Aide de camp

The camping season is looming, and it's time for young men the nation over to nail their courage to the sticking place and get the Trangia and the tent out of mothballs.  Each year camping looks less and less appealing - the cold, the hassle, the inability to bring all your adult toys with you etc.  And yet to decline to go would be an admission of defeat, a kowtowing to the advancing years.  And we can't have that.  Rage rage against the dying of the light.

Unfortunately it's murder trying to book campsites these days as holidaying under canvas has become dead fashionable.  Years ago one could turn up without a reservation and still bag nine pitches and a kennel for the dog.  But now it's like trying to get into Studio 54.  This is only one area of many in which the zeitgeist has chased me down and helped itself to my hobbies.

Over the last five years or so most if not all of my interests or peccadilloes has become the thing for the fashionable young graduate about town.  All men under 40 who aspire to a certain intelligent otherness now wear tweed jackets, ride fixed wheel bikes, drink real ale, go camping of a bank holiday weekend and live in Walthamstow Village.  Yes - I invented that.

Whilst one doesn't wish to appear churlish, where were you lot in 2010?  I don't do these things to make a statement; I do them because I believe them to be pleasurable and/or worthy of my time in some other regard.  I happened across them not because the colour supps suggested I should, but because they appealed to me on a fundamental level.  That's the problem with fashion movements: they broker no dissent.  They don't allow for individual likes and desires.  You throw your lot in with currently fashionable pasttimes etc. whether you like them or not

When I was a boy, I was starstruck by the mod movement.  As soon as I saw a scooter, a sharp suit and a pair of desert boots, I was lost to it.  My little mates and I immediately became mods, and I can honestly say that this period was the most improbably exciting time of my entire life.  I lived being a mod, absolutely lived it.

Sadly for me, during the long summer holidays in 1981, all the former friends decided en bloc to become casuals.  Just like that.  I could not believe it.  I felt betrayed, but they couldn't see the problem.  "Everyone was a mod then, and everyone is a casual now."   The scales fell from mine eyes.  The aesthetics of modism meant no more to them than did the price of sherbet.  It just is what it is now.  We move on.

I resisted the move, and I still affect a certain mod look to this day.  I don't do this to make a statement or stand out.  You cannot choose with whom or with what you fall in love.  It chooses you.

You Gotta Have...

The wife and I popped to the pub on Saturday evening with a couple of old friends. As the night wore on, more and suspiciously well dressed young persons kept turning up. Each wandered through the public bar before disappearing downstairs to a basement room. It turns out the pub had a resident northern-soul deejay, who was down there spinning discs furiously.

It leaves me absolutely cold, northern soul. Any sub-genre that so wilfully wallows in obscurity is on thin ice from the off. And NS aficionados do love to score points with the rarity of their vinyl. They might deny it, but it's what drives them One can only imagine the self-satisfied sashaying that goes on when the deejay plays a track so overlooked by history that even the recording artist it can scarcely recall murdering it.

The reason the tracks are obscure is that all were originally considered second-rate at best, so that only seven copies were pressed. (In fairness to Barry Gordy's musical judgement, most did then go down like the Hindenburg upon release). Worse still, some didn't even get that far - the record company deciding that upon mature reflection, one might just as well try and market bowel gas. Whatever your take on soul music, I think you'd agree that Motown knew its onions. They produced wonderful, joyous and accessible pop music. When, therefore, they decide something stinks, stink it does. All the expensively-shod preening to the contrary won't change that.

Also, if NS were objectively any good, the phenomenon would have spread far and wide - at least as far as the Capital. No. Apart from the occasional misguided pub in Clerkenwell, northern soul's spiritual home consists of wretched northern mining towns and Butlins in Caistor.