Time to light the lights for the return of The Muppet Show

The big Muppet news of 2026 so far has been a one episode revival of The Muppet Show. It seems to have been championed by Seth Rogan (executive producer) and featured Sabrina Carpenter as the show's special guest.

There is always a worry when a beloved franchise gets a reboot - as I said when The Muppets was released back in 2011. But Disney has done a reasonable job as caretakers of the Muppet legacy in the past 15 years, releasing lots of new projects although not much has really made an impact.

There was a follow up film, Muppets Most Wanted, that was okay. I didn't like it as much as the 2011 film. Disney tried two series featuring the main characters (The Muppets and then Muppets Now!) and also did a short series about the Muppet Show band, The Electric Mayhem and a Hallowe'en special - Muppets Haunted Mansion. None of the series grabbed me and Cathy and we didn't finish watching any of them. (Maybe, as Gonzo sings, we're going to go back there again, someday.) 

So, I watched The Muppet Show special with low expectations but high hopes - fan chatter before the release seemed positive and I'd seen a couple of clips that made me feel less apprehensive than I would have felt going in blind. And overall, it was a decent epsiode that vibed very much with the feel of the original show.

It was the usual chaos behind the scenes, lots of recognisable background characters, fourth wall breaking comments, a guest star who leaned in and took it seriously but didn't take herself seriously, and some fun musical numbers. The duet between Kermit and Sabrina Carpenter featuring lots of harmonising muppet fish and swamp critters felt very OG Muppet Show. Statler and Waldorf were back in their box. Rowlf was back on piano. Scooter was back backstage. It was all done very well.

I had a couple of minor quibbles. Bobo the bear shouldn't have been saying "It's good to be back" when he was a character first introduced on Muppets Tonight, not The Muppet Show. Pepe the Prawn was under-used and appeared in probably the weakest sketch of the show. I'm not sure what Beauregard was meant to be doing during the rats' musical number. 

However, those are really penickity issues. I'm quite happy that all I have are penickity issues as that's a sign of how much this one off special got right. Here's hoping it gains enough of an audience that Disney agree to doing more!

Book of the Month: More News As It's Made

Last month I blogged about the small community of Action Force fans keeping the toy line alive with new figures and custom toys. David Gillis is one of the leading Action Force customisers and his creative customs show just what Action Force could have been if commercial pressures hadn't crushed the original toy line into the GI Joe mould. 

David also has a good eye for photos, and this coffee table book of his Action Force photography was on my radar for a while. A 'black Friday' deal finally convinced me to order myself a copy. And I'm very glad I did.

Briefly, the book is gorgeous. Beautifully laid out to show off the photos, with a mix of scenario-building and real-life details for a lot of the photos. David's love for Action Force really shines through each picture and snippet of backstory.

Presented as photos from the files of the Action Force Photogtaphic Unit (AFPU), the book is split into sections for the four elements of Action Force and then a section on the Enemy led by the evil Baron Ironblood. 

Q-force is the naval and aquatic arm of Action Force. 

At one point in tbe book, David describes Q-Force as "underrated", which I would agree with. The figures still pop up regularly 'on card' and seem easier to find than other parts of Action Force, although Space Force runs them close. 

I've included pictures of two custom vehicles because they are both developed from Star Wars "mini-rigs". Around about the time The Empire Strikes Back was released, Kenner produced some small one figure toys that didn't feature in the films. They were in the pocket-money range for kids, unlike other Star Wars vehicles.

I love how David has taken these vehicles and repurposed them for Space Force.

The more popular parts of Action Force were the SAS Force and the infantry Z-Force. I have a feeling neither would be used on toys now - SAS has probably been copyrighted by the Army, and "Z" has become a Russian propaganda symbol used to express support for the invasion of Ukraine. 

But back in the 80s, Z-force were the good guys.

Stories featuring good guys also have to have bad guys and the ultimate bad guy challenging Action Force was Baron Ironblood who commanded an army of brainwashed soldiers known as the Red Shadows. 

David has created some new characters who have also sworn allegiance to the Baron, but most of the Enemy photos feature the original Red Shadows and Muton robots in various scenes. 

Overall, I think this book would be interesting enough for people who don't have a nostalgic connection to Action Force. The photo work is excellent and the write ups add some great little details to the pictures. 

More News As It's Made is available from Total Toy Books.

Keeping Action Force alive

I have to admit that when I was a kid I liked my Star Wars figures, but I loved my Action Force toys. It's an almost forgotten toy-line now but there is a small committed community of collectors and hobbyists keeping it alive.

In fact, there is enough interest in this quirky British toyline that even some big companies are paying a nostalgic nod to it. I blogged almost two years ago about how Reaction had resurrected Red Laser. Since then, they have also released Red Jackal - who was a repaint of the GI Joe character Destro in the original Action Force line in the 1980s. 

Naturally, I acquired a Red Jackal when he came out.

But then recently, I decided to buy two figures made by a guy called Matt who has a charming little sideline in 3D printed figures. He has reproduced a figure called Skeletron, that was the mailaway bonus figure in the final wave of the original Action Force. Kids could save up proofs of purchase and send off for a freebie figure - in this case a robotised skeleton. 

Matt has also created his own "what could have been" figure of a Kraken Kommander. The Krakens were produced in the last wave of Action Force - the story goes they were thawed after being frozen for millennia and then cloned by the evil Baron Ironblood who used them to fight Q-Force, the naval branch of Action Force.

The figures are great quality. I picked a robotic silver Skeletron from the available options. It comes with a bonus replacement head and a gun that looks a bit like an 80s Star Wars weapon. 

Kraken Kommander comes with a couple of accessories too. I love the sculpt of his face. He oozes the supreme self confidence and superiority that the sculpts of the original Kraken figures had.

