Internet time clock of the heart.
Nov. 25th, 2007 02:34 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
hirezSomewhat trousered this evening. Time-travel has that effect.
Years ago there was a down at heel hotel/boozer in the middle of Cheltenham called The Plough. I recall some band called 'The Roadrunners' had a residency there because they were in the NME gig-guide for months. Esprit de Corps probably played there too. Round the back was a car-park that was little more than a bomb-site with a load of hardcore dumped in it. There were Buddleia growing out of the crumbling brickwork and rusty Fords everywhere.
It was all flattened in the 80s and replaced with the Regent Arcade, which is exactly what you'd expect from an 80s provincial mall that considered itself too posh to be called 'mall'. Not for nothing was a Cheltenham fanzine named 'It's only a bloody clock'. I used to go there quite a bit because it contained record shops. And the sort of bloody awful shops you only ever see in malls. Etam. River Island. Fucking Clintons. The entire cohort of the Dolmansaxlil Corporation.
I was there today for the first time in at least a decade. It's smaller, louder, held together with gaffer-taped plasterboard partitions and jammed out with Cheltenham yout'. You know the flickery-neon cyberpunk future we were going to have from the vantage point of 1986? Just like that. A concentrated bubble of 80s that's too dense to move with the rest of the timeline and has been abandoned to its fate.
The sort of yout' that frequents Broadmeads in Bristol are grimly spherical pram-faced mingers jabbering into mobile phones. Cheltenham yout' fall out of personal-plated Range Rovers, haul their miniskirts down slightly and then jabber into mobile phones.
Out of a sense of completeness and curiosity, I beetled up the road to the other 'mall' to check. Pretty much the same. You could be anywhere on the planet that does malls. I wandered round the back stairs of the place on the off-chance that I could find the door that leads to the outlet mall in Gurnee Mills, IL. However, all I found were funny looks from the security staff.
Which leads me to think that malls aren't spatially linked the way shitey metal nightclubs are, and that's probably a good thing. We can't have frigging shoppers discovering inter-dimensional travel by accident while they were looking for the scented candle shop. That sort of thing takes a certain amount of application and the ability to deal with watered-down lager, several hours of AC/DC and a lake of toxic lager piss slopping out of the blokes bogs. You need to be dedicated to your cause and look the part if you're going to lurch out of some black-painted pit in an entirely different decade and country to the one you entered.
Anyway. That particular reality (and it's very real. I'm not from here.) will be written about at some point in this future.
After that, it was off to the aged P's for tea and toast. All very fine. This week we discover a semi-distant relation ran the Hants and Dorset bus company.
Years ago there was a down at heel hotel/boozer in the middle of Cheltenham called The Plough. I recall some band called 'The Roadrunners' had a residency there because they were in the NME gig-guide for months. Esprit de Corps probably played there too. Round the back was a car-park that was little more than a bomb-site with a load of hardcore dumped in it. There were Buddleia growing out of the crumbling brickwork and rusty Fords everywhere.
It was all flattened in the 80s and replaced with the Regent Arcade, which is exactly what you'd expect from an 80s provincial mall that considered itself too posh to be called 'mall'. Not for nothing was a Cheltenham fanzine named 'It's only a bloody clock'. I used to go there quite a bit because it contained record shops. And the sort of bloody awful shops you only ever see in malls. Etam. River Island. Fucking Clintons. The entire cohort of the Dolmansaxlil Corporation.
I was there today for the first time in at least a decade. It's smaller, louder, held together with gaffer-taped plasterboard partitions and jammed out with Cheltenham yout'. You know the flickery-neon cyberpunk future we were going to have from the vantage point of 1986? Just like that. A concentrated bubble of 80s that's too dense to move with the rest of the timeline and has been abandoned to its fate.
The sort of yout' that frequents Broadmeads in Bristol are grimly spherical pram-faced mingers jabbering into mobile phones. Cheltenham yout' fall out of personal-plated Range Rovers, haul their miniskirts down slightly and then jabber into mobile phones.
Out of a sense of completeness and curiosity, I beetled up the road to the other 'mall' to check. Pretty much the same. You could be anywhere on the planet that does malls. I wandered round the back stairs of the place on the off-chance that I could find the door that leads to the outlet mall in Gurnee Mills, IL. However, all I found were funny looks from the security staff.
Which leads me to think that malls aren't spatially linked the way shitey metal nightclubs are, and that's probably a good thing. We can't have frigging shoppers discovering inter-dimensional travel by accident while they were looking for the scented candle shop. That sort of thing takes a certain amount of application and the ability to deal with watered-down lager, several hours of AC/DC and a lake of toxic lager piss slopping out of the blokes bogs. You need to be dedicated to your cause and look the part if you're going to lurch out of some black-painted pit in an entirely different decade and country to the one you entered.
Anyway. That particular reality (and it's very real. I'm not from here.) will be written about at some point in this future.
After that, it was off to the aged P's for tea and toast. All very fine. This week we discover a semi-distant relation ran the Hants and Dorset bus company.
