn and is now very collectable.

 People frequently come to the assumption that if you work in a record shop you must be pretty cool. They envisage that your record collection is bristling with untold gems and rarities that they could only dream of. One of the frequent questions I am asked is: ‘how many records do you have?’ The answer is quite bizarrely not as many as some who don’t work in a record shop. After all, if you live in a river you don’t need to buy water do you? The other question which I get asked often is: ‘What was the first ever gig you went to?’ Wide eyed with the expectation that I might say ‘The Pixies’ or Lou Reed, the customer waits with baited breath ready to marvel at my sublime, jealousy inducing answer. Indeed, the response I get is usually an open mouthed one as the answer is:

Barry Manilow at Wembley Arena. Word.

 I was thirteen I think, and had taken up the rebellious hobby of smoking to ingratiate myself with the cool and slightly harder kids. Unfortunately for me I just looked like a small child brandishing a cigarette, not the gangster/hustler I envisaged. The fact that I could barely inhale didn’t do the image any favours either but I tried. One thing they don’t put on cigarette packets are warnings such as: Smoking may cause you to attend crap concerts. If they did I may have stuck to sherbert dib-dabs and Panini football stickers but alas, the folly of youth.

One Sunday afternoon I’d finished dinner and got permission to go and play, er I mean look sophisticated and hang out with my friend Andrew. The world was our playground, anything was possible in the heady freedom of the day (except I had to be back at half four as Mum and her friend Sue were off to see the aforementioned crooner big-nosed Barry that evening and I was being babysat by my sisters as my dad was going to drive Mum and friend to Wembley) so we went round the corner to see what delights the underground car park could offer. Well ’street’. Now that I was away from the parents and any neighbours that might see me I could safely spark up a snout (I’m trying to avoid the use if the word fag for my american readers, I don’t want to appear that I’m all for burning homosexuals). Near the end of the second ciggie Andrew dared me to smoke the filter to be ‘well ‘ard’. Piece of piss I thought, what a simple request and he would look admiringly at his daring, maverick smoking friend with a new sense of awe. So I smoked about three lungfulls, which I properly inhaled to illustrate what a man I’d become. Then it was time to go home.

 At the bottom of the street where I lived, a short way from the car park, things started to go wrong. I felt dreadfully ill, all the energy was draining from me and I felt weak, dizzy and nauseous. I was alone as Andrew had gone home another way and as I literally collapsed and began to crawl towards my front door I wondered whether I was dying. I also feared being murdered by my parents so the options weren’t great. I made it to the door and feebly knocked and scratched until my mum opened the door. My face must have looked a picture, the colour gone and my lips blue as she asked:

‘What the hell have you been doing?’

‘Smoking’, I weakly replied – choosing to omit the filter bit. My lie stood up as my parents thought that I was a good boy who had done nothing in his life more drastic than stealing a piece of bubblegum at the age of five. Mum was under the impression that my first attempt at smoking had backfired somewhat and she rather gleefully, as the knowing adult, watched her son learn a valuable life lesson the hard way. Something was happening to me but I didn’t know what, but I was damned sure I should be near a toilet. I crawled up the stairs, seemingly as insurmountable as Mount Everest in my poor state. I made it, now being watched by my dad and sisters too, who found the pathetic poisoned brother show utterly hilarious. Ahhh, the love of one’s siblings. Then I spent quite a while projectile vomiting and suffering from diarrhoea, crawling from bedroom to toilet with great frequency wishing that I was actually dead. But worse was to follow.

About an hour later I started to feel better, the poison now out of my system but my display of illness had alarmed my parents. They were reluctant to leave me alone in case I died or something. But it seems they weren’t alarmed enough to cancel the evening at Wembley Arena with Bazza. My older sisters, less than bothered at the antics of their little squit of a brother, decided they weren’t going to look after me as there were more pressing engagements to attend to like singing into a hairbrush or coating every surface in the house with the sticky residue of hairspray before going out to a roller-disco or something (this was the eighties after all). They weren’t about to give up an evening of boy-baiting to make sure I was ok so, horror upon horror, I was informed that I would have to come to Barry Manilow and either sit in the car for two and a half hours with dad or see if there were any tickets left. Most of you would’ve chosen the first option. I didn’t.

Upon reaching the Wembley complex (finally, after dad got confused in the horrible ring road chaos which saw us repeatedly going past ‘World of Leather’) I was swept up in the sheer magic of this wonderful occasion; loads of mums sporting Manilow T-shirts and clutching glossy programmes, excitedly jabbering at each other in their post-menopausal frenzy. How could I sit in the car on a night like this? The anticipation of hearing ‘Mandy’, ‘Could It Be Magic’, ‘Down at the Copa (Copa-Cabana)’ and many many more of the tunes I’d had forced on me in my formative years by my mum was just too overwhelming. So dad went to the box office and returned clutching our tickets to heaven, and they were cheaper than my Mum paid for hers, much to her chagrin when it turned out that we were only two rows behind her and had just as clear a view of Barry’s nose as her. Mind you, you can see that from space to be honest.

