Monday, October 24, 2005

Wild boys! Mild boys!

Do they have old punks in Belgium? They do here, I've started to see them. Blokes that still look sort of hard and. Most tellingly, have an ear-ring.

It's always odd when members of distinct social groups shuffle towards middle age, which brings on an inescapable homogeneity. No matter what you wore in your teens, brothel creepers and drapes, bondage trousers and safety pin, doc martins and half a pint of dried blood from whoever you'd just given a kicking to, once you reach a certain age you reach for the Littlewoods catalogue and the slow, inexorable decline starts, the one that ends in slippers and the faint aroma of piss and biscuits.

As Simon and Garfunkle should have sang - 'old teds, old teds, sat on their park bench like novelty book ends…until they leap up and, with a form of martial art based on the jitterbug and too many Chop Shocky DVDs, beat the crap out of a passing mod'. Or something.

The really interesting ones are yet to come, with the dreadful craze of tattooing (I know, I know, but I didn't get one in the end, did I?), when the hair starts thinning I think there are going to be more than a few assistant managers of chain supermarkets with 'happy to help' on a lapel badge and 'fuck the skins' in Times New Roman 40 point round the scalp.

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