I bit the bullet and finally attended a Cookd and Bombd forum meet on Saturday. For those of you who are blissfully unaware as to the function of this Internet establishment, it’s basically a Chris Morris and Peter Cook site that started way back in 1999 to store rare archive material. You can get to it here:
http://www.cookdandbombd.co.ukI’ve been posting on the forum there for over five years now. To start with, it was just me, the moderators, some other random friends of theirs and not a lot of other people rambling about Morris, British psychedelia, obscure cult classics and not a great deal else. Of course, the forum is a very different beast now, split into several sections, having several thousand members (a number of whom are successful in the world of the media themselves) and a lot of lurkers and hangers-on. Although I subscribe to the fairly commonly held belief that it has indeed “gone downhill” or at the very least become more unnecessarily argumentative and whiney in the last couple of years, I still feel an unhealthy amount of attachment to the place. Nonetheless, this was the first “meet” I’d been to in two and a half years.
I’ll be honest. I don’t like these forum meets much usually. They’re fantastic for putting names to faces and seeing people in the flesh who you’d always found fascinating online, but I still find them very awkward. For one thing, I’ve never been great at having to deal with a whole flood of new people at once – parties filled with hardly anyone I actually know almost always get scrubbed out of my diary these days (especially now I’m married and don’t have the nagging voice of “but you might meet a lady” circling in my brain on a permanent loop). I’m at my happiest talking to people one-on-one. If I have to split my attention between fifteen people I’ve never met before, more often than not I find myself struggling to get past the usual niceties, and no doubt make myself seem like a hopeless dullard who can only talk about how terrible the trains were on the way down. I can imagine the conversations after I leave:
“So, did you meet Dave then?”
“Yeah, actually. He seems to know a lot about the history of London Underground delays, and the deterioration of the service over the last couple of years. Fascinating chap”.
I’m also forced to recall the worst Internet meet I ever attended, for Cookd and Bombd again four years ago. Four other people turned up, one of whom was a woman who’d caught a picture of me online in one of the previous meet threads and decided I was “lovely looking, a bit like Ian Curtis” (and it’s seldom you get to see those two descriptions joined together in one sentence). Her first words to me when she turned up to this occasion were a sharp “and you like absolutely NOTHING like your photo”, before descending into relative silence and pissing off an hour later. The rest of the evening was spent with the other three Verbwhores, one of whom was banned from the forum a few weeks later for aggressively abusing and revealing intimate personal information about one of the female posters online. Suffice to say, there was a slight lack of warmth about the whole occasion.
This one was very different, however. One of the forum members had very kindly and bravely agreed to open up her garden for a barbeque, and this lead for a much more convivial and relaxed atmosphere. As the food and drink flowed, I felt considerably more comfortable than I might have done in a noisy pub, and much more able to hear everyone’s conversations, rather than just the two or three people nearest to me. It was also a genuine delight to finally meet
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my_red_dream who, it turns out, is incredibly friendly, charming, and naturally funny. It was also beyond nice of so many people to splutter “BUT YOU DON’T LOOK 32!!!” simultaneously. I wish I’d had digital film footage of that outburst. It certainly beats women spluttering about how I look nothing like suicided lead singers in real life. Anyway, should anyone particularly wish to see images of myself with the other people, do click on read more. It was a nice occasion, and I enjoyed myself so much that I made myself late for the meal in Brick Lane I was supposed to be going to with Amanda in the evening.
( Read more... )In other news, my stereo amplifier finally died last night. I feel oddly upset. Amanda went to play David Gray’s “White Ladder” on it, and the left speaker output popped, and hasn’t worked since. To be fair, it’s a mid-1980s Toshiba amp that I bought second-hand for twenty quid from a relative at the turn of the century, always with the intention of eventually replacing it as I built up other more modern stereo parts around it. In that time, the Aux socket has died (meaning my CD player is plugged into the radio tuner one), the volume crackles and distorts every time one of the dials is turned, and it looks like a giant silver shoebox which should have been designed only to store Metal Mickey’s size 16 boots. I am going to have to replace it if I want to listen to music properly, so a visit to Richer Sounds seems likely over the next week or so. And I still can’t help but partially blame Amanda for playing David Gray on it. If I were in a frail or otherwise delicate shape, I might give up the ghost as soon as “White Ladder” creaked into action as well. I shall have to give the beast a proper burial at some point soon, perhaps to the tune of something that was a bit more to its tastes.
