Mooching about Interwebshire*, it is easy to forget those long ago days spent in the seedy village of Inksmudge. Although there are umpteen websites devoted to all sorts of past publishing glories, it is rare – at least in my experience – to chance upon an item I clearly remember snipping out of an old inky paper and slotting in to my teenage cuttings pile. (Why did I never bother to paste things into a scrapbook?)
Those heaps of printstuff were, for the most part, lost or abandoned or buried or burned to a cinder many years ago. So I was delighted, this morning, roaming through the shire, to find this snippet, almost certainly from NME circa 1974. It still makes me laugh, though perhaps now accompanied by a lump in my throat. Tempus fugit, lost youth, blah blah blah…
* NOTE : A term coined, as far as I’m aware, by John Barleycorn at the much-missed According To The Ninth.
Mr Key, don’t fret. Even if you had pasted those inky smudges into a scrapbook it would be lost by now. Trust me, I did and it is. Better just to stick to the burlap gunny-sacks. Then you will be able to use them to ward off the inevitable approaching deluge.
Mike, the phrase “burlap gunnysack” is ersatz Hooting Yard: http://shuddery.blogspot.com/2005/12/dobsons-uncanny-time-pod.html
Thanks a bunch…!
I’ve been ‘caught’, by Linda, looking at a rude picture on the interweb and now have to sleep in my shed with only my scrap books for company for the foreseeable future…
O.S.M.
(I daren’t close my eyes. The Grunty Man might come and get me..)
My apologies Mr. Shuddery
I had in mind the recommendation by Rufus Crank in the Pillows for Gardeners letter.
“Paper and cardboard cuttings on the subject of buffleheads are an acceptable stuffing, in extremis. Use burlap gunny sacks or other rough fabric.”
I was unaware that Mr. Key had poached it. Shame on him.