Wan Light

I had a moment of extreme reminisce today. Just a flash. It was like having a knife plunged into my chest and twisted viciously. The cause of the pain? An overheard snatch of conversation between two of the 14 year old girls in my tutor room at lunchtime that went “and he said ‘we never talk when we’re sober, do we?’”

In and for an instant I was transported back fourteen years, to when those kids were being born, and my own moments of late night (and sometimes early evening) deep drunken discussions with the girls who, indeed, I never talked with when we were sober. I saw the walls of Jon’s parents’ front room, spinning slowly and gently collapsing in on themselves. I saw Christmas decorations spiralling out of control, drifting up to the heavens. I tasted cheap Dutch lager and vicious home-brew elderberry wine. My brain twitched on the scent of too much Studio hairspray.

Similar thoughts and flashes of memory also delivered in the afternoon from the smell of … shampoo? Hairspray? Body spray? Something… something so powerful and loaded that my mind just cracked when I should have been taking the register and all of a sudden I was back in the mid 1980’s, swimming with synth-pop, darkened closets, guitars ringing out proud and pure, fingers intertwining, afternoons of window gazed tedium and voices saying ‘I loved you for two years’ already too late. Times when even the flicker of an eyelash was too long a time to wait for love, or for anything at all.

In memory of those times then, at least in part, it was so nice to find an email in my inbox with a URL for a lovely Orange Juice site. I’m sure some of you will enjoy it as much as I did. Even if it did remind me of the pain, even if it did make me remember the dances in the fading light; the vast emptiness of knowing everyone only ever remembers in their own internal ways and that the connections that once sparked across rooms on the waves of alcohol will never come again.

posted by duke harringay at 7:57 PM

Had an email from Andy Rosyton today, in which he told me that there’s been movement on the Wolfhounds site he’s been putting together. It looks good. I still need to write that thing about the whole ’86-’90 scene for him… one day, one day. Which I’ve been saying for about a year now, but hey.

He also sent a url for a page that he reckoned I might be interested in: http://www.geocities.com/Hollywood/Heights/2998/interviews/richlet.html I went and had a look, and it really freaked me out. It’s a copy of a letter that Richey Edwards sent to me way back in, if memory serves me correctly, 1988. It might have been early 89, but whatever. I vaguely recall sending out some photocopies a year or two later to some hard-core Manic’s fans, around the time of the Heavenly release of ‘You Love Us’, so I guess it somehow filtered through to the Internet. I expect it’s on a bunch of websites by now. I kind of regret sending out those copies now, but at the time it seemed fair enough. Richey and the band were talking about exploitation and how they were kind of up for that whole thing, so it seemed kind of fitting. Anyway, it was really strange seeing it in now that new context. Very strange indeed.

I’m glad it’s out there though, because it contains some of the Secret History of the Manic’s, in that it’s the letter in which Richey said that ‘me’ by the Wolfhounds was one of his favourite records, and that the article about McCarthy and Wolfhounds in Underground magazine made him want to join/form a band. So, you know, I’m glad that information is out there.

posted by duke harringay at 6:57 PM

Yesterday morning some engineers from our local cable company were due to come and set up a Broadband connection. They arrived around 9am and left around midday: What should have been a half hour job ending up taking three hours.

I felt sorry for the engineers. They’d clearly just been chucked in at the deep end, with scant training, and no real understanding of what it was they were doing. Initially they tried to set up the cable modem with my Ethernet port, as I wanted, but that was clearly not going right, so eventually they talked me into going with the USB option. Since I wanted to try and get things working anyway at all, I said okay, and hey presto, everything then went smoothly, and off they toodled, several hours late on their schedule for the day and no doubt with a whole queue of disgruntled customers lined up ahead of them.

So, great, I thought, I have super speedy Net access. But how do I share it around the other machines in the house? Now I’d pre-empted this somewhat by getting myself a wireless router and a couple of wireless cards, and in the leaflet that came with the router it all looked relatively straightforward, even if I didn’t really know that much about MAC addresses and cloning IP addresses. Or anything at all.

So that was Saturday wasted. Nothing I tried worked. It all just crumbled to dust in my hands. I kind of knew the problem lay in the fact that the engineers had talked me into using the USB connection instead of the Ethernet, but hey… I tweaked and twisted anyway. All to no avail.

This morning I phoned the tech support and asked a bloke if he could tell me how to set up the modem through the Ethernet card as I originally wanted. He seemed to think the original engineers had been really thick to be unable to do it in the first place, but whatever. After a few tweaks of ipconfig and whatsits, I finally got the modem working through the Ethernet. Yay! And it really wasn’t that difficult after all.

Then I went out on my bike.

Much cooler today. I was coughing a bit when I got home, a result of the cold air in my lungs and chest from the chilly downhills. I wonder how much longer I can continue to ride in shorts and short-sleeves? Not much change in the trees though, since last weekend, or the week before, probably thanks to the warmth of the past five or six days. Some withering ferns lining the roads up Haldon, and lots of rowan berries, but only a few tree leaves showing much change and very few falling yet.

So. Home and in front of the computer again, and I tried once more adding the modem to the router and configuring everything, and, um, at first it didn’t work so I went and made some veg lasagne for dinner, and then tried it again. Yay! For some reason I don’t really understand it worked! Then I farted around with the wireless card in my laptop but that wasn’t doing anything exciting at all, so I went and farted about on the downstairs computer and lo and behold it all worked! Double yay! So now C can sit and access the broadband connection from her study without nasty network cables snaking along walls and around skirting boards… plus she can now print on my printer wirelessly instead of always trailing up the stairs and handing me a disk and saying ‘can you print this for me please?’ and me getting grumpy. It’s all very exciting. Isn’t technology wonderful? When it works…

The speed of the connection is 536 kbs. I just did a check. Since it’s only meant to be a 0.5mb connection, that’s pretty good. I am dead excited. Now whenever anyone asks if it’s worth getting I’ll say no, it’s crap, don’t bother, and then there’s less chance of other folks coming along and hogging bandwidth with their online Doom tournaments and crap.

Still can’t get the bloody laptop to connect, but I’ll deal with that some other time.

Now all I have to do is find something worth looking at on the Internet… that might take a little longer.


posted by duke harringay at 8:51 PM