Seasoned bloggers (and, at a whopping, erm, two years, I count myself one) know that “blog fatigue” is an increasing problem. More and more bloggers are competing for decreasing audiences  - people who, by and large, barely have the wherewithal to drop-kick an imaginary zombie on Facebook, let alone actually read something. Factor in the credit crunch, oil, gas, house and food prices, global warming Gordon Brown blah blah blah - why should anyone care in the slightest what that Taffy Sandwich bloke (or whatever) is blethering on about this week?

One solution might be to “go theme”; good “theme blogs” attract loyal audiences; e.g. the likes of unnecessary-quotation-mark-person and right-wing-website-commentator-baiting-person. (Honourable mention also to the brutal, stark Kraftwerkian minimalism and Ronseal-like efficiency of Ms B. Dreams.)

What theme to choose, though? News? There are already 100 quintillion (at a conservative estimate) news blogs, each one a bazillion times more boring than the last; not to mention the fact that journalists from major newspapers have recently started to get in on the act by publishing their random tube-train scribblings on their papers’ websites, cleverly saving themselves the trouble of doing any proper research or editing - or writing - by simply prefacing the piece with “I reckon that…” and calling it a “blog”.

How about sport? Ooh, yeah! I like Ipswich Town! I… erm… think we might do quite well this year!! We’re playing Preston a week on Saturday!!! Can’t wait!!!! An absolute non-starter. Sport is about as funny as Ebola, and anyone attempting any type of humour in a sporting context should be shot on sight (Phil Tufnell).

Music? Diminished minor seventh transpositions in Marillion songs? Hmmm - perhaps not. Folkestone? Fuck-stone. Unpleasant characters I meet at car boot sales or on eBay (of whom there have been quite a few recently)? I daresay there’s already enough unremitting bleakness to be found in your own encounters with the rest of humanity without the need to burden you with mine.

So I won’t be “going theme” - I span the genres, I’m a polymath, I run a broad church. More importantly, there’s the possibility that it’d involve slightly more work, and I’m at risk of losing the battle against my own indolence as it is. However, as Vlad the Impaler was often heard to remark, I will stick a poll up…

A goodly part of my weekends are, as you know,  spent at car boot sales (”swap meets” for the transatlantically inclined), rummaging around other people’s - well, crap, frankly - in the hopes of finding a sellable bargain. And despite the rather detritus-feeder-y nature of the job, it’s a life-plan which has worked for the last 6 years now, and which I continue to enjoy hugely. Me motoring around my little corner of the Kentish countryside on a balmy English summer morning in my trusty Fiesta has echoes (in my mind at least) of some latterday Darcy-esque lord of the manor dashing around his estate, hounds and horsemen at his side, relentless in his quest for… erm… out-of-print Luther Vandross CD singles.

Predictably, the least enjoyable part of it is the fact that the rest of humanity is involved. Boot sales attract all kinds of sellers, from house clearance / furniture removal professionals who are there every week of the year, to families who have had a once-a-year clear-out and are treating the thing almost as a social occasion.

Now, I normally try to reach 4 or 5 boot sales in any morning, and people tend to pack up and piss off at 11.30 or so, so I need to get everything done as quickly as possible. Hence the best kind of seller is the one who just shuts up and lets me get on with looking at their wares, but there are other types too;

- Mr “What kind of music are you after?” - there’s no perfect answer to this one (what I’d love to be able to say is “cheap but valuable music”, or alternatively “not your music”) -the object of the exercise is to stop him launching into an interminable spiel about exactly how many Val Doonican / Highland Brass Band records of absolutely no interest to me whatsoever he may or may not have, and it’s not always easy.

- Mr “I only want to be your friend” - even worse than the above. You can’t brush him off with a “just browsing” - he wants to tell you his life story, how that record means so much to him because he once met a girl at a gig by the band concerned, and even though nothing actually happened between them it was just an AMAAAAAAYZING night, and… recently, I’ve taken to putting my fingers in my ears and shouting “LA LA LA LA LA LA” until he shuts up.

