My daughter’s in her early teens. She says, “Dad, kids just aren’t practical like you. They just don’t do that making stuff anymore. I bet most of them in my class couldn’t even strike a match.”
I was at a loss with that comment. I thought she was at a good school. Strike a match? Burn the place down. No idea why that sprang to mind. But I did teach her to strike matches, light a bonfire, cook sausages on a stick and string a guitar. We lived in a flat, so the sausages bit did cause a few problems. Trail of kindling dropped all up the stairwell, the smoke got out of hand, a right mess, difficult to explain that one away.
There’s been a steady slide in practicality since I was a kid in the North East in the 1970s. Then everyone over the age of ten could fit a plug. The three-pin electrical mains type, or if you lived somewhere foreign, one of those deadly two-pin jobs, no earth, or ground as some call it. At Christmas time, woe betide the parents who hadn’t stocked up with half a dozen plugs for Christmas Day. Even your gran could fit one. Strip the wire with her falsies. No – think again. In those days, all the old bastards had false gnashers; it was de rigueur. My gran had all hers pulled out for her 21st birthday. Fuck me, imagine that. “Happy birthday, love. I got you a car,d and your dental appointments this afternoon. Do you fancy going out after, for celebratory soup?”
Every kitchen drawer had a few near-useless screwdrivers, a pair of rusty pliers, a broken army jack knife, and a small toffee hammer – perhaps one reason for the dentures, toffee that is, not a hammer in the gob. Then again, it was all Saturday Night and Sunday Morning. Give it a read if you’re from the posh end of town. Real life. And that was set in Nottingham, relatively cosmopolitan in those days, at least compared to North-Eastern towns. Screwdrivers were nearly always flat-head, worn out from opening tins of paint and being used as makeshift chisels. Opening tins of Spam or Pek Chopped Pork when that horrible little key had broken off. If you did manage to use the key it produced a deadly razor-sharp ribbon of steel with a life all of its own, springing around the kitchen. “Don’t touch that, it’ll cut you, oh, too late….” Like something Rosa Klebb would whip out of her sleeve while your back was turned.
The jelly in those tins always revolted me. Resembling an early Damien Hirst experiment, but he didn’t exist then, so nobody knew who the fuck he was. If Hirst had existed, doing his cow stuff, he’d have had a right proper kicking. “Call that art? My kid could do better than that, get a proper job you poncy twat…” Or something very similar.
Along with “You’re useless… you’ll never be good at anything.” That was drilled into every single kid from an early school age.
This was typical daily off-the-cuff abuse. Nobody had to think about it; an instant riposte, people had a ready catalogue at their fingertips. Hirst would probably have had an empty bottle of Double Diamond hurled in his direction just for good measure.
On a summer Sunday, for tea, we’d have a tin of lozenge-shaped ham, coated with that awful jelly, chips, cooked in a proper “house fire” chip pan, a lettuce leaf and Wonderloaf white sliced bread, spread with margarine. All possibly garnished with that skinny cress, optional, if the household had heights of grandeur. Salad Cream was the condiment of choice, and loads of added salt to bring out the already salt-laden flavour of the jellied chopped ham. Followed by Libby’s tinned mixed fruit with Carnation condensed milk poured on top. The fruit was tinned in a thick sugar syrup, and the condensed milk, whatever that was, had added sugar. Probably yet another reason for no gnashers in many folk. It was absolutely, thoroughly, truly awful.
Let me explain for you lucky bastard upper crust southern types, we had breakfast ten minutes before we went to the mill, dinner at lunch time, tea at dinner time and if you were lucky enough, supper in your pyjamas, ten minutes before bed, which was probably a single Weetabix, lathered in sugar and a drop of milk. And you might get to bed ten minutes before you had to get up, or the other way round. Confused? Live up North.
Back to screwdrivers. None of those new-fangled cross-head “Phillips” type. Always a bugger when you needed one of those, but you could usually get away with jamming in a flat head and then knackering the very screw you were trying to remove. All this, and the plugs still got fitted on Christmas Day.