The arm details are excellent too. Even down to the printed logo and the scales on his forearms.

Both figures come with "file cards" - these replicate the ones that could be cut out from the back of Action Force figures. There isn't room for a filecard on the packaging here so it was a nice touch to include them.

I'm looking forward to digging out my original figures to compare with the new recruits!

Nostalgia is a weapon - football edition

One of the bon mots Douglas Coupland included in his book Generation X is "Nostalgia is a weapon". It's always stuck with me and I've got older it's become more obvious that 'nostalgia' is weaponised by marketing departments, politicians, and by social media. (How many "good old days" posts pop up on your algorithm? Mine is full of 'em.)

Naturally football clubs have got in on the action. Retro shirts have been popular for a while among fans because they are pure nostalgia fuel. Usually retro tops are just done for leisure wear. But this year, Shrewsbury Town's main kit is a throwback to their kit from 40 years ago. 

I feel I am in the nostalgia crosshairs. Because, this was my first ever kit. Here are some pictures of when I was a matchday mascot way back in 1986. It was a typically grey October day with a crowd of less than 3,000 paying supporters.

I was a lucky mascot. Shrewsbury won 4-1 against Grimsby Town. I wore that kit for the rest of the school year in 'games' every Wednesday afternoon in junior school. 

A few years later we discovered the shirt was an almost perfect fit for our beloved family dog, Celyn.

(She was a very patient dog, putting up with this.)

The shirt I wore as a mascot now has pride of place on my office wall, after Cathy got it framed as a surprise present.

I bought the new season's shirt ahead of Shrewsbury's first game of the season at the weekend. I hadn't bought a replica shirt for a few years - I just haven't liked the designs. But this was one I felt I had to buy. 

I went to the match with my two eldest nephews who patiently queued with me in the club shop before the game. They were less patient during the match itself because it was generally dire to watch and frustrating.

But I had a very funny feeling watching the game. For the first time in a long time it really felt like watching Shrewsbury play. It unlocked a primal memory of those first games I went to, when "Shrewsbury Town" was first imprinted on my brain. This is the colour scheme I knew first. 

Other colour combinations have come and gone. But none have stuck with me this strongly. 

One of my nephews has been to several Shrewsbury games, but for the other, this was his first. Maybe he will have the same imprinting experience and for him, this will always be the true colours of Shrewsbury Town. The circle would be complete. 

2024 Cinema trips - all the 'quels

It was a case of all the "quels" in 2024. I saw sequels, a prequel and an interquel. In fact, five of the seven films I saw in the cinema were "quels", and the other two were adaptations of books. Here's what I watched on the big screen:

Dune Part 2 - sequel (although they split the source material in two for the movies so this was a continuation sequel rather than a second story in a franchise). Full review here. 

Inside Out 2 - sequel. I really liked the first Inside Out film, which took a complex concept and explored it in a very accessible way. The sequel continued the story of Riley and her emotions, which have multiplied as Riley grows up. This is probably one of the best depictions and explanations of how anxiety is a protection mechanism that can go into overdrive and become harmful. 

Besides Anxiety, the other new emotions include, Embarrassment, Envy, Ennui and, my favourite, Nostalgia, who pops in and is promptly dismissed for being too soon. Although I think I felt nostalgia as a teenager - certainly I found myself looking back to things I had done a few years previously and having a new appreciation for them. Nowadays I agree strongly with Douglas Coupland's comment that "nostalgia is a weapon" and I know it gets weaponised against me. That's why I end up with things like an A Team van made by Playmobil...

The film has a happy ending for Riley and her friends as they navigate the emotions around changing schools, establishing new friendship groups and playing ice hockey. I like the mix of joy and anger that fuels Riley's in-game activity. There's a good explanation about how our beliefs about the world and about ourselves shape our lives - another deep topic that I felt the film-makers summarised well. 

Harold and the Purple Crayon - the film version of a popular kid's book. So, not totally original but technically not a 'quel. Full review here. 

Alien Romulus - an 'interquel' that was apparently set between Alien and Aliens, the first two films in the franchise. Not the greatest movie in the Alien franchise but I enjoyed it. Full review here. 

Beetlejuice! Beetlejuice! - a "legacy sequel" released decades after the first film. Full review here. 

Transformers One - a prequel of sorts. I'm not sure where in the Transformers franchise this animated film fits, but it was expanding on the in-universe lore and would act as a prequel to just about any other Transformers movie. 

It's the origin story of Optimus Prime and Megatron, and why they became bitter enemies. I thought it was very well done despite leaning hard on some over-used tropes - the people in charge don't have our best interests at heart; best friends become implacable enemies; there is a quest for a lost artifact that can save civilisation. 

However, within those well known story arcs, the script was lean, the film was fast-paced with several action sequences that all served the purposes of the plot, and there was plenty of humour in the dialogue and situations but it never got silly. It felt like a grown up kid-friendly cartoon. It also added some depth to other long-established characters, even those with limited screentime like Starscream, who in this was more than just a whining minion of Megatron. 

The Wild Robot - another film based on a book. I watched this with Cathy on her birthday in a cinema that was experiencing temperature issues. It was freezing. At one point in the story an ice storm hits - at that point it felt like we were in a 4D film experience. 

The basic plot was of a robot booting up on a remote island and looking for tasks to carry out. Being a robot it works out how to communicate with animals and gradually develops its self-awareness to become the protector of the wild creatures. This includes teaching an orphaned gosling to fly - which I found was a surprisingly moving storyline. 

