It's incredible how many people have fond childhood memories of the shipping forecast. I remember listening to it while waiting for the game broadcast. They were broadcasting computer games, we would record them onto cassette tape and play them back into the computer. A hit and miss process to say the least, and not one that always worked.
So we'd stay up until 3.30am to record the game and then spend an hour trying to get it to load onto the computer and then finally go to bed, defeated. Things not working was a right of passage then, these days it's all too easy. I don't spend the weekend trying to adjust gaps with a feeler guage, or standing in shop doorways wondering how to get 25 quid for a battleship game.
Now I've got my own relatives sending email through some automated system asking to "join your professional network". There's a reason we only meet at funerals. We're already linked on Facebook, must we do this? Can't I keep my professional network for my professional contacts? No I can't, because if I refuse this unwelcome intrusion it'll start a family feud. In the end a cave-man with a Facebook page is still a cave-man. Actually I think cave-men had more confidence with women. That's the only constant thing over the last 40,000 years and we're worse at it now than we were then.
At times like this I can see why people take up gardening and join swingers clubs, I just pray I don't bump into my cousin in there too.
All this because of The Shipping Forecast. I don't know, really I don't.
JJ
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6 comments:
JJ, are you sure that you are still taking your medication? Because it sure beats the hell out of me as to what the Shipping forecast has to do with cavemen and women.
I was making an analogy between my growing up and mankind's growing up in an evolutionalry sense. The shipping forecast is a boyhood awakening and the swingers club is a slap in the face with a used condom.
I thought it was obvious, read it again.
Dogger Fisher German Bight, Sole Lundy Fastnet Irish Sea. Sheer poetry. I also used to like that opening medley on Radio 4 with Greensleeves, Danny Boy and nursery rhymes all interwoven. It was like a hymn to start the day with. Ten minutes of Farming Today before the news. God forbid they should ever abolish that hour's time difference.
It's what makes us British, m'boy!
yeeeeeeh.
It's hard to imagine in twenty years we'll all be saying "remeber that Facebook thing where we used to put our pictures and write stupid things "JJ is frying bananas for the cat"
Well may you laugh, JJake, but I remember when personal portable audio cassette players were the hight of cool.
And ten years later, computers went all multimedia (a.k.a. they could handle sound).
And roller skates...gawd, I'm so 20th century.
Kill me before I get old.
What do you mean "it's too late ?"
The shipping forecast is a highly emotive subject, I knew it would be, not quite sure why though
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