LA Woman again

An almost joyful stroll down Bethnal Green market brings back sardines, crab, cherries, peaches, a ray of sunshine, and a vinyl copy of The Doors LA Woman. The vinyl looks in really good shape, but the sleeve has clearly seen some appropriate use. No doubt one listen will counteract all the healthiness of crabs and cherries and so on, and I'll be bouncing off the walls wailing (Morrison wails, not howls, I think you wail when you're drunk) just like I used to.

We are steadily buying our vinyl back. I left most of mine in one flat or other in Peckham round 1992. Clearly a mistake based on unwaranted enthusiasm for new media, nomadic lifestyle, living without baggage and all the rest of it. Such thinking might get you somewhere if you are lucky when you're young, but it can also leave you nowhere. In the middle there are practical and prosaic considerations as to the material necessity of architecture to grapple with, such as; I don't need an office to sit in at the university, the pub will do, but I do need a hell of a lot of shelf space for my library (lesson for university planners) or, as my friend Tim Pyne once asked me, I think for pertinent social purposes - 'I need you to go and buy me a complete record collection'.

Now the man on the stall seems to light up when we pass by, all expectant like a puppy dog. He needs to sell at least some of his LP's and we like the idea of recycling them. He also seems to have stocked right up on Hawkwind in hope. So we've got to keep him going, it seems to have become a local obligation.

However the wailing gets us in to trouble. When Julie put her new Burning Spear record on the other night there was an ominous chime from our new seventies retro Abigail's Party doorbell and our little rock n' roller about to make it big as rock star neighbour complained about the noise! Fuck me, this is some inversion. Correct, little rock and roller and his partner who wants to save the world are quiet as a fucking mice (occasionally we hear a little bit of guitar noodling) but really, I've never felt more like some character out of 'Old Folks Boogie' (a Little Feat classic if you're uninitiated).