The third act of the movie dragged a bit. The most intriguing part was seeing the wider world, with humans living in large hi-tech habitats, with hydroponic farms, hovering over the drowned ruins of cities (San Francisco to be precise). It's a world after the climate apocalypse and the survivors seem to be doing OK with an army of robot servants undertaking menial tasks. Somehow, that felt like the most unrealistic part of the film compared to a robot learning how to talk to a gosling and teach it to fly before its fellow geese migrated and left it behind. 

Looking ahead to 2025, I'm sure there are more 'quels to come. I have set myself a challenge to try and watch more original films next year. 

Book of the Month - A History of Heavy Metal

This book was a makeweight in a 'buy two for £7' deal in HMV, which used to be a record shop but now is a more general emporium of random things. Including books. (I bought Slaughterhouse Five and The Boys from Brazil in a previous deal - both reviewed back in September.) It felt sort of suitable that I would be buying a book about music from HMV despite the company's drift away from selling music.

A History of Heavy Metal by Andrew O'Neill is based on a stand up comedy show about heavy metal. Without wishing to be too rude, that's pretty apparent from the way it's written. The narrative goes off on tangents. There are a lot of opinions. And it gets quite repetitive after a while, like he's forgotten what he has previously told you (twice) about a particular album or how he thinks Metallica declined in greatness when they went commercial. 

The thing is that heavy metal is inherently ridiculous. Andrew sort of recognises this, but rather than let the stupid excesses of the movement speak for themselves, he feels the need to put his own gloss on it by telling you they were stupid. And fair enough, if you despise 'glam metal' as much as he does, maybe recounting stories from those bands is tedious. I did like his comment about forcing himself to watch a documentary about Motley Crue as research for the book. I understand how painful that must have been - but really it did feel like the minimum amount of effort in terms of actual research. 

But although Andrew is willing to admit that metal is often just very silly, he also tries to paint it as an important movement, uniting outsiders and providing a community for people who don't feel they fit in. Which is all fair, I suppose. He tells his own story of getting into metal a couple of times in the book and that was more interesting than being told, again, how his favourite Death Metal albums were amazingly innovative and genre-defining.

Overall the book could have done with more stories, more nuggets gleaned from research and fewer opinions (or at least just being told those opinions once). There was plenty left out and glossed over - the entire Satanic Panic in the USA in the 1980s, for example. But maybe he didn't know much about that because I'm aware that religious moral panics are often opaque to people outside the religion. 

Several times he alluded to stuff, but didn't return to the topic to explain it further. The reader is just assumed to know what went wrong with Celtic Frost, for example. That's the one that really stuck out but there were several others. It feels like the book is aimed at people who don't know much about heavy metal; the interrupted explanations wouldn't be helpful.

He also has a very annoying authorial habit of putting jokes and tidbits of information in footnotes. These really interrupted the flow of reading. A long time ago I was told that if a point (or a joke) is worth a footnote, then you should really think about including it in the main body of the text. The continual footnoting did make me wonder if he doubted his ability to land a joke. Truthfully, many didn't land. They just got in the way. 

Although I wouldn't particularly recommend the book, it did have some highlights. I liked this comment on page 84 so much I read it out loud to Cathy:

"Def Leppard's enormous success in the States is what the other... bands were aiming for, though none went for it with quite the same ferocity, plus of course they possibly lacked the shark-eyed commercial killer instinct and pop chops to write the sorts of songs that millions of people want to hear. Bear in mind that most humans are awful, and so if millions of people want to buy your art... it's probably not good art."

That final sentence really made me laugh. 

And towards the end of the book (p.271) this rather astute comment caught my eye:

"One of the major advantages of cassette tapes was the lack of random access - you just started it where you'd left off. As a result albums and mix tapes got listened to more evenly. Records and CDs favour the beginnings of albums, and MP3s lead to the universal experience of listening to someone dj-ing at a party and skipping tracks halfway through. Being spoiled for choice means many people give albums less time to grow, and fewer listens in general."

I remember listening mainly to cassettes in my formative musical years in the late 80s and early 90s (when, I admit, I really liked Def Leppard) and I think he is on to something here. There are a lot of album tracks I listened to in order to get to the bits I liked because fiddling about with fast forward or rewind was annoying. Even the few albums I had on CD got taped onto cassettes because I didn't have a CD played in my bedroom, but I did have a succession of tape-players.

(It's strange, because at the time there was a big movement saying 'home taping was killing music' but I got introduced to a lot of bands whose albums I have subsequently bought and rebought in different editions because a mate taped me a copy to listen to.)

There's a certain level of nostalgia at work there, and that is a theme for the book. The chapter titled 'In the Late Nineties Every Band I Loved Went Shit' gives it away. The following chapter slagging off Nu Metal feels a bit like an old guy complaining the music the kids are into is rubbish. The nasty comments about Linkin Park felt awkward given Chester Bennington's suicide - which was actually in the same year this book was published. I'd have taken them out for the paperback release because it really comes across as punching down. 

The book ends with a rather silly series of predictions that heavy metal will eventually take over the world, which mainly seems to be a rather long gag about the heat death of the universe arriving before the release of a new Guns & Roses album. It felt like unnecessary filler when the previous chapter about the current state of heavy metal had ended on an optimistic high point. 

And a note on indexes - the book really needed two, an index of bands and artists and an index of topics. 

So, this is 'a' history of heavy metal. I think 'the' history is probably still waiting to be written.

Books of the Month - a trio of twentieth century novels

Recently TK Maxx has had a great selection of books available below list price. (Including several different editions of Nineteen Eighty-Four, which felt a bit odd.) Over the last couple of months I've bought some older fiction that caught my eye. I'm going to review them in chronological order, starting with the oldest.