No new appliance ever came with a mains plug fitted. They were purchased separately until the advent of the plastic moulded plug. That was the start of a slow slide to the practical oblivion we are currently witnessing today. I cannot recall when the cursed moulded plug first appeared. Probably some early EU directive, in happier days, the plug aside, when we were all connected, and not electrically. Instead of a dwindling has-been lump of rock surrounded by rising sea and ocean, wallowing in self-pity over 300 years of long-lost empire. No longer Captains of Industry. Captains of fuck all, with no industry to be found. A rudderless ship to boot. Just service “industries” producing nothing tangible, or even useful in the most part, and serving no one, except further lining the very deep pockets of the extremely minted classes, extracting vast wealth from us all, to add to their already vast pile. Probably sat on a different continent with minions controlling the steady monetary harvest. Bring on Mad Max, that will show them all. The sooner the better. I bet Max could cook sausages on a stick. No chopped ham for him. I do go on.
In the good times, we could fix bike punctures, fit a pane of glass, mend our own shoes, glue stuff, nobody sniffed in those days, nail things down, change a kettle element, sew a button on, put up a shelf, hang a picture, pickle onions, fit a guitar string. The list goes on. All the dads serviced their own cars, if you were lucky enough to have one. Accepting cars cannot really be serviced in the DIY market anymore.
Brian May and his dad knuckled down and built Red Special from an old fireplace and a bunch of tat in their spare evenings. None of that tonewood bollocks. All simply because they could. They were curious, and it was much better than watching the telly.
I think by then we had probably stopped shoving little boys up chimneys, and polio was just about eradicated. It wasn’t cool to wear a seatbelt, if the car even had them, and certainly not cool to wear a crash helmet. It wasn’t particularly cool to be dead either, but a lot ended up that way, through the windscreen, not a very good-looking corpse every time. Think that’s a Tom Waits line. Listen to Tom. Marc Ribot often plays guitar – brilliant musician.
They were practical times. Personally, while we talk about technology, I preferred the age when the fax machine was seen as a big deal. Late ’80s, early ’90s. Mobile phones in their very infancy. Lugged around by odious Suits with an air of superiority, looking down on those who skulked around phone boxes or employed an answer phone. They were generally completely useless, both the phones and Suits, due to a very poor attitude, reception and huge cost of making a call. “Mobile” should have been a case for Trading Standards with trade descriptions, phones being about as big as a briefcase and weighing around 30 kilos. However, no one cared as the concept was ridiculed. That will never catch on, they said.
I ran my business empire from a string of numerous phone boxes, stinking of piss. The boxes, not me. You got used to it. Handsets were grimy, reeking of fags, but no one caught anything nasty. Probably good for the immune system. That’s why toddlers eat soil. My sister ate a worm once. Looking back, I can’t believe we held something so filthy so close to our mouths and faces. Always carried a sock full of small change, useful in more ways than one. Think we used to eat a lot more shit then, at least us Northern types, beyond London and the Home Counties. In the parts of the country where it starts to become grim and very blue-collar. However, everything still worked, stuff got done big time, people and businesses made money. Digital was unheard of, except maybe unless you referred to CDs, the expensive new kid on the block. It was an analogue world, but we didn’t even know it then. Vinyl still ruled. Records got thinner and a bit floppy as the price of oil increased. Computers? Didn’t really exist in the mainstream. Apart from a few Amstrads, for the common man. That self-made man and arch tosspot Sugar brought them into being. Though he doesn’t strike me as a computer nerd. Glorified word processors, but they certainly got the job done a bit quicker in the office, without using as much Tippex. Girls still typed. It was always girls, that’s just the way it was in the olden days.
I read a bit about Sugar, Alan Michael, trading – Amstrad – but you probably knew that. Apparently, the main streets of London, many years ago, were paved with wooden blocks set in bitumen. Wooden roads. Never heard of that before. Interesting. Reduced the noise of the carriage wheels and the horses’ hooves. Clever. Fashioned from some very hard-wearing tropical hardwood. Shipped 1000s of miles around the globe. Causing major deforestation, in some beautiful tropical country we just happened to “find” on our travels, then raped, burnt and pillaged as a matter of course. Imagine that, how the fuck does someone lose something as big as a country for fuck’s sake? Covered in tropical forests. Teeming with monkeys, tigers and elephants and stuff. Not to mention millions of indigenous people. You’d trip over it, bump into it. Doesn’t seem feasible, but we, the British, found and discovered loads of them apparently, just lying around. I’m sure they had never been lost in the first place, or maybe there were a lot of very careless people about in the old days, misplacing things, losing countries?
