Ah, Youth
Today I went to the allegedly annual Scout Fair jumble sale thing in Partick. There was a very long queue, lots of scouts and a lot of crap for sale at fairly relevant prices. I did, however, manage to get some excellent things… A Commodore Amiga CD 32 – scouts price £3, market value £30-40… A Spectrum ZX 81 (boxed) – scouts price £1.50, market value £30-40… A ZX Spectrum printer – £1.50, market value £50. Ha! Those foolish youngsters need to try harder to earn their badges for Capitalism. Having said that, I did get sort of caught up in a buying frenzy. There were more old computers than you could shake a stick at, and coupled with the scouts’ abstract pricing system, my powers of judgement became clouded. I got a BBC micro for a fiver, put it in a black bag and lugged it around for about ten minutes before remembering that despite being the definitive system to play Ian Bell and David Braben’s classic work of genius ‘Elite’ on, a BBC micro weighs about the same as a tent full of scouts. So in the end I left it, safe in the knowledge that I could afford to be decadent.
What I didn’t manage to find was anything as good as this… (I found it in a box the other day).
It reminded me of when I was young. My best pal’s dad owned a toy shop and so he always had a steady supply of loads of stuff. Which obviously gave us the opportunity to wreck it all with impunity. And one fateful day we got our hands on a Doozer. The Doozers were the little green chaps from Fraggle Rock. If I remember correctly, the Fraggles would go above ground, steal radishes from the big hairy things’ vegetable patch, come back down into Fraggle Rock and give the radishes to the Doozers who would then proceed to construct particularly elaborate buildings for themselves using the radishes as raw materials. The Fraggles would then take it upon themselves to eat the Doozers’ houses. It seemed they couldn’t digest the radish in it’s raw state and the poor, unwitting Doozers were exploited for their ability to somehow distil vegetable matter. Kids, (particularly scouts), there’s probably a message in there somewhere.
Anyway, me and Keith had a Doozer. Like the rest of its kind, it was about eight inches tall, slightly chubby with a gormless expression and dressed in construction gear with a hard-hat. It was made of that funny spongy material that meant you could bend it into various poses. And what did we do with the Doozer? We didn’t bend it into any sexual positions and we didn’t snap its arms and legs off. We did however strip it naked to see if it had a willy. (Which, of course, it didn’t – and as far as we could tell at seven years old, he wasn’t a she). Then we laughed at how stupid it looked for a while. Then we pried off its hat which was glued on and laughed even more when we realised that Doozers were bald. Then we got a biro and wrote ‘Duncan Goodhugh’ across its chest and laughed until we cried.
I heard and narrowly missed seeing a dog getting run over the other day. A man walked past me in a fairly bored fashion half-shouting at nothing apparent. Not unusual for Glasgow. Then I walked past him and he shouted ‘Hey! Gonnae catch that mate’! Then a dog ran past me which I made no attempt to catch because I was carrying things and I didn’t like the man’s tone of voice. As I walked along I noticed the dog (one of those crap dogs that are about the size of a big rat) had stopped to piss on something. So I tried to get it but it ran away and when the man came looking I pointed to it running away along the pavement and he just sauntered after it. I crossed the road to use the bank machine and heard a big long animal noise that sounded like it came from one of those crap rat-sized dogs. And it had, because I looked around the corner and saw the man walking up the middle of the road, holding his dog (not very triumphantly I might add), swearing at an unstopped car. The dog wasn’t squashed though. At least not on the outside.
I turned round to use the bank machine only to find that someone had decided to throw their curry and noodles at it. I wonder why people sometimes throw meals at bank machines. Surely they they too need to get money out before they can get some fried rice to throw at the bank machine.
I painted the living room white the other day and I’m going to sort out all of my stuff starting tomorrow. I think next week I’m going to do one entry a day with a photo.
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