Fiesta: The Sun Also Rises - Ernest Hemingway

I'd never read any Hemingway, and this might not have been the best novel to start with. However, it sounded interesting from the blurb on the back. The basic premise is that a bunch of dissolute American ex-pats living in Paris in the mid-1920s decide to go to Pamplona to see the running of the bulls and the bullfight there in the fiesta. 

It's not all bullfights and drinking. Along the way some characters go fishing. There's a deep love for angling in the writing, almost as much as there is fascination for bullfighting. Within the group of tourists there is a woman who is the object of attention for several men, including the narrator, who is carrying a war injury. It's never spelled out but the inference is his wound prevents him from functioning sexually. 

And that's about it. The various infatuated men either get with the woman or don't. The narrator seems detached from all their drama. The Spanish and French characters are just background or mainly there to be patronised. There's some antisemitism and a one character discusses a black boxer he admires using the N word to describe him. 

And fair enough, the book was published in 1927 so what else would be expected. It's an outsider's viewpoint with an ingrained superiority and yet a hollow sense that the people they are so superior to actually have more authenticity. The main characters flit through and observe, are amused by what they see, and then flit off and in the process are utterly meaningless. The fiesta would happen with or without them.

Overall it hasn't inspired me to actively seek out any more Hemingway. It had its moments. (If you like fishing, I think you'd like that chunk of the story!) But I wasn't sorry to finish reading it. 

Coming Up For Air - George Orwell

From the mid-20s to a novel published in 1939 and full of semi-prophetic foreboding about the looming war between Britain and Germany. There's a weighty inevitability to the coming conflict that is reflected throughout this novel - but it's what will come after that really terrifies the protagonist, an era of secret police and endless propaganda. 

When I read On 1984 by DJ Taylor, which was a book about how Orwell wrote that book, this novel and Homage to Catalonia were mentioned as feeding into the key ideas of Nineteen Eighty-Four. Having read both books now, I see what Taylor meant. There's a lot here about the way memories preserve things that have been otherwise obliterated by progress and how the world was going to change. 

The book is set in four parts. In part 1, George, the 45 year-old protagonist is unsettled in his life as an insurance salesman, married with kids and trapped in suburbia. In part 2, he recounts his life growing up in a little Oxfordshire village, his experience in the First World War and his subsequent career in sales,  made possible by the social upheavals caused by the war. In part 3, the hatches a plan to use some money that his wife doesn't know about to fund a trip back to the village he grew up in. And in part 4 he makes the trip which ultimately ends up in disappointment and realising that you can never truly go back. 

There is quite a bit of humour in the book, particularly George's life story. There are several vignettes that capture some true-to-life experiences and observations of people. We stray into some unprogressive views when George the protagonist (and possibly George the author) shares some negative opinions about women, although in fairness several male characters come in for a verbal bruising as well. 

Orwell is good at describing archetypal characters, like men living on faded glories, the genuinely wealthy, the penny-pinching middle-class who don't have funds to match their status, the tory-voting suburban families desperately working to pay their mortgages, and the hard-working, perpetually screwed-over poor. He has particular fun mocking the earnest young men who are various shades of communist and argue fine points of political dogma as if any of it matters. George (and probably George as well) are older and wiser than that and recognise it's all futile.

Despite that negative cast to the story, and the depressing conclusions drawn by the protagonist as his trip doesn't work out as he naively expected, I enjoyed reading this. I find Orwell a very readable author. His character's inner monologue is engaging, and while George the protagonist makes no claim to be a hero or a good person he is extraordinarily sympathetic. I might not have felt that if I had read the book when I was younger, but now I'm in my 40s and slightly horrified how long ago my school and university days are now, I get where he is coming from. 

The Stepford Wives - Ira Levin

And so this trio of reviews jumps forward to the 1970s. This is a very short book, with incredibly lean prose. A lot is left to the imagination with one sentence or a short paragraph summing up key events that move the story forward.

I knew the basic outline of this story without ever having read it or seen any of the film adaptations. The main character is Joanna Eberhard, who moves with her husband, Walter, and children to the seemingly idyllic community of Stepford. She soon notices there is something odd and docile about most of the other women in the town and the few free spirits she encounters seem to be creepily changed somehow after a few months living there. 

The basic gist is that the men of the town have a secret society and have found a way to turn their partners into "perfect" housewives. Joanna realises she needs to escape from Stepford to avoid a similar fate and the story takes a tense turn as she flees. That section was very well written and I had to keep reading to find out whether she made it out or not. 

The edition I read had an introduction by Chuck Pahlahniuk, the author of Fight Club and several other novels. I read the intro after I had read the book - to avoid spoilers. (That proved to be a good choice!) Chuck thinks The Stepford Wives is a warning of a backlash against feminism and that Levin is just illustrating a more fundamental truth - men will just find a different way of putting women in boxes. It's an interesting take and shows that even a comparatively short novel can have depth and layers to it. 

I recognised the titles of most of Levin's other novels and would like to read more of his work, which I think is the highest credit a reader can give. The Stepford Wives really captivated me and I've found myself thinking about it several times after I finished the book. 

The melancholy magic of the FA Cup

I watched the FA Cup final on Saturday. The timing worked well for me to watch it as I have been confined to the house isolating after being infected by covid.

A generic picture (by me) of the Wembley Stadium arch...

I have actually made more of an effort to watch the FA Cup final in the last few years. I enjoyed last year's game when Leicester won the Cup for the first time in this history. This year's contest was less exciting on paper, with both Liverpool and Chelsea winning it multiple times in the past and also being two of the really big teams in the league. FA Cup finals are always better when the less successful clubs get a tilt at winning. 

Back in 2019, I blogged about how the first FA Cup final after my Dad died was an unexpected moment where I keenly felt his loss. That feeling has diminished somewhat over the last couple of years, but it's still something missing from the occasion. Dad would always watch the cup final and talk to me on the phone about it afterwards, even when for several years I wasn't particularly fussed about it and hadn't bothered watching. 