Even if you can get some peace whilst you’re looking through the merch, you’ve still got to negotiate prices. The sensible seller will have everything clearly advertised at 50p or £1, but again, there are other malfunctioning personality types -

- Mr “It’s in the book for £x”. “Record Collector” magazine prints, on a yearly basis, a book full of totally arbitrary and meaningless “values” for vinyl and CD. It’s completely out-of-date, and takes very little account of the change in buying habits / wider availability which the internet and eBay have brought about. If an amateur record seller gets hold of a copy, woe betide you (and him). They think that they’re being generous by selling an item at £5 when “it’s in the book for £8″. Back in the real world, there are hundreds of copies on eBay failing to sell at 99p - and every other stall at every other boot sale in the entire nation has multiple copies of the same album.

Mrs “I’m Not Budging” (and I’m afraid it’s always a woman). A ghastly, immigrant-hating, “Mail”-reading materfamilias, physically dominating her weedy husband, sweating profusely and and wearing latex leggings. She’s determined on her price structure and takes massive self-righteous umbrage if you try to haggle. Closely related is Mrs “these cost £10.99 in Argos, you know”. Well, why don’t you take it back to fucking Argos for a refund instead of burdening me with your rancid personality whilst attempting to sting me for a fiver?

Add to this the hazards of simply walking around; geriatrics in full zombie mode and families with pushchairs appear to be magnetically attracted to me, as are smelly people, especially in the summer. (I’ve learned to hold my breath pre-emptively for a couple of seconds when walking by, based on how skanky someone looks and the width of the berth that others are giving them.)

Proles, Poles, geezers, shysters, desperados, mugs, thugs, nitwits, halfwits, dimwits, con men, old men, stinkers, drinkers, lazy thinkers…. actually, come to think of it, it’s a bloody nightmare. I hereby announce my retirement from the boot sale circuit to concentrate on my burgeoning career as an alcoholic.

Many would think that, working on eBay, I’d be insulated from the worst of humanity’s face-to-face idiocy; indeed, it’s one of the reasons why I chose this particular “career”.

However, it’s not always the case that you can avoid our species’ enormous prevalence of twats, liars, berks and nob-ends entirely; take this message I received this morning:

“Hi, cd recieved,thankyou, but would like to know how you justify postal charge of £1.50, thanks.”

This was my reply:

“The charge is for posting, packing and handling; neither the mailer, the bubble-wrap protector, or my time in wrapping it / petrol for driving to the post office / time spent standing in the post office queue come for free, unfortunately. £1.50 is a fairly standard and perfectly reasonable charge for 1st class CD postage on eBay within the UK. I’m sorry if you think it was excessive; as a gesture of good faith, let me know what you think I should have charged and I’ll refund the difference.” (I quite like the last bit; surely not even the world’s biggest prick would have the brass neck to ask for a 20p refund or something…)

However, I subsequently discovered that the same guy is selling these items. Both are lighter than a CD. His postage charge?

£1.50.

Unbe-fucking-lievable.

Do feel free to purchase either of his items in order to leave him negative feedback based on his excessive postal charges; I’d love you forever.

So finally, we approach the meat - or rather inedible, over-chewy Quorn-myco-protein gristle - of what makes me tick musically; progressive rock. Even now, 25 years after punk’s musical and cultural revolution subsided, it’s still largely the case that admitting to liking progressive rock is musically akin to boasting that you’re a paedophile sheltering a vast legion of illegal immigrants, all of whom think that Heather Mills got a raw deal in the divorce proceedings.