The gig itself was so overwhelming that I remember very little of it, except that Manilow just told jokes throughtout the second half of the gig which was excruciating. But my new found love of gigs was born on this night. But I vowed to only go to cutting edge concerts which would reveal my discerning and sophisticated music taste. So three months later I went to see Billy Joel and got told off for dancing on the seats. My hedonism knew no bounds, the rock and roll lifestyle had me in it’s grasp. I even went and saw Sting during his jazzy period…..LET’S ROCK!

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This entry is dedicated to my Mum. 28/12/46 – 7/2/08. Wish you were here to read this and share the memories xxx

Crikey. Isn’t January interesting? Some days in this wet, bleak northern hemisphere the sun doesn’t seem to rise at all and if it does it buggers off after five hours ‘work’ before plunging us back into the cloying and interminable darkness. Another er, positive is the fact that work is just as bleak too. There is nothing happening at all as it would appear that no one has any money to spend on second hand records having spent it on calenders, bath salts and perfumes such as Calvin Klein’s ‘Depression’ in the festive shopping free for all. Let’s not forget that January is also the top month for couples to divorce which can be expensive, but at least that means in February I’ll be getting lots of  ex-husbands’ record collections in from newly seperated women so they can make room for more shoes/cushions.

What can I do to make the money roll in? I did suggest to the proprietor that we double as an internet cafe. We have at least four stained mugs, a kettle and a computer so it’s all there ready to be utilised. The only problem is that I’ll have nothing to do as the PC will be commandeered by some geek who wants to play online ’World of Warcraft’ with some fat, socially inept B.O soaked man on the other side of the planet for seven hours. Only having one PC is quite a drawback and not having anything near proper catering facilities is detrimental to my fabulous idea too (the kettle is in the same spider and grime infested kitchenette room as the slightly wobbly toilet – it’s very grim as well as excruciatingly chilly). So there was my one half-baked idea thwarted and I don’t have any others at all due to lack of motivation/caring/lack of brain cells through substance abuse.

People tell me that we should get a website ‘built’ and list everything we have in stock. I find it hard to believe that people will trawl through page after page of Carpenters singles but they could be right, after all the web is frequented by total lunatics (marvellously and precisely illustrated by this: http://www.carrotmuseum.co.uk/ for example) but it isn’t my decision. We do sell on the net but only list things that we can’t seem to shift in store (that’s a lot then) or valuable items. It’s highly lucrative and massively, unsurprisingly irritating. The main reason is that the public are capable of extreme fussiness – how many more emails am I going to have to reply to that insist on a full refund for their CD because the jewel case has a hairline crack caused by our careless postal service? Suggesting that it is cheaper for them to buy another case in their local record shop for about twenty pence rather than send it back for eighty pence never seems to work. Each to their own.

But thank God (TM) for the internet. In my youth we only had Ceefax and Teletext (this may confuse my foreign reader(s) – Google it) which was the eighties equivalent of the web but the porn looked very disappointing (cor, look at the green blocks on that!) I would surely go bonkers, sorry, more bonkers without it to keep me company on the those long days with few real people to connect with. Pressing F5 all day to see if anyone has sent me a message on Facebook is ever so fulfilling and makes the time crawl by that little bit faster and I go home with the warm glow of fulfillment at the end of the day. Sometimes, like you, I look for jobs on my PC whilst being paid (negligably) to do so. This is an excercise in confusion and bewilderment for me as I have no idea what the job descriptions mean in 99% of the listings. Let this be a warning to younger people: don’t stay in the same job for 12 years or you will be left behind and estranged from the processes of change, a bit like going to prison I should imagine, but at least you’ll get sex there. I don’t think I’m likely to survive if I get released back into the wild, I’ll probably be unable to move more than ten yards away from my place of captivity and will die of exposure scratching at the door of the shop forlornly whilst sobbing. So for heaven’s sake buy a CD of something from me or you will be responsible for my untimely, cruelly slow death. Or if you can point me to a job description that I may understand that would be better.

Right, I’m off now as I have a lot of F5 pressing to catch up on and there’s only three hours and thirty two minutes left to do it in now. Must crack on.