People talk about the "magic" of the FA Cup and really what they mean is nostalgia. As I watched Liverpool and Chelsea punch and counterpunch their way to a 0-0 draw, extra time and penalties, I remembered watching the various cup finals when I was a kid. It made me feel melancholic as the nostalgia washed over me. 

Cup final day was always a big day in our house. In the 1980s it was one of those very rare times that a football match was broadcast live on TV. It almost seems silly now - my time off isolating has been spent watching live football from almost every level in the top five tiers of English football - but back then there was the Cup final, and that was about it.

It was also on both main channels, BBC1 and ITV, so it felt like a real moment when the nation stopped to watch the football. (They did that again this year, but we have way more than 4 channels now so it dominates the schedules less.) We always used to watch it on the BBC, often starting with the build up before lunch time. Some years we would switch over to ITV for the bit presented by "Saint and Greavsie" (Ian St.John and Jimmy Greaves, who had a weekly football chat show on Saturdays). But normally we ignored the ITV output. 

Those were halcyon days for FA Cup finals. I don't remember the one from 1984, when we had just moved into our house in Shrewsbury. But I remember watching Manchester United v Everton in 1985 - notable for Kevin Moran becoming the first player sent off in an FA Cup final, and Manchester United winning in extra time through a goal from wonder-kid Norman Whiteside. I wanted Everton to win and was disappointed that they lost. 

I don't particularly remember anything from the 1986 final when Liverpool won the FA Cup and became the first team to win the League Title and the FA Cup in the same season (the "Double") in my short life-time. Everton were the losing finalists again.

I have vivid memories of the final in 1987 when Coventry City won the FA Cup for the first and only time in their history, beating Spurs. Firstly, there were lots of goals, including a great diving header by Keith Houchen, and a looping own goal that sliced in off Spurs defender Gary Mabbutt's knee. But it was also played in brilliant sunlight and the Wembley grass was bright, bright green. We had a video recorder and taped the game. My brother and I rewatched that match several times, which is probably why it burns so bright in my memory.

And then in 1988, there was the famous win by Wimbledon over Liverpool. Nobody gave Wimbledon much of a chance, but they nicked a 1-0 win. By then I was fed up with Liverpool winning everything and all the gloryhunters at school, so I was very happy that Wimbledon won. 

Those are the finals I really remember. I'm sure I watched others. I remember Gazza being stretchered off after injuring himself with a ridiculous tackle in 1991. But other memories are hazy. What I mainly feel when I think about the FA Cup final relates to the whole family sitting down to watch the game, my father's infectious excitement, the sheer novelty of football on the telly, and this marking the end of a football season and in its own way the beginning of summer.

The other thing I remember is the family sweepstake. Once the team line-ups were announced, my dad would write all the player's names on tiny bits of scrap paper and we would take it in turns to draw them. Whoever had the piece of paper with the name of the first player to score a goal won. The prize was picking a box of chocolates afterwards, when we would walk across the park opposite our house to the little paper shop near the school, where there would be a small range of boxed chocs behind a glass screen. 

It felt like my mum won every year, even when she picked unlikely players to score first. This might be a trick of memory as I have no record of who actually won each year. It just felt like it was always my mum who was lucky in the sweep. It didn't matter anyway because the chocolates got shared. 

That vignette in itself is wrapped in nostalgia, like all these memories. The paucity of television channels. The simplicity of a sweepstake with very little at stake. Just those little family traditions that made the day special. That's where the magic lay, if there was any magic at all. Not on the field at Wembley, but in our living room. We made those moments happen and then froze them in sunlit amber as happy-sad memories. 

Maybe Dad was trying to keep those moments alive, with those phone calls after the game all those years after I left home when we didn't watch the game together any more. I understand that now. Now that the phone calls have stopped. 

When all our cells change why do we expect to stay the same?

This post has been sitting in my draft folder since January 2017. Given some recent conversations I've had, I feel like it's worth an airing (with a few minor edits).

I find New Year quite melancholic. It's a time to reflect on what's happened and look back on stuff. (In 2017, for various reasons, I ended up looking back a bit further than normal. This is mainly because of reconnecting with some people I had been in school with over two decades previous.)

I journal offline as well and reading old journal entries, or my old blog posts on here, sometimes makes me feel like I'm reading about a different person. Douglas Coupland warns us that nostalgia is a weapon and sometimes I can turn that weapon on myself by thinking about the past and about how much has changed.

The thing about change is that it's rarely in huge increments. Yes, some are life-changing and can happen over a few short days (for example, diagnosis of a chronic illness), but most of our changes - in attitudes and priorities - happen slowly.

I read somewhere that all the cells in our bodies are renewed every ten years or so. I've been in a relationship over 25 years. I'm a whole new man. In fact, I'm the second whole new man to have been in the relationship. An entire version of me has died off and been replaced. And we didn't even know it.

Or did we? I'm not the same person as I was 25 years ago. Experiences and achievements, wins and losses, have made their mark. I feel a lot less certain about some of the things I was so certain about back then. Things that were once important don't matter and things that never used to matter to me suddenly seem important. How much of this is just the weight of living pressing down on me and how much is actually physical? Feelings of attachment and abandonment originate in brain cells that change like any other cell. As my cells change does that have an effect on my opinions?

There's a couplet in an Avett Brothers song that goes: 

I want to have friends 

That I can trust 

That love me for the man that I am 

Not the man that I was. 

I really like that lyric because it shows how we can be perceived as the person we were in the past, even though we have changed. That can be a battle if we have grown up, if we react differently now, if we have different priorities. When people assume we will always act a certain way that can be constraining and they may not like it if we do something they don't expect.

