Me, squalor - and Radio City

By Steve Regan on Oct 8, 09 04:24 PM

I'd been meaning, for a long time, to do some serious cleaning, tidying and minor repairs at my flat in New Brighton.

But I have to psyche myself up for such activities. It is, after all, so much easier to let things slide on the domestic; to drift into easy-queasy squalor.

Especially for a poet and an artist, such as moi!

But soon, I'm supposed to host a monthly meeting of the New Brighton Educative Wine Tasting Society (NEWTS for short!) at my place, so the incentive has been around for some time for the Big Clean-Up.

But we are talking a major operation. Really. The kitchen's in such a mess I'm tempted to start with a controlled explosion.

Well, weekends are no good at all for housework. I'm too busy recovering, in a horizontal position, from the rigours of working full time Monday-to-Friday to have an y energy left for elbow grease activity of any sort.

So what I did was ... I took a day off work earlier this week. No, not a sickie; I don't do them. A legitimate flexi-day is what I booked for the clean-up.
Well the day started badly, because the alarm clock radio was tuned to Radio City by mistake.

(Normally I wake up to Radio Four's Today programme, or sometimes Snelly on BBC Radio Merseyside, but definitely not the moron fodder that is the modern Radio City).
I think the broadcasting philosophy behind Radio City 96.7, as it now likes to be known, is this ... the listeners are the mental equivalents of goldfish... their memory has a two-second span, that's all.

So the disc-jockey babble was very short, dumn-ass phrases, and the reading of incoherent showbiz "goss" out of the redtop papers. Zzzzzz.
And all the time the 'presenters' were 'speaking', there was crappy club-anthem style instrumental musak playing under their voices.

(I think I was listening to a banal posse called Rossie and Co. Whatever! They made Smashey and Nicey off Harry Enfield's telly show, seem positively vivacious and intellectual.)

Also there were loads of raucous adverts and jingles to endure - some involving a silly bird with a grating mid-Atlantic accent laced with synthetic excitement - urghh! How can people bear such crap? It certainly made me get up in a bad mood.

I grew up listening to Radio City inn the early to mid 1970s, when I was a teenager in Wigan. It was good back then. Witty, warm, intelligent banter is what I remember, and occasionally the output was quite edgy. What a shame it turned out like it is today!
Anyway. Coffee. And turn the bloody wireless off!

So. That was last Monday. I had a day of industrial-style cleaning ahead of me. Did I do any of it?

'Course, I didn't. I went to Birkenhead and bought a tray instead.

I kinda figured the tray would make me return dirty crockery to the kitchen more efficiently.

So it wasn't a complete waste of time...

Unlike Radio City!