You would not believe how many horses there were in London in the 1800s. That’s why they laid miles of wooden roads. Well in excess of 50,000. All shitting and pissing on the hoof. Or dropping dead at the side of the road, quite often flogged to death. Nobody cared. Can you imagine the flies? Regularly leaving the carcasses to rot where they dropped. They became much easier to chop up and move once they softened up and putrified. Put that on your CV. Horse Chopperupperer. Have own tools. Willing to travel.
Anyway, they eventually got rid of the wooden roads, on account of them stinking of horse piss; it simply soaked into the wood and didn’t wash away in the rain. So, they just tarmaced straight over the top of the blocks. Or maybe laid cobbles, if Lord Tarmacadam hadn’t reared his oily head at that particular point in time.
Fast forward, and now we are moaning about potholes. Can you imagine just how much horse shit there must have been? Those old-fashioned metal boot scrapers, at the entrance to posh town houses, I always assumed it was just a bit of a mud thing going on, but – yep, you guessed it. It was everywhere. Maybe that’s why the pothole was developed, so they could simply shovel it full of shit. An original idea. I bet someone got a massive grant for that, years of research. Four thousand holes in Blackburn, Lancashire. It’s been going on since then, if not before.
And the poor people didn’t even have shoes.
So, Sugar, when he was a tea pot lid, to quote the vernacular, used to nick the blocks whenever any street works were going on. Old wooden blocks, coated in tar, getting dug up during road repairs and the like. Bagged them up and flogged them off as firewood. Very enterprising, he’s a practical man, I guess, but turned him into a bit of a dick head if the Apprentice is anything to go by. I can just imagine lots of wizened old Cockney geezers sitting in front of the fire, depths of winter, howling gale, tugging on a Woodbine while the room fills up with nicotine, bitumen fumes and hot horse piss. Little Jimmy and Molly sat on the hearth rug, heartily coughing, faces warm, backs freezing. The walls would be running with rivulets of a poisonous brown liqueur, condensed from the evil cocktail burning in the grate. No wonder they all croaked early.
I digress. Back to practicality and the loss of. Seems every other day I get a call “can I restring a guitar…” The answer is a polite “No”. Well, obviously, I can, but I no longer offer this service. In the not-too-distant past, I used to do such jobs for a contribution to the charity box. Now no fucker carries cash, so little Jimmy and Molly are no longer funded. Similarly, I will not change batteries in electro-acoustics. Keep your money.
I usually go on to explain that every player should learn how to put strings on, it’s not difficult, and there are 1000s of YouTube clips out there showing how. If you are dextrous enough to play guitar, you are more than able to fit strings. In a moment of madnes,s this inspired me to consider making a short string fitting video for my YouTube channel. Watch this space, or rather the channel, and please subscribe; it all helps. The possibility that I am slowly embracing new technology is, frankly, a bit scary. Where will it all end?
As I wrap this up, I’ve hit the wrong key and apparently generated an AI summary:
The document is a nostalgic and humorous reflection on the decline of practical skills and self-sufficiency over the years, particularly comparing the author’s childhood in the 1970s North East England to modern times. It touches on various topics, including teaching practical skills to his daughter, the ability to fix things like plugs and bike punctures, the evolution of technology, and societal changes. The author reminisces about simpler times when people were resourceful, repaired their own belongings, and lived in a more hands-on, analogue world. He contrasts this with today’s reliance on convenience, digital technology, and the loss of practical knowledge. The narrative is interspersed with anecdotes, cultural observations, and critiques of modern attitudes, including a humorous take on Alan Sugar’s entrepreneurial beginnings and the absurdities of historical practices like wooden roads in London.
This was produced in seconds, staggering in some respects, but completely misses the point about learning to change your own bloody strings. Bring back the fax machine. No, fuck it, bring back the Luddites.