There's also a danger in such expectations. If we know we are loved because of what we were when we were first loved then it's hard to say we have become something different. We become inauthentic versions of ourselves, afraid to admit what we really feel or think or believe at this point in time, in case it turns out the people who love us love us because of who we were then, not who we are now.

It's hard to see people for who they have become. If we have friends and loved ones who do see us for who we are and not who we were, then we are very fortunate.

Nostalgia Triggers from 90s Choons

I usually listen to the radio when I'm doing stuff in the kitchen. With the world generally being pretty dreadful I've been avoiding news-based stations and so have retuned the radio to Absolute Radio 90s, which just plays songs from the 1990s, triggering memories from two thirds of my life ago.

Photo taken in Paris in 1993 or 1994

For example, when The Size of a Cow by The Wonderstuff comes on, then I'm transported back to sitting at the heavy lab desk at the back of Mr Dorricott's science classroom. My desk-mate, Tim, was really into The Wonderstuff and a lot of other music. He used to go on the train to Birmingham to buy "choons". He pirated me a cassette of Nevermind. I remember once at my house my tape player chewed up his tape of Achtung! Baby and when we cut and pasted the tape back together we put one bit back in the wrong way round. Unintentional remixes of our time.

(This will all mean nothing to anyone under the age of 30, probably. Tapes? What are those?)

Another song that is on heavy rotation on AR90s is Parklife by Blur. I have a very specific memory related to this. Back when that song came out I used to go to a church that met in an upper complex of rooms above a pub. During Sunday evening meetings you could hear the music playing in the pub downstairs. Sunday evening meetings were generally informal, and I remember one evening we had moved the chairs round into small circles to pray in groups. Through the floor came the thudding beats of Parklife. I wasn't the only one in the prayer circle mentally singing along.

All the people
So many people
And they all go hand in hand
Hand in hand through their
(beat)
Parklife

I know I wasn't the only one singing along because a few of us mouthed the word 'Parklife' in time with the song. We saw each other do it and grinned.

And then I left Shrewsbury to go to university, just as the Britpop bubble exploded. Anything by Oasis or Shed 7 or Elastica reminds me of university days. Basket Case makes me think of my digs in the first year when one of the first things I bought was a CD player that I cobbled into my hi-fi amp and double tapedeck. But those are later days and moving to Cardiff for Uni, to living here afterwards is more of a continuum. When I left Shrewsbury to go to university I ended up never going back there to live, not even for a summer holiday. So that is the one clear page break in my story.

It's the songs from the early 90s that are the real nostalgia triggers, but that's not to say I particularly want to wallow in that nostalgia. Looking back it's a wonder I got through those teenage years as I was barely coping with undiagnosed depression, was a fervent religious fundamentalist, and had the weight of expectations on me to go to university and achieve great things.

That last one is hard to reconcile with the great love I had (and still have) for my father, but he did tell me how he thought I could follow in his footsteps and study medicine, and one reason I went to study theology is because I knew Dad would approve of that choice when medicine was closed off to me (more on that later).

Understanding depression more as an adult, I can see how it affected me quite a bit as a teenager. I know I'm not unique in finding teenage life hard. Recently I have reconnected with a few people I knew in school and realised that I wasn't the only one who was presenting a brave face. Some of the people I most admired have told me they felt constantly on edge, or were hiding an eating disorder, or were bullied as badly as I sometimes was, if not worse.

I think it would have been good for my fragile, nervous self when I was younger, if I had known that the people who seemed to have got their stuff together were actually feeling just as desperate on the inside.

For me, my depression has left me with some regrets. I dropped friendships that I wish I hadn't. It affected my concentration and my ability to focus on schoolwork, and dampened down my love of learning. I barely read some of my textbooks at A-Level. It's stuff I sometimes wish I had actually learned. It also stopped me from learning new skills. I was very keen to learn how to play guitar, went through a depressive phase, sold the guitar to a classmate, and I still occasionally wish that I had been in a mental place where I could have actually learned to play it.

I had almost zero self-confidence, which was also linked to the depression. Here's a story that illustrates it. I was planning on studying science at A-Level, with the end aim of applying for medical school. I went on an open day to the VI Form College and went to the science labs. My school had switched that year from single subject science GCSEs to a "Double Science" course that covered all three subjects and gave you two GCSE grades at the end.

When the science teacher heard this, he was very dismissive. "Oh," he said, "you won't be able to do A-Levels unless you've done single subjects at GCSE. Most people find the step up really hard anyway, so it will be almost impossible for you!"

I remember feeling absolutely shocked by that. There was no point trying if it was going to be impossible. So I went and did three other subjects instead.

For a long time I was angry that my school had made me do double science, because that had prevented me from going on and potentially becoming a doctor like my dad. But it wasn't the school, and it wasn't even that discouraging response from the A-Level teacher who was to blame.

It was only recently I thought to myself, 'Why did I let someone I had never met before shape my choices in such a way?' Without sounding disrespectful, he was just a bog-standard teacher in a run of the mill VI Form College in a half-horse town. In what way was he an authority? He had never met me and he had no clue whether I was any good at science or not.

That encounter could have gone another way. I could have ignored him and had a go. I got Double As in my Double Science (despite mainly talking to Tim about music) so clearly I had some ability.

Besides, every A-Level teacher reckons their subject is really hard and requires a lot of work. If I turned up in that class and I was behind the curve, then a good teacher would find a way to bring me up to speed, rather than writing off my chances before I'd started the course.

But when you're depressed and you feel that everything is a struggle, you don't respond to negativity like that in a positive way. It doesn't spur you on to try hard and prove them wrong, which is how I wish I had responded.

