Monday 4 June 2007

thirty years have gone
since marc bolan died in a
purple explosion.

I am beginning to wonder where those thirty years have gone. I recall sitting at my mother’s table, eating (I remember vividly) bacon, egg and fried tomato when the news came on the radio that Bolan had been killed in a car accident, having wrapped his purple mini round a tree near Barnes.
I was in Wales at the time and had no clue where Barnes was, nor did I care, since the terrible truth was filtering through to me that Bolan was dead.
I was seventeen and not terribly sane at the time so it was understandable, at least to me, that I should be upset as Bolan had been an important figure in my life since about 1970. So I cried.
My family, as always, were confused by my behaviour and for the most part remain confused at my behaviour to the present day. There was a fair bit of tutting, frowning and mocking, which is the standard procedure in North Wales for dealing with unusual situations.
Certainly my mother has always found my addiction to Big Brother to be deviant behaviour on my part and one year banished me to the kitchen to watch it while I was staying with her for a few days.
Ziggy from BB (surely that can’t be his real name) today hosted a dinner party for the girls, wheeling them in one at a time so he could share a different course with each of them.
He used the time wisely, and probed the ladies on how they felt about their housemates. No one, it transpires, likes Charley very much.
‘She’s got no substance,’ said Emily, neatly emphasising the fact that she wasn’t discussing nominations, just telling Ziggy (he’s Jewish. Is that a Jewish name?) about the people she’d rather not have in the house.
Later, Charley was the last to come to bed at 5am and started the girls on a sensitively-timed singalong.
‘Will you stop singing shite???’ raged Tracy from her bed, her face adopting the expression of Sean Bean as Boromir when Frodo goes invisible and escapes.
‘It’s the Spice Girls!’
‘Exactly! It’s shite! shite!’
This gets Tracy lots of points from me. Anyone who realises that the Spice Girls are shite has reached a certain level of spiritual enlightenment.
Meanwhile in Coronation Street, Leanne Battersby’s secret is out. She is a woman of the night (or at least a woman of the afternoon) and has been selling her scrawny bones via an agency in one of the only two hotels that Manchester has.
Unfortunately, as Manchester is such a small place, it was inevitable that one of her customers would turn out to be someone she knows, like her boyfriend’s brother.
In soapworld there is no such thing as a secret, and very soon, boyfriend’s brother’s wife is threatening divorce and (as you do) the boyfriend’s brother manhandles Leanne into his car-boot and drives off with her, his expression rather like Sean Bean as Boromir when Frodo goes invisible and escapes.
Attempting to retrieve his ringing mobile from the floor of the car while Leanne screams ‘Let me out! Let me out!’ he runs through a red light and gets driven into by a Greggs Delivery Truck (heavy with pies).
I feel a tragedy coming on…