Private
Eye’s Francis Wheen says that
“amnesia is the handmaiden of hypocrisy”. Well, quite. He begins this
piece for the Daily Telegraph:
Every few years, when spring-cleaning my sock drawer, I pull out the sheets of yellowing newsprint that line it and start reading. That’s the next hour written off. Stories that merited no more than a glance at the time suddenly seem preternaturally interesting, as the snoozing characters and incidents leap into vivid life after their long hibernation. Cash for questions! Monica Lewinsky! The Third Way!There is more, and then there is this:
A week is not only a long time in politics, but also the maximum attention span of much of the public, which is why so many news items burn as brightly but briefly as a firework on November 5. It’s like the life of Solomon Grundy: a crisis looms on Monday; MPs scamper round radio and TV studios making a hullabaloo, which provides Tuesday’s headlines; on Wednesday, the party leaders exchange pointless insults on the subject at Prime Minister’s Questions. By the weekend, after more buck-passing and harrumphing, a new crisis looms. What was the previous week’s fandango about? No one knows or remembers, until they find it in their sock drawer two years later.How nice to see a journalist putting journalism in its place.
And now, for no particular reason other
than that I have been listening to a lot of Texas blues, here is Freddie King in
1966 with “I Loved a Woman”:
similar technique to
fellow Texan Albert
Collins (whom I saw in a bar in New York and was amazing).
That’s
Clarence “Gatemouth” Brown
(whom I saw in a bar
in Auckland and was amazing)
running the band behind him. All I know about King
is that he was a big influence on Eric Clapton and after the concert at Western
Springs in the 70s he put his hand down my then girlfriend’s front. I never did
find out what she was doing backstage.
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