blog.djstead.net

A few nights ago in London, I got lucky. Well, okay, not that lucky – but I did get up close and intimate with a celebrity… That (lucky?) person was Simon Amstell , performing a warm-up gig for recording his DVD in Dublin in the near future: I got lucky by buying the very last ticket; I got up close by braving the front row; and intimate because – well, quite frankly, a lot of his material hit home. There was no mention of his Popworld/Buzzcocks history (through which I’m sure many of you know of him) – instead we got a raw insight into “the real Simon Amstell”, as twee and sickeningly OK Magazine that sounds. He took us through the embarrasement of approaching his first until-then-secret crush in a shop, and – instead of communicating in the usual manner that ‘normal people’ seem to achieve so well – he yelled out their full name across the shop, and – having gone that far – could only proceed to communicate with them even louder. He introduced us to his overtly ...

Up until a few weeks ago, I really could not care less about the election. For me – national politics was a joke that I didn’t find particularly amusing, or particularly offensive; it operated outside of my social circles, my circus of ideas; it was something for other people to be interested in. To be quite honest, I can’t even recall if I voted in the last national election – I know I voted locally, because that’s where I believe it matters – but national politics never seemed to matter. The amount of bureaucracy, red tape, cliches, endless fuel for the tabloids, and – above all – blandness – of political influence at a nationwide level, just seemed irrelevant: I’ve likely had the good fortune to not have to live through the Thatcher Years – but politics, particularly in England, seems stuck in the old days. The fact we’ve flipped between Labour and Conservative for the past 65 years seems akin to those years when your options on television were ‘this side or t...