 The dawning of a brand new year heralds much soul searching amongst us humans. New starts are announced, self improvement goals are declared and, more importantly, easter eggs hit the shelves to tempt those new year dieters back into the trap of scoffing and self loathing where they belong. Thankfully diets aren’t something I have to worry about as I have the metabolism of a hyperactive shrew on amphetamines, so that leaves me free to worry about all sorts of other things including how the music industry is irrevocably altered for the worse each year and that, once again, I may be out of work very soon and will have to join the ranks of mobile phone sales people (although I’d have to have spikier, greasier hair and buy an even cheaper suit than the one I own already.)

It’s only the 8th of January and already the first bit of depressing news has reached me. The news is that HMV have decided to stop selling 7″ singles to (get this) ‘make room for more modern technology’. I think they seem to have forgotten a vital detail in their decision: if you are a record store you usually stock records. So now they have a section devoted to memory sticks and bloody i-pods. With each passing day I begin to hate the i-pod/MP3 thing even more and wish to return to the days of cassette singles, ‘Nice Price’ LPs and video tapes. This really doesn’t bode well for my technological future as I’m only(only?) 32 and there are bound to be more breakthroughs for me to lag behind with in the very near future whilst I deny their existence and continue to cling on to my ‘Walkman’ tightly. (At least you can replace the sodding batteries with those.)

But what of this brand new age? What is in store for us? I predict that in the future you will be able to have a microchip which holds all 900,000 Bob Dylan albums inserted in your buttocks with a syringe. I suppose it’ll be a bit like micro chipping a dog. Now, instead of doing that fiddling thing that everyone does with the all-too-clever twirly dial thing on the fascia of an i-pod whilst walking into people, all one will have to do is squeeze said buttocks together and think of ‘Subterranean Homesick Blues’ and it will pipe the music betwixt arse and earhole. The one draw back is that you’ll look even more vacant than usual or if you are singing along you’ll look more demented than those you see talking to themselves in the street only to realise later that they have one of those silly bluetooth things stuffed in their ear to make them look important/space age just so they can keep their hands free to hold frappacinos and lifestyle magazines.

I’m sure a fair few of you are more enthusiastic about new technology than I. (I’m sure most of you are actually more enthusiastic about everything.) I sometimes wonder if in  a past life I spent my time hunched over parchment illuminated by the sulphur glow of candlelight, scratching away with my quill bemoaning the invention of pens and other devil’s tools before nipping off to the apothecary to get my scrofula sorted. A lot of ‘advances’ are totally pointless though. Take Blu-Ray DVDs for instance. We’ve only just managed to replace our VHS tapes with DVDs and now they want us to replace our DVDs with newer, shinier versions of DVDs - in funkier cases and for £30 a pop. Imagine the disappointment on the face of techno lovers when they get their new copy of Blu-Ray ‘Independence Day’ home and discover that it’s still shit, but just clearer shit. Still, as Kevin Costner knows ‘if you build it they will come’. He was talking stupidly about dead baseball players but in this context I’m talking about the anoraks that wait for these new formats to emerge so they can swiftly max their credit cards, only for the price to plummet 12 months later to a level even your goldfish can afford (but won’t buy because it’s not that stupid…plus goldfish can’t go shopping. Yet. You’ll have to wait for the i-goldfish or something.)

So to sum up: old stuff – yay! New stuff: Boo shucks. I’m off to buy a word processor now, all this glowing screen thing is freaking me out. Until, next time. Happy New Year by the way.

 Old people. There are a lot of them about, you may have seen them hanging around in shopping centres congregating around seats sucking mints and saying ‘Ohhh yes, dear, I know dear’ to each other loudly before toddling off to dawdle in the street to stop you getting anywhere fast. (But they move bloody fast when they want to, oh yes. There isn’t anything more disconcerting than seeing a decrepit oldie with a stick moving faster than you. This I see a lot.)

Pensioners (I feel mean already) are so predictable that it can be an exercise in extreme annoyance to deal with them. This is because I have to have the same conversation with each of them, usually twice: once at normal volume and then at SHOUTING level as they seldom hear me over the gangster rap I like to play to them. Why do I find them irritating? You may have noticed I find ALL people irritating but they take the (slightly stale rich tea) biscuit. Mainly this is due to the fact that any music released after 1974 is ‘modern rubbish’. The last LP or cassette (CDs DO NOT EXIST) they bought would’ve been a Leo Sayer album but they didn’t listen to it much because it was too challenging. Therefore they went back to listening to Glenn Miller, the ‘Oklahoma!’ soundtrack or a Richard Clayderman compilation on MFP. Eventually their record player’s stylus would’ve died never to be replaced. Their record collection (usually numbering about 12 LPs) then redundantly sits beneath their all in one stereo radiogram for the next 25 years before they have a brainstorm and decide to sell them as they saw on the telly that all old records are worth a fortune. By this time they can barely lift a soiled handkerchief so they will telephone the shop to find out how many thousands of pounds they will get for a complete set of Mantovani LPs. The conversation will go as thus:

‘Hello? Hello? Do you collect records?’

