30 songs

A few themes have emerged across the previous 29 posts, which will feature here and thus validate the truism that although some things change, some things never change.  Despite the fact that I am wallowing in the comfortable abyss of middle-age, disinclined towards many of the things I enjoyed doing in my teens, 20s and 30s, favouring routine and productiveness over excitement and spontaneity and functioning in society burdened by indifference, irritation and contempt....despite ALL of that bleak gloominess, I am still in some ways no different to the person I've always been:  I still love Bob Dylan, I'm still open to forming distant crushes on talented women like Kate Bush and I am still capable of being passionately awestruck when discovering a new band or artist. And that's the point of this last post.  Illustrated by Hurray for the Riff Raff. The famous line in Forest Gump about life being like a box of chocolates is much better applied to the BBC music show, Lat...

Films filled the void left by football, when I finally fell out of love with the latter and rediscovered a new love for the former.  Everyone would cite films as one of their interests, but what they usually mean is that they either enjoy going to the cinema a lot - to watch anything half-decent usually - or they have an exhaustible list of favourite films that provide familiar and comfortable viewing when they happen to be on. Personally, I hate the cinema.  People are conditioned into unnecessary and irritatingly noisy snacking and the ones you end up sitting near will either fidget or whisper and generally leak piss all over the experience of getting into a really good film on the big screen.  Once my children didn't need me to take them to the cinema anymore, I stopped going (except for the recent Star Wars episodes and spin-offs that is). But then a few things changed that.  One was the discovery that there were a lot of cleverly made films in the late 60s a...