New Places For Old Stuff

A few days ago, I opened the doors on a couple of new blogs. New blogs for old stuff. Before the Streets Were Aired is where I'll be posting a selection of the anonymous old photos that I seem to accumulate with frightening regularity. Some are formal, some funny, others quaint. The majority though, are simple, mundane moments captured on film. To be honest, it's the latter that I usually find most interesting. A beam of light illuminating a long-forgotten instant from a lost world. Before the Streets Are Aired could run and run to be honest, I have an awful lot of old photos. My other new blog though, has by definition, a limited shelf life.

One Sunday morning last Summer I was at a car-boot sale, rummaging through the remnants of a house clearance. It was all there - furniture, books, bedding, kitchen utensils, clothes and many other personal possessions of, one assumes, a recently deceased elderly lady. The residue of someone's life, scattered across a field for complete strangers to pick through. A heartbreaking thought to dwell on for too long. Buried deep in one of the boxes, I unearthed an old handwritten diary. The year is 1952 and the diary was written by a young woman, eight months married and one month pregnant as the story begins. Except of course that it isn't a story. The events in the diary actually happened. Spoiler alert...nothing much actually does happen. The charm of it is that while it's a delightful document of a year in a young woman's life, it all takes place in a world that is at once recognisable and yet impossibly distant from our own. I found the minutiae absolutely fascinating and thought that a few others might find it similarly interesting, so I'm sharing the diary, day by day, in real time over at Dear Diary 1952.

The new blogs will feature no music and precious little comment from me. They're merely portals through which to take a gander at a couple of my other interests, if you feel so inclined. Over here though, it'll be business as usual, all being well. To prove it, here's a fine tune from an album that fell just outside my top 20 of 2015, 'Constant Bop' by Bop English, the side project of White Denim's James Petralli.