‘Do I collect records? I take it you mean does the shop buy used records? Yes, we do.’

‘I’ve got some old ones. There are some big ones and small ones.’

‘What sort of music?’ I ask, knowing full well what is about to take place.

At this point I can stop listening and go and make a cuppa. They generally don’t know what they’ve got as they haven’t looked at them for years. One thing is for sure, they will mention the Beatles. It is a little known statute that every british household must have at least one Beatles record, preferably really scratched, written on and replete with stained/crinkled cover. Then I have to explain that they were the biggest selling band on the planet and just because they’ve heard of them and heard some bastard saying how valuable they are doesn’t mean anything. They think I’m lying as the bloke on the telly said it was true. To cut this short I’ll ask them to bring the bloody thing in with the rest of their records for me to yawn at. Great. What I need is another copy of ‘With the Beatles’ to add to the other 40 I have, the only difference being that the scratches are in different places….

Rather conveniently as I was churning out my waffle above, the door opened and I was presented with a couple of bags of records from an old couple. Lo and behold I have had my stereotypical attitude fortified with the contents of said bags. The bag (which I got lumbered with because they wouldn’t take them away again) contained: Geoff Love’s Christmas LP, The new sounds of Liberace, the Stars salute Sinatra (featuring performances by a stella group of crinkly or now dead warblers like Shirley Bassey, Harry Secombe and Frankie Vaughan), The Big Ben Hawaiian Band, Perry Como’s 40 Greatest Hits (forty?!), the (ubiquitous) Sound of Music soundtrack, Mrs Mills Party Favourites….I give up. There are more but you’re probably just as bored as me.  It really is difficult to tell these pensioners that their records are only appreciated by the very nearly dead. For some unknown reason they must think that hoards of twenty year olds queue by the shop door each morning frantically jostling each other to get in first to snap up that copy of ‘This Is….Val Doonican’.

I can’t wait to see if this will be the case in decades to come. When I get old I like to think that record shops (should we miraculously survive the interminable march of ‘progress’) will be turning their noses up at Metallica’s black album for being too easy listening and the new generation of kids will laugh at us for listening to Radiohead (that old rubbish.) My dad is a great indication of who I’m likely to turn into. Only the other day he was sitting talking to a family relative lauding ‘proper music’ like Brian Poole and the Tremeloes as I sat shaking my head fully aware that I’ll be doing exactly the same to my nieces and nephew in twenty years. ‘You call this music?’ I will sneer. ‘In my day we had proper bands like ‘Muse’ and ‘Interpol’, none of this noise…’

 I feel a bit left out. Everywhere else in town has rack after rack of splendid gift ideas for the festive season. As I peruse the racks in HMV, my senses are overwhelmed with the quality presents that you and your loved ones will be buying or receiving this year. If only I had the marvellous stock they had! I wish I had things like ‘Jeremy Clarkson’s Hilarious Badminton Mishaps’ or ‘Christopher Biggins’ Incredible Chess Bloopers’ DVDs to make the punters happy. I wish I had ‘Michael Palin’s Travels around Basildon’ DVD/Book tie in for only £35.99 for you to get your Mum so she can feign weary gratefulness on Christmas morn. Or there are those DVD games that you can get which promise fun for all the family (except the young children, teenagers who don’t like anything anyway, and the elderly. Oh, and your dad who fails to grasp the concept of anything new: ‘A DVD game? When I was a lad all we had was an orange and a stick to play with on Christmas day before being sent up the chimney….’)

Then there are the books. Piles of them which are £19.99 in the run up to Christmas but will be found for £3.99 in January. This is because they will be titled with such wonderous headings like ‘100 Most Amusing Hamsters’, ‘Nigella Lawson’s Cooking with Beetroot’ or ‘My Life’ by some 16 year old footballer who’s biggest acheivement is coming on for the last ten minutes at Barnsley in a reserve game and being looked at once or twice by Fulham. Still, seeing these books in the bestsellers charts makes a change from the plethora of child abuse stories that litter the ‘literary’ charts nowadays. Things like ‘Daddy, Please Nooooo’ and ‘My Childhood as a Human Pinata’ aren’t that festive I suppose. I’m surprised that the public fall for this cascade of utter shit every year. The golden rule is to consider: Would you want that oversized brick of a book cluttering up your tiny bookshelf? How would you feel if you were presented with such drivel? Yes, your grandfather might like golf but does he need another ‘Jimmy Tarbuck’s’ Golfing Tips’ book for the fifth consecutive year? He probably knows the rules by now. (If he likes golf he’s probably given up on life anyway so why bother buying him anything?)