You have to be careful with wishes like that though. If I hadn't been so discouraged by that guy, I wouldn't have ended up studying theology. Even, if I hadn't been depressed and had studied and got the A-level grades I wanted to get, I wouldn't have ended up studying theology in Cardiff. My life would have had a very different trajectory and although I was in a pretty tough place then, I'm in a good place now. Happier than a lot of people, and, I hope, doing a bit of good in the world.

It all worked out. It could have been an easier route, though.

I'm going to stick with listening to Absolute Radio 90s because in a strange way hearing those songs has helped me rearrange some mental furniture and appreciate my journey from then to now.

Rocking it like it's 1990

Two years ago I was given some medical news that prompted me to change my diet and lose weight. This has meant having to buy new, smaller clothes and clear out a lot of my XL stuff that is way too big and was long overdue for removal.

In the process I found this sartorial delight that I bought when I was about 14. 

Lovely, eh?

It came from C&A (remember them?) in the summer when everything was fluorescent neon. Shell suits were the other big craze at the time. It would be another year or so before the grunge hoodies and baggy jeans would take over.

I could never quite bring myself to dispose of it, even when I was far too large for it. But one benefit of being smaller is that it now fits. And according to one friend I might vaguely be on trend with it. I guess 25+ years is long enough for the fashions to come around.

Someone else commented that it makes me look like children's entertainer, Mr Tumble. I got quite a few comparisons to Mr Tumble when I was chubbier so this has given me pause. I'm not sure I want to dress in a way that is reminiscent of him.

On the other hand, I owned this shirt first...

Garbage - live in Manchester. The #20YearsQueer Tour

Nineteen years and nine months after we saw Garbage tour their eponymous debut album, Cathy and I went to Manchester last Friday to join in celebrating the album's 20th anniversary.

We've been to the Manchester Academy before to see the Tragically Hip. That room was a terrible venue. This room was bigger. But was also terrible.

The support were a band called Dutch Uncles. We missed half their set but I don't think we really missed anything. They were one of those bands you know will never be big as soon as you've heard one song with it's unnecessary tinkly piano in it. Most of their embellishments sounded like something that's been added because that's what proper musicians do.

(It was depressing looking around and realising the audience were probably all the same age as me and, wow, how old we've all grown.)

The idea behind this tour was they would play the songs off the first album and the b-sides they recorded around then. They played the entire first song - a b-side called Subhuman - backlit behind a sheet so it was like watching a shadow puppet show. I was a bit worried they'd do that all night, maybe as a way of preventing people from seeing how haggard Shirley Manson had gotten, but they dropped the curtain for Supervixen, which was the first track on the album and has a crashing intro. It's a great song to open a set with.

Shirley didn't look too bad considering she's pushing 50 and has lived rock and roll for about thirty years. What I noticed is that she really benefits from being in a band with three producers. She mumbles and shouts rather than singing. She also likes to talk drunk nonsense at the audience. We had two different stories about how she met the other members of the band for the first time. She went on for ages about what a wonderful musical city Manchester is, which, well, yeah, a lot of bands have come from there, but the repeated statements about what a great city it was got a bit boring after a while.

The gig took a while to get going but when they played Only Happy When it Rains, Stupid Girl and Vow the audience were bouncing along. Unfortunately they were the last three songs of the main set-list. Continuing the Manchester theme, they tried to work a bit of I Am the Resurrection by the Stone Roses into the end of Vow to end the show. It didn't really work.

The final song of the encore was great - When I Grow Up from the second album. There were a couple more b-sides before that though. And a song from their 2012 album, which somehow I'd missed. Apparently they have a new album out next year and they promised to tour again. I'd think twice about travelling so far to see them but if they play closer to home, then I might.

Overall it's one of those gigs that I'm glad I went to, more for the nostalgia and to say I've been rather than because it was a transcendental experience or anything.

Full set-list, because we have wikis for this sort of thing now. Huzzah.

A time of change (farewell to 'the tank')

My beloved Golf finally reached the point where money spent fixing it would be money wasted. For the past fortnight and a bit I've been driving my 'new' car, a Vauxhall Vectra. Having learned to drive in a classic boxy Cavalier back in the early 90s, it does feel a bit like coming home.

The Golf, known to us as P-TAB was a great car, though. I drove to Mull twice in him, although Mallaig was the furthest North we went in him. I tried to work out the extremities of our journeying - furthest south would be Hastings to the East and Plymouth to the South. We took him to Northumberland and the Eastern borders of Scotland. We even went to Llanidloes. You don't get much more wild west than that.

When I sold him on to those people who say they will buy any car (any, any, any!), he had over 175,000 miles on the clock. I put 75,000 of those miles on him.

I took these photos just before saying farewell to the car I affectionately called the tank.

In all his battered glory

The clock - 75,000 of those miles were mine

Setting off on the last journey

Reliving my childhood through retro packaging

I made an impulse buy in the supermarket tonight - a Star Wars figure on a retro style backing card that reminds me of buying them first time around back in the 1980s.

Having only returned from abroad in 1983, I only ever bought Star Wars figures on the Return of the Jedi backing cards. A whole load of the figures I had back in the day have been retooled and re-released now, including Luke Skywalker in his Jedi Knight outfit, and the Gammorean Guard from Jabba's palace.

I could leave those ones, but when I saw my favourite space admiral ever, I had to have it! Altogether now: "It's a TRAP!"

Occult desserts

My buddy Justin's nostalgic blog post about Ice Magic brought back some childhood memories. Specifically, my Dad refusing to buy dessert toppings with the word 'magic' in the title, because of the occult connotations.

I could make stuff up about my childhood but the truth is way more amusing.

