… is this thing on?

Testing, testing.

One two. One two. Two.

Ha. You know those roadies who get up on stage and test all the band’s gear before a gig? And they do all that ‘testing testing one two one two’ stuff into the microphones, to make sure they’ll work when the singer finally takes the stage. Well, Simon once said that the reason they said ‘one two one two’ was because roadies couldn’t count to three.

Made me laugh, but I guess you had to be there.

Anyway – how can you tell if these things are even working?

I mean, low-tech or what?

Still, of course it’s low tech, it’s a tape recorder. An old and battered relic of a time before digital storage and CDs; iPods and MP3s; memory sticks and SD cards.

At least it works. I wasn’t sure it would, it had been abandoned and left to rot in the cupboard under the stairs.

I kinda know how it feels.

Anyway, the tape player is old – it was made by Amstrad, the company started by that rude bloke off The Apprentice. Mum used to love that show. Even went through a phase of saying ‘You’re fired’ for a while when we did something stupid or naughty.

Funny the things you miss.

NOTE – The Apprentice

What was known – ironically – as ‘reality TV’. Entwistle in his paper ‘Manufacturing Nothing: Light Entertainment’ writes: ‘Afraid to see the world around them as a larger picture, people instead reduced their views of the world to the tiny, artificial windows they called “reality TV”. What is certain, however, is that reality played little or no part in such programmes.’

Oh well. I’d better get on with putting this on to tape; the story I have come back home to record. I’ve been making notes for weeks, jotting down the things I remember, the conversations, the impressions I had at the time, just so I could do this. Make this tape. Tell you these things in my own voice.