But it is the music industry that really takes the piss at this time if year. I swear that the record label bigwigs put the names of the artists on their roster in a hat and pull one or two out. Bingo! Queue the release of the ‘Best of A Flock of Seagulls’ but with remixed extra track! Or yet another ‘Best of the Eagles’ to add to the collection. This one is vital though as the tracks are the same as last year’s but in a different order. The cover is also white this year instead of brown. Thanks for that. Then there’s the forgotten artists that make a desperate attempt at being noticed once again by reforming for one new song in the hope that it will top the festive chart of crap. On the back of this one new song, forlornly tagged onto the end of ‘The Very Best of…’ a tour will be born where everyone can go and realise that they’ve actually grown up and regret spending £45 on seeing a greying’Take That’ or ‘David Beckham’s Spice Girl Extravaganza Party’ and wished they’d stayed at home to watch ‘CSI Miami’ with a cup of peppermint tea. Still, at least ‘Take That’ Fans don’t have to put up with frog eyed yelper Robbie Williams gurning anymore. (Oh. That’s the one you really like. Sorry.)

 Calenders are also a great gift idea. Sometimes it’s such a good idea that everybody has it so everyone can end up with four calenders for the year. Band calenders are a popular choice but don’t trust the ones that don’t show you the pictures on the back first. My ‘Girls Aloud’ calender this year features pictures that look like they’ve been hastily snapped by a pervy man in a suit down the front of a gig on his two mega-pixel camera phone, shortly before being ejected by a burly security guard. December’s pic is quite bad as, not only does it heavily feature the robotic ginger one that doesn’t move, Nicola, it is also very grainy. Therefore I’ve done the sensible thing of going back to May so I can have the picture where you can see up Nadine’s skirt and glimpse her flowery knickers. I wonder if old ladies do a similar thing with their calenders if they have a particular favourite picture of a kitten peeping out of a boot? Do they go back to May too?

A shortage in gift ideas still? Vouchers are the answer, but not vouchers for ‘Boots’ please. Trying to spend £20 on deodorant and ibrubrofen is a little dull. No, people want vouchers for clothes or entertainment. I’m hoping to get some so I can extend my DVD collection. I have my eye on ‘Simon Cowell’s Fishing Howlers’ vol II. There’s even a chance it might be reduced after Christmas so I might even have enough for ‘Stephen Hawking’s Chair-robics Workout.’ I love Christmas, it’s so spiritual isn’t it?

 Thieves. It takes nerve to be a successful one. It takes guile and cunning and sleight of hand. Thankfully, they are mostly opportunist idiots - about as subtle as Alan Carr’s homosexuality or Amy Winehouse’s nights out.

Having a very small shop gives me the advantage of being able to keep an eye on everyone. That is unless I’m on the computer which faces the door and not the punters – I lost about 10 hip-hop and R&B CDs last week due to my blogging and Scrabble addictions. (It was those bloody chavs again and they didn’t even have the manners to drop some a little bag of skunk on the floor.) Still, theft isn’t a real problem usually.

 The funniest thief was about eight years ago. I was late for work having just had an early morning argument with my girlfriend (no, honestly), so naturally I wasn’t feeling very buoyant. That argument turned out to be beneficial because I was seething when I had my first visitor. He browsed around whilst I slammed price stickers on a new batch of CDs and put them on the counter in the ‘fresh in’ section. A few minutes later the visitor approached the counter so I composed myself and nicely asked if he required assistance. I recognised him as a local busker, and a shit one at that. The only song he ever seemed to play was ‘Daydream Believer’ by ‘The Monkees’ (badly and in an almost falsetto whine, which may explain my hatred of this song.) He asked me if I had any ‘Everly Brothers’ 45s. Indeed I do, tons of them, so I turned my back on him to root around for the box to show him. Turning back I noticed he was standing in front of me with his hand inside his jacket, Napolean style. How weird. So as he one handedly set to the task of rummaging through the box I noticed that the ‘fresh in’ section had a huge gap in it.

Hmmm. What can we deduce from this turn of events?

‘Can I have my CDs back now?’ I ask him.

‘What the f*ck are you talking about?’ is his eloquent reply.

‘Why do you have your hand stuffed inside your jacket?

‘None of your f*ckin’ business, you can’t go around accusing people of stealing.’

‘It is my business. I just filled the ‘fresh in’ section FIVE MINUTES AGO and you are the only person in the shop and there is suddenly a gap there and your hand is tucked in your jacket.’

He calls me a c*nt and admonishes me for accusing him of theft.