It was acceptable ‘posh’ dessert for dinner guests in the 80s…

Last night we had Irony Boy and wife round for tea. They were trying to rehabilitate themselves after the ball-grabbing-throw-tea-everywhere incident that killed our remote controls, so they cooked tea for us. And for pudding we had a special treat…Viennetta.

You remember Viennetta? It’s an ice cream thing with a very thin chocolate partial chocolate coating. It was once incredibly popular, a bit like Arctic Roll, but considered much more fancy. Arctic Roll was Saturday tea time. Viennetta was Sunday lunch, for special dinners, to impress guests. After all, it came on its own ‘plate’ and everything and had an Italianish name, so it had to be posh, right? (I think it was the same thinking that came up with Dolmio as a name for cheapie pasta sauce.)

And because it was served when we had guests, it was always cut incredibly thinly to make it go round. My mum once served 14 people out of one Viennetta. I’m not saying she’s tight, but I could see the pattern on the plate through my slice…

But anyway, Viennettas are still there in the freezer cabinets. They cost £1 these days and are a budget pud. (I think they were more expensive in the 80s, like Cornettos used to be.) I don’t know if you can still get all the variations - I used to like the biscuit one, but they did mint, strawberry and chocolate ice cream varieties too. In fact, it was the chocolate version we had last night. Nostalgia never tasted so good.

Nostalgic twinge

I felt a nostalgic twinge about the church I used to go to today. It's weird to think about the time I spent in Barnabas, at a number of venues across Shrewsbury. There was the old Barnabas centre, above a pub at the back end of Mardol. It had a long main room you could play a decent game of football in on a youth night, except that the carpet would strip the skin off your hands and knees if you ever felt on it at speed.

And for a while we were 'aliens and strangers', pitching up at a variety of venues like the Music Hall in The Square, the careworn main hall of the Wakeman School, Springfield Hall in Sutton Farm (when we had two congregations), and then the current centre in Coleham.

I remember the intensity of some services - where there were 'words' and 'tongues' and all manner of goings on. I saw an exorcism one night, with shrieking and thrashing about until it was over. And I wonder what happened to all those 'words' and 'pictures' which were shared. What was their long-lasting effect? I know at one time people tried to write down all the 'prophetic words'. Does anyone have a record? Does anyone still refer back to them?

And at the time there was a sense of being part of something bigger - this was it, happening now. But actually, today it all seems so long ago, as if it was all seen by a different person in a different life. That's what nostalgia is - a looking back tinged with a regret that those experiences are in the past. Nostalgia is a recognition of distance; distance caused by time (the fourth measurement of distance).

But there's also a sense of sadness. Those words were spoken in the context of a community which, for one reason or another, has changed. People move on. People who were once central to the ongoing prophetic life of the church drift out of being part of church life. People die. Not wishing to sound cruel, but some people stagnate, never moving on from old battles and old arguments as if they cannot bear to let go of the past, even if the past is poisonous to them.

And some of us grow up from wide-eyed kids who believed we knew what was right into wearier souls who have discovered that actually the answers produce more questions and sometimes the only thing you can do is ask the question and wait and see if you get an answer. And I guess such melancholy is another root cause of nostalgia. Life seemed so much simpler back then. Like TV, you knew what you were watching when you watched in black and white. But high definition colour can sometimes feel confusing. It can trick the eye and strain the brain trying to keep up.

It's a complicated emotion, nostalgia. And I'm not convinced it's a particularly good one to indulge. Yes, I need to look back, but I also need to look forward. If I truly believed that such a dynamic life isn't happening now, or couldn't happen in the future, then I may as well give up. Looking back over my personal history, and remembering the things I've heard, and seen, and felt, is not the prime reason for my faith today. It can't be - because those things are long-gone; the evidence of the past can only show me what happened in the past.

Faith is based on what I've known in the past, what I see today and what I hope for tomorrow as a result. Maybe in the future those hoped-for things will become part of my past and I'll feel nostalgic about them then. Who knows? But if I'm only ever looking backwards, it will be challenge to walk forwards. And whether I want to dwell in the past or not, the only way I can move is forwards, and I'll move in that direction no matter how desperately I cling to memories of times past.

Action Force

Ah, the 1980s. A more innocent place for kids. The idea of that one day they might do Star Wars prequels was a source of hope rather than despair. When someone gave you 50p to spend, it was a big deal, mainly because it was a huge coin. And toys weren’t aggressively marketed by tie-in TV shows, at least until He-Man came along.

Action Force was probably the last great populist British toy line (since then we’ve been importing American and Japanese fads). It gave Star Wars figures a good run for their money, despite being made by the same company initially, Palitoy. A scaled down version of Action Man, my blue helicopter pilot figure from the first series is the first toy I remember buying when we came back from Africa.

The second wave of figures was split into the four components of the Action Force, and faced off against evil terrorist mastermind Baron Ironblood, now referred to in our house as ‘Bucket head’. Together with his Red Shadows, Muton robots, and later Kraken reptile beasts, this megalomaniac threatened to take over the whole world. Fortunately the might of Action Force, an international force of military experts who were bizarrely exclusively white, stood in his way, thwarting his evil plans.

Why the nostalgia? A few years ago I was well into collecting AF, but I hadn’t bought any for a while. Until today when, visiting a relocated retro toy store in the city centre, I found some carded figures, including three Q Force (the naval elite of Action Force) figures that I only possessed as loose figures before. So, it looks like I’m still a collector.

The slightly blurred photos don’t do them justice. For toy nerds, the Sea Skimmer figure was only released in the third wave of British figures, before the toy line got subsumed by Hasbro and marketed as the Euro version of GI Joe. All three cards have third wave backs and the mail in offer is the Skeletron. All three cards are in English and Italian, hence the Deep Sea Defender’s alter ego "Palombaro."