“Progressive Rock” as used today has come to be a meaningless term applied to anything from the 70s which isn’t “cool”; it’s usually employed as a catch-all insult by NME newbies who weren’t even in nappies when the music concerned was being made. Mind you, to be fair, if any band was progressive rock, Marillion were - their early works are pretty much slavish note-for-note facsimiles of Peter Gabriel-era Genesis, whilst their last two albums with Fish at the helm are both serious concept albums. “Misplaced Childhood” (containing their best-known song Kayleigh and this mighty slab of cheese known as Lavender) is all about love - and apart from those two singles, it’s a seriously mushy, highly avoidable affair. On Fish’s last album (before they booted him out) “Clutching at Straws”, however, the theme of love is dropped in favour of the much weightier topic of booze. The whole LP is about fame / how the band (and Fish in particular) coped with it, and the rigours of the road, by drinking way too much.

Marillion under Fish (real name: Derek Dick. Pseudonym a good option.) were and remain a very capable band, stymied all-too-often by weighty concepts and over-sentimentality; but on this song, “Incommunicado”, their best by a country mile, they show what they can do when they have a proper thrash-about.

And to accompany the latest step in my musical pancraptuneicon, a poll on what you think of TTOTDOWOHOHCBATCI so far.

Ahhh… golf. It’s the Open this week at Royal Birkdale (see what I did there?); the oldest and most prestigious tournament in the golfing calendar, and a perfect opportunity for the sport to remind me why I have a love - hate relationship with it.

It’s mostly hate, to be honest, and it’s not the sport per se, which is great fun to play and even watch - it’s the players. Take Sandy Lyle, for example. In the same week that Tour de France riders, drugged up the eyeballs and with testcicles shrunk to the size of petit pois, were using every last ounce of their physical and mental resistance to drag themselves up 2000-metre mountains, Sandy played 9 holes on the first day of the Open, and then gave up - because it was raining. And a bit windy. Well, if you will name a boy after Olivia Newton John in “Grease”, what do you expect… Americans Pat Perez and Jerry Kelly were similarly whining like poncy hairdressers about the conditions and threatening to stay at home next year. You know what, lads? You can piss off back right now for all we care. If you can’t ply your trade anywhere other than at a racially-segregated manicured country club on a balmy Florida day with your plastic wife watching on, your game isn’t really up to much, is it?

Oh, and further on our American cousins - why do they insist on calling it the “British” Open? It’s not the “British” Open, it’s the OPEN. THE Open. Just because you decided to copy us and have one yourselves, it doesn’t mean that we need to retrospectively nobble our nomenclature. I haven’t heard many of you referring to “American football” recently. Where will it end? Does the fact that some ghastly antipodean colonials have formed lucrative tribute bands mean that we’ll soon be referring to the “British Pink Floyd” or the “American Doors”? Harrumph.

Hmm… not much love in my love-hate relationship with golf, is there? Now, where was it again? Ah yes - the upcoming Ryder Cup, when we get to stick it to the moaning Yanks on a biennnial basis (no offence intended to any of our wonderful transatlantic readership). A whole continent joined together in sport - not through love of the game particularly, just an overwhelming desire to send the overpaid, pampered Seppos and their Barbies scurrying back to Stepford land with their golf clubs between their legs. No exaggeration - the Ryder Cup has probably done more for the cause of European unity than the single currency, or even Eurovision…

Is there any hope for Gordon Brown? Just over a year on from the start of his premiership, he appears to be lurching from disaster to disaster and has the most lowest poll ratings since the Lion King commissioned MORI to see what his wildebeest and antelope subjects thought of Serengeti food chain policies. The right-wing press has got its teeth into Brown, and now our spoilt, pig-shit-thick, NIMBY, ignorant, self-serving, whining public are chiming in with Pavlovian predictability at every opportunity. I even heard a woman the other day complaining about central Folkestone’s new parking regulations (which local residents had voted for) and blaming Gordon Brown.

In short - never mind the fact that a lot of the UK’s problems are also global and nothing to do with Brown; never mind that the Tories don’t appear to have any policies of their own, are very unlikely to do anything particularly different, and are mostly newbies who don’t have a clue about government, and never mind the fact that, presentation skills apart, Gordo’s not actually doing that badly - he’s now certain to lose the next election.

