Tuesday, July 11, 2006
Yesterday, in Eastbourne, we went to a “house clearance” shop to check out the bounty of the dead. They had a waist-high stack of Sky magazines that I dug through for twenty minutes. Half a lifetime ago, when I was in my early teens, I used to buy Sky – it seemed adult, more grown up than Wild About Animals, and I hid them under my bed. Looking back, I can see that this period, 1992-3, was a watershed: the time when I awkwardly walked up to popular culture and shyly offered it my hand. What joy to see them again! This was pre-Britpop and lads’ mags, and long before the internet; the pages were full of PM Dawn, supermodels, Winona Ryder, Evan Dando, Beatrice Dalle and magenta headlines on white backgrounds (“Non-Dodgy Indie Band Alert!”). If I could have carried them off with me, I would be reading them still.
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