‘Who’s the c*nt?’ I reply, ‘you are the one with a bunch of empty CD cases stuffed in your clothing.’ Then I wave the actual discs at him which are sitting in front of me to file in the drawer. He looks a bit abashed but tries to bluff it out some more. Stupidly I march round to his side of the counter and wrench open his jacket. Surprise! Oh look, CD cases. I give him the option of handing them back and never coming to the shop again or he can stay in the shop with me and his cases and wait for the police. He left to pursue his obviously highly lucrative career as a musician.

That brings me to this Monday just gone. At 10.40am I was making coffee and two guys walk in. They, as every other person on a Monday morning tends to, ask me the oft repeated question of whether I buy records. Yawn. Whilst looking at the records half heartedly I inform them that I have no money to spend in the till as it’s Monday morning. The records are pretty good so I offer them £17 for all eight. They agree and I suggest that they return at 1.00pm. I offer to keep hold of the vinyl until then to save them the bother of carrying them around until then. Upon their return I will furnish them with some lolly. All good. I carry on with my ultra hectic morning of overdosing on coffee and looking out at the occasional pretty office girls walking past.

12.40pm and one of the cheerful goths I wrote about in an earlier blog ventures in on his lunch hour to praise my sparkling wit/prejudices/cynicism. After thanking him profusely he then explains that he’d had some records stolen out of his (mum’s) car the previous day. Again, I’ve heard all this before and he doesn’t seem too upset so I nonchalantly say that I’ll keep an eye out for them as he mentions a couple. Amused when he mentions ‘Sonic Youth’ I laugh at the co-incidence of having had an LP by them in first thing. He has kittens when he spies the others and says ‘that’s them!’ I explain the above and suggest that, as the little toe rags are due back in twenty minutes, he may wish to inform the local nick. Good lad, he’d reported the theft the day it happened so we thought it would be quick. However, he didn’t know the crime number or registration of the car so things slowed.

 Time was running out, almost like an episode of ‘24′ except without explosions or split screen action or any excitement whatsoever. I give him the shop ‘phone and, after looking up the police switchboard phone number on the internet (I suggested 999 was a little over the top for a few stolen LPs, that number should be reserved for people who have lost a cat or locked themselves out) he dialled and struggled with all the questions they fire at you to see if you’re a time waster or not. Then it’s my turn. I take the ‘phone and suggest that a police prescence might be a good idea. They’re all busy apparently. But the shop is literally yards from the police station, and it’s a big one which must be full of people doing law enforcement type things. I wonder if Chief Wiggum from ’The Simpsons’ is in charge for the day. I am informed that all of the local CCTV cameras are trained on the shop. I look forward to appearing on ‘Street Wars’ soon.

The call continues. I am asked to give descriptions of the two scallies. This bit is quite easy because they have just arrived outside of the shop, hanging around finishing their cigarrettes/joint. So I give a rather accurate description very quietly to the switchboard operator of the gentlemen. The thieves enter. I am informed to keep them here and a car will be with me in fifteen minutes! Fifteen minutes? I enquire what I am supposed to do to stall them, give them £17 very slowly in one pence pieces? Ask them their favourite colours? Suggest we start a book group this instant? Remarkably, the whole shop – which is gaining more lunch time visitors – are waiting quietly whilst I seemingly totally ignore them all to have my chat on the blower. But I do that a lot anyway. Even the fingersmiths are patiently just waiting. They even start listening to our vinyl on the record deck. My, these criminals are as good as gold, they can come again. I’m only surprised they didn’t offer to take their shoes off when the entered.

Just when I feel I can’t hold them anymore, the biggest, tallest copper I’ve ever seen walks in and I have the really lovely duty of pointing the guys out. No christmas card for me this year then. The first guy looks a bit shocked upon being told that they are under arrest but kindly hands me back the record he was just listening to. Bless. Searched in the shop they unload their pockets of further illicit goods – a stolen MP3 player featuring goth music was turned up. This also belonged to the cheerful goth funnily enough. They also had some dope in a really funky tin taken from them. That pissed them off. Then four more units of old bill turn up so the outside of the shop is surrounded by three squad cars and a big van. Anyone would think they’d just found Osama Bin Laden buying ‘Nolans’ singles from me.

Job done, they are led away in handcuffs and the shop gets busier as passerby visit for a good old gawp. The shop empties with the exodus of the Queen’s finest. Later, I give my statement, cheerful goth gives his. The Policeman that takes mine exclaims that it was like an episode of popular trashy cop soap opera ‘The Bill’. I pointed out that he was wrong as no one that used to be in ‘Eastenders’ was present. How we laughed.

 Are people a little bit dim on purpose? Do certain humans, upon rising to face a new day, decide to try and enliven the mediocrity of their daily grind by seeing if they can perplex others for some sort of amusement? It would seem like it. There may even be a group where these poppets can get together and come up with ways to mentally hassle shop keepers and swap hilarious anecdotes at their achievements in this field, whilst enjoying coffee and cake and the odd jumble sale.