So what should he do? I, being a vengeful spirit, would chuck a big “fuck you” at the British public in the shape of something that they think they want, but really don’t; e.g. a referendum on Europe (a “no” vote would surely win, and the economic consequences of leaving the EU would only sink in afterwards; e.g. when your BNP-tending Essex roofer tries to bring 5000 cans of Stella back from Calais).

However, I’m sure Brown is a bit more mature than me; if he knows he’s going to lose next time, these two years (or so) represent a really good chance to push something radical and far-sighted through parliament, free from the constraints of having to justify it to the Mail man (who in any case would probably dislike free money if it was presented as a Gordon Brown policy). Loads of money for public transport / renewable energy, a complete shake-up of the school system, renationalising the railways or even something REALLY far-sighted like pushing a combined European armed forces; the sky’s the limit.

But instead, he’ll obviously just keep bumbling and blundering, coming up with piecemeal and hastily-announced reactive legislation in ever-more-desperate attempts to reinvent his lost popularity, and he’ll lose anyway.

Another pearl from the Folkestone Gazette, this time from the monthly Business section (printed in FT-style must-be-important-and-authoritative pink). Mike Fawcett of HSBC writes a piece entitled “Not back to the 1970s, yet”.

He’s talking about the prospects of recession, obviously, but equally obviously, he didn’t contemplate the mixed temporal messages sent out by including a photo of himself looking as if he’s about to offer to fix the plumbing in an antiquated Dutch ginger-fetishist grumble-flick…

(I nearly went with “feline groovy”, but that would have been rubbish. By which I mean even more rubbish.)

I’ve just spent the best part of a week looking after my sister’s cats, and since a) I’m now missing them a bit and b) my reading on the blogometer has been dangerously low recently, I thought I’d, erm, “let the cat out of the bag” (guffaw) as to how it went. (Hang on, why would you want to put a cat in a bag? Surely, even if you were inclined, or forced by circumstance, to confine a cat, a box, with its level flooring and unique patent scratch-proof side-features is going to be considerably more comfortable for both confiner and confinee… anyway, I digress.)

Missy and Amber (for thus is their nomenclature) were to spend the week with me in Folkestone, and neither had been on a car journey of more than about 10 minutes, so I was slightly trepid on setting out from Croydon; with good cause. Missy was fine throughout the 75-minute journey; she just sat in her box (see? BOX. Not bag.) chilling out and enjoying the panoramic vistas of the South Downs and all the amenities of Kent’s impressive motorway network. Amber, on the other hand, wasn’t happy at all; frothing at the mouth, mewling loudly and eventually giving her breakfast a second airing (just as I made the final turn into my road…. grrrrr…..) - but finally we all made it back without serious misadventure.

Cats, as y’all’ll know, are very territorial - so not only were they massively underwhelmed by their new surroundings (at first, both hid in the darkest corner they could find), but they also, despite being sisters who had been together from the moments of their birth, really didn’t want to know about each other. For the whole week, Amber occupied the upstairs and Missy the downstairs, their only contact being an occasional hiss as they caught sight of each other. The atmosphere was like a Spice Girls reunion. Still, it was quite ego-enhancing for me; both cats would wait at the bottom / top of the stairs until I made my way up / down and would then shower me with affection, as if to say “I knew you were getting fed up with that other baggage… where’s my food, by the way?”

But predictably, all-too-quickly, and just as we were all getting used to each other, the week was over, and now they’ve gone, leaving only a faint musky “where the fuck is that piss smell coming from” whiff as a reminder of their presence (and of my sister’s lousy job in toilet-training them).

Generally I do enjoy feline company massively, and it gives me a good excuse to talk to myself - which I do anyway, but if I address the comments to the cat, it’s somehow slightly less eccentric. (Don’t you think so, Tafkass?). So in the long term, I may well get a moggy myself, and you can look forward to my “cat whisperer” updates becoming a regular feature…hurrah!

