Stop the Week 7

Happy New Year everybody. Come all ye faithful, it’s 2011 now. It was only 100 years ago that we were all busy getting ready for the Great War. May the coming few years, despite the hike in oil prices and the increase in VAT, be rather less apocalyptic.

2010 ended here with a fair old bang rather than a whimper. There was nothing quite as memorable as standing (two years ago) outside the manorial home of our mighty German friends, huddled together in the sub-zero chill and staring into the cloudless heavens, oo-ing and ah-ing as we followed a squadron of paper lanterns on their diaphanous journey to the stars. I have since discovered that these beautiful paper lanterns have been known to wreak some kind of ecological damage – interfering with the flight paths of rare geese, perhaps – so I guess that’s an option ne’er to be repeated.

No, this time round it was something much more prosaic: a good old shindig that took place in a restaurant in old Beaulieu-sur-Dordogne. I recognised it as the dingy traditional establishment where my wife and I had once eaten while on holiday. Two courageous Scottish chaps have transformed it into something rather more modern and inviting. They are wintering elsewhere to gather strength for next season, and have left the keys with a Belgian friend and fellow music-nut. Don’t worry, though, they gave him their permission to hold a party in their absence.

Kim asked me to help with the music: always an honour and a pleasure. Since he’d borrowed a record deck for the occasion, I took the opportunity to rifle through my collection of 12” singles in search of tasty morsels for the dance floor.

I went armed with a bag of some headphones, one of those plastic spacers for ex-juke box singles with big holes, some indispensable CDs and a bundle of antiquated treasures from my dustiest shelf: things like Gwen Guthrie’s ‘Hopscotch’, Patrice Rushen’s ‘Forget Me Nots’, Coati Mundi’s ‘Me No Pop-I’, War’s sublime version of ‘Groovin’’ and, gulp, the Gary Byrd Experience’s ‘The Crown’.

The only trouble was that I was allocated the graveyard slot. So everyone was too busy wining, whining and dining while I was spinning my blasts from the past. The trouble with D.J.-ing is that your job is to pick things that make it impossible to stand still. Dancing is one of those oh-too-rare pleasures of my life, so standing on show behind the console with a pair of phones on my head cannot compensate for the frustration of having to stay there or thereabouts. Lest one misses that seamless cross-fade from one piece to the next, you understand.

‘And then the music changes…’, as Alan ‘Fluff’ Freeman was given to intone. By the time it was someone else’s turn and I could move onto the dance floor to practise my ‘tigers-on-Vaseline’ moves, the new D.J. was pumping out the most awful racket. Grunge and… AC/DC for heaven’s sake! Suddenly the dance floor was choked with gyrating bodies. You couldn’t move; you couldn’t talk. You could only wonder. It underlined that there’s no accounting for taste, that you’re onto a losing cause if you try to predict or mould it, that you can’t hope to please all the people all of the time, and, most worrying of all, that you’re getting old. Like Father William, my time has been and gone. Ich bin ein dinosaur.

Choosing the music for the party was a challenge of head-scratching proportions. Choice, for a Libran like me, is the final frontier. I should be so lucky, of course. It’s only in the privileged West that we are blessed with the luxury of choice. In many countries, I’d simply take up my crude clay vessel and trudge my way to the nearest source of clean drinking water. Choice? There are no alternative options. 

Panic in Detroit



I remember talking (theoretically) some time ago to my oldest and dearest friend about the options open to us if we chose to up-sticks and move out of our current nests. He mentioned that real estate was cheap in Detroit. This morning I saw some amazing photographs of some once magnificent municipal buildings in the Motor City. They reminded me of old imperial Moscow after the Bolshevik hordes had steamed through them. Incredible devastation and decay. Even the once magnificent central railway station was reduced to a vandalised shell. How could it have happened? This was once a great industrial American city.

No doubt property is cheap in such a damaged, traumatised place. But, my, what a leap of faith it would take to invest in the hope of its eventual gentrification. Downtown Detroit? I’ll be staying in rural France for the moment, thank you very much.