Who’s been causing me to audibly sigh or bury my head in my hands of late? Today a regular browser popped in and had a little mutter to himself whilst walking around the shop. On his way out he says: ‘Oh, you sell records as well.’ The shop is wall to wall records, thousands of 7″ singles line the shelves from floor to ceiling. There are LPs all over the place. ’I didn’t think they made records anymore’, he adds, failing to grasp the concept that this statement is irrelevant as we are second hand anyway. I assure him in my world weary way that ‘they’ do and always have done and leave it there for fear of venturing further down the path of this man’s idiocy. He probably still buys cassettes.

Some aggressive feral youth came in last Wednesday and marched up to the counter. ‘Have you got any Diana Straits?’ (Yes, ‘DIANA Straits’) was his question. No please, no manners and not a clue, so I mildly ridicule him. This I somehow have down to a fine art, but only at work. I know just how far to mildly goad people by instinct without getting a smack in the face. In fact, in twelve years I’ve only been asked outside for a fight twice and threatened with assault once. But this guy is so stupid (he’s a chav after all) my facetiousness is beyond him. So I give up and direct him to the ‘Dire Straits’ CDs and try to get back to eating my lunch. Upon perusing our selection of ‘the Straits’ staggeringly mediocre output he pipes up: ‘Why the f*ck are you listening to this?’ as he gestures to the speakers. I can’t remember what I had on but it was probably Ryan Adams, ‘Uncle Tupelo’ or ‘The Broken Family Band’ as they are on rotation at the moment due to them being my current obsessions. Great question. I told him that it was on as I hated it so much and I like self torture. He left empty handed (and empty headed, naturally.)

On Monday last week a girl comes in (ohmygod A GIRL! Look! Look!) and after a small browse she enquires: ‘Are these CDs for anyone to buy?’ Nope. Today I’m only selling music to people who’s names begin with the letter H. Tomorrow I shall only be selling to bricklayers called Dave. I didn’t say that obviously, naturally I was struck dumb by the presence of a member of the fairer sex. I may even have fainted.

If I do actually end up fainting in here, or have an accident like falling off the ladder, there’s a good chance I won’t be discovered for some time. At the moment I’m getting more visitors to this blog than to the shop. This doesn’t bode well seeing as it is the run up to the celebration of greed, money and stress that passes for an apparently religious festival called Christmas. Over the years Christmas here as turned into a bit of a non-event. Again, this reflects people’s reluctance to go shopping so the lucky internet traders get all the trade. This is totally unsurprising to anyone that has actually tried physically shopping in England recently – it’s horrendous. Most of the time you are lucky to find more than one member of staff manning the tills. Inevitably the people queueing in front of you will be laden with stuff, ask too many questions to the monosyllabic teenager who grunts moody replies and they will pack their bag far too slowly. Then they’ll pay for everything with a mixture of credit card and vouchers before asking for cashback too late so a new transaction has to take place. Then something will go wrong with the teenager’s brain/till so everyone has stand around tutting whilst a supervisor gets summoned so they can use their magic bunch of keys to make it all better.

People should be flocking to this shop; no queues, every till manned all the time (all one of them) and wonderfully polite and tolerant staff (errr…) It’s just a shame that there might not be anything you want to buy for anyone but surely that is a minor drawback compared to the aforementioned bonuses? You’ll only buy them things they don’t want anyway, so why not buy you loved ones a used ‘Steely Dan’ CD or a Marc Almond picture disc? If you disappoint your friends and relatives with your choice of present at least you can take solace in the fact that you’ve helped keep me in a ‘job’. Think of it as kind of buying a goat for an African village or adopting a manatee. I can even write you a certificate if you like, and I’ll write to you every quarter to let you know how I’m doing. (Why when people adopt an animal does this happen? Who wants to know that ‘their’ meerkat spent the last three months eating scorpions and standing cutely on it’s hind legs? Or that the manatee looked weird and ate kelp slowly? These things are surely bleedin’ obvious.)

So, Christmas is cancelled. I gave up putting the shop decorations up about three years ago because no one ever noticed them. The nearest you’ll get to festive here is if you look through our Christmas singles box. After finding 146 copies of ‘Walking in the Air’ next to each other you’ll want to forget about Christmas too.

Sex.

 There, I have your attention. Sex and certain types of music go hand in hand. For instance, don’t try seducing someone whilst listening to Meatloaf or Hawkwind  – go for a bit of Marvin Gaye. Although I would suggest you are better off not taking advice from someone who has all the pulling power of a thalidomide tug-of-war team.(I.E: me). There are a lot of songs lauding this still popular pastime/procreation method, although most of the ones sold here get bought by single men so any romantic connotations included are pretty much rendered redundant. So where do these men get their real life kicks? Best not delve too deeply into this as who knows what degree of sordid behaviour one would discover? But the obvious answer is good old reliable pornography. This is where I, er, come in.