(Or I could spare you all and get a girlfriend instead.)

Now that I’m uber-editor-in-chief-alissimo once more, an ottery spraint of my musical leavings is long overdue.

This time, we’ve got the pleasure of “Private Life” by Grace Jones. I heard it first on Grace’s “Best Of” compilation “Island Life” - I wasn’t listening too closely to the lyrics and, thinking that the chorus actually said “Island Life”, I imagined it a paean to some mythical “toa-tally tropicaal tyaste”-style Bounty advert vision of the Caribbean. On closer investigation, I found that in fact, it combined the most laid-back beat imaginible with some of the bitchiest lyrics ever written:

“Your sentimental gestures only bore me to death
You’ve made a desperate appeal now save your breath
Attachment to obligation and regret; shit, that’s so WET.
And your sex life complications are not my fascinations

You asked me for advice I said use the door
But you’re still clinging to somebody you deplore
And now you wanna use me for emotional blackmail
I just feel pity when you lie, contempt when you cry”

Blimey! Let’s just hope that she never volunteers for the Samaritans, eh Chez?…

The song is also notable for being one of a select breed of covers which are better than the originals (”Jealous Guy” by Roxy Music being another); it’s originally a Pretenders song, picked up and covered with “up to 11″ nastiness by the formidable Ms Grace. Hmm… who’d win in a fight out of Chrissie Hynde and Grace Jones? Now that I’d pay to see….

(A quick boring nod to the production - The Pretenders’ original has prominent acoustic guitar and backing vocal parts; Island Records owner / producer Chris Blackwell has pared it down considerably, leaving just keyboards, drums, fat bass and a fair bit of echo; it’s practically a dub version. Oh, and although I wouldn’t say it to her face, Grace Jones has an atrocious voice; but by dint of having worked with some of the best producers in the business, made some of the best dance music of the late 1970s / early 1980s.)

As per my endless bangings-on over the last week or so, my wee sister and I went to see Iron Maiden on Saturday night at the incongruous venue of Twickenham, home of English rugby. Luckily, obsessive long-straggly-haired Swedish wrinkly-faced rock codgers won the attendance battle over the braying Hooray Henrys* who usually inhabit the stadium. We were in the “genteel” seats in the second tier of the stand, where the order of the day was an occasional post-modern-ironic Wayne’s World devil hand-sign and a half-hearted “whoooo!” when leather-lunged frontman Bruce Dickinson yelled (as he did on several occasions) “SCREAM FOR ME TWICKENHAM!!!!”. Aforementioned continental Maiden obsessives, on the other hand, were mostly in the bottle-lob-tastic standing (or rather moshing) area; I was reliably informed that some had been queueing outside since long before the doors opened at 1pm to be right at the front (sis and I sauntered in at 8pm and were still enjoying felafel and organic pear cider in the heavily-subsidised music industry hospitality bar when Ver Maiden got started).

The gig itself? Good, although a) the acoustics weren’t fantastic and b) I only knew about 4 of the songs. (The latter fact can’t really in all honesty be blamed on the band.) Oh, and as I observed when posting “Invaders” on Taf’s Tune of the Week, Ver Maiden can’t help speeding up whilst playing songs; it’s amusing to watch the superannuated drummer trying to keep up.

(* - My experience of the event wasn’t enhanced by the fact that I stupidly went dressed as a braying Hooray Henry, sporting both a tan and that nice John Rocha brown shirt which you all saw me in at the Realosphereomeet. Everyone - literally EVERYONE - else was wearing a Maiden replica T-Shirt, and I’m sure that the sotto voce “fucking wanker”s that I kept hearing were a direct consequence of my sartorial decision-making. Or possibly the fact that I kept using phrases like “sotto voce” and “sartorial decision-making” in conversation….)