We get a fair amount of grot in here. Unfortunately we are unable to sell the hard stuff as we don’t have a license so it’s all pretty tame Sunday tabloid fodder but it still sells well, especially to young adults and old men. I used to think that getting rid of the records and CDs and just stocking blue movies would be a better business strategy overall, but I love the view of the bus station so much that I don’t want to paint the window black. Plus I get more than enough wankers in already so my idea was rightly abandoned. The grim thing is that when buying in this sort of stock you have to handle it; you have to check that that the right video cassette is in the right box or that the DVD is not scratched. Obviously this means handling somebody else’s second hand masturbatory material, which is pretty grim if you think about it, especially as you have the soon-to-be-previous owner right in front of you. One really has to try hard not to think about what those hands have been doing before, during and after viewing  said movie. Still, as long as you wash your hands afterwards, can stop retching and can afford decent therapy, it’s worth it as the profit is excellent.

My main supplier of ’special interest’ used to come in every couple of weeks with one or two carrier bags full of pornography. He must have been rather keen on this art form as he clearly spent a lot of time buying and watching these. (Maybe he was a reviewer?) He was quite a sight. If there was one man who you thought would have looked like a porn fan it was he. He’d lurch into the shop in a tatty green jacket, balding head, over-sized glasses and buck teeth. He was about six foot seven inches tall and his trousers were a little too short. Every time he ventured in we would start the transaction with his usual question of: ‘Do you buy videos?’ I would reply in the affirmative and he’d ask: ‘What, adult videos?’ And off we’d go. The first time I bought stuff from him, all the while trying to keep a straight face as I read the titles like ‘Lesbo Soccer Mom 6′ or ‘Russian Porno Housewives 8′, I nearly wet myself laughing when I got him to fill in a cash pay out form and he wrote his name: Mr J Leper. Priceless. I hope he doesn’t read this, mind you he probably hasn’t got a computer as they’re  no good for accessing pictures of naked people are they? Computers only exist for spreadsheets and checking the football results. Oh, and for receiving emails telling you of your urgent need for a bigger dick.

 It’s amazing how some people have no shame. One young gentleman was in one Saturday afternoon perusing our selection of marvellously priced DVDs. Having tired of wading through the usual titles on the rack (Harry Potter and The Interminable Boredom, Rush Hour 8, The Eyes of The Hills Have Eyes etc) he decides to rummage somewhere else. A little while later he asks to see our selection of porno DVDs behind the counter, in a really loud voice. Several heads turn in surprise and amusement. I was slightly miffed as at that time there were no flesh flicks in the shop. I asked him what he meant and he says, ‘Look, it says here to ask to see your porno DVDS’. Huh? Puzzled I follow his finger to the sign he’s reading. Bless ‘im. It said ‘Ask to see our Promo DVDs.’ Well they do say that masturbating makes you blind, but I don’t know if it makes you dyslexic too. He tries to gloss over it by saying that he has a rather adventurous girlfriend who likes it, not him. Hmmm.

I had an acquaintance whom I got to know accidently through his frequent visits to the shop. His main passion was cinema but he also had a massive collection of gentlemen’s videos. He would share his passion freely, like when you or I hear an album we like and think others should too, and he would copy stuff for you whether you wanted it or not. One day I asked him to do me a copy (yes, shoot me for hypocrisy) of the highly middle class and repected Queen Victoria story ‘Mrs Brown’ as I really enjoyed it at the cinema. In due course he furnished me with a copy but put that Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee Jones home movie on the cassette too. He didn’t tell me first. All I can say is I’m pleased I decided to watch ‘Mrs Brown’ before I lent it to my mother first. This man also decided to give me a copy of ‘X-Men’ he’d taped for me even though I had not asked for it and had no desire to watch it. So I didn’t watch it and gave it straight to my dad who will watch anything. (He even went to the cinema to watch ‘Batman and Robin’ which, fair play to him, he walked out of with five minutes to go – the only film he’s ever walked out of.) A few days later I asked his opinion on the ‘X-Men’ just to engage in a little small talk. He said he missed the movie as he fell asleep half way through. He said he was very confused that when he awoke the actors seemed to have shed all of their clothes and were engaging in some vigourous jiggery-pokery. He soon realised that the ‘X-Men’ had long finished and something a lot more involving was being played out. He seemed quite pleased and it certainly woke him up somewhat.

I have since had that video tape returned to me and have still failed to watch ‘X-Men’. I’ve seen the ‘extras’ though.