I have lots of memories of being a kid growing up in Blackbird Leys in the 1970s, on the outskirts of Oxford, a good number of them marvelous, some of them comic, and several that I’d rather forget because they were just unpleasant, or vaguely criminal, or downright depressing. Blackbird Leys, back then, was a tough place to live, a depressed and often violent council estate. Fighting was pretty much compulsory.

When my sister died suddenly a few years back, we all descended on the bank one grey April morning—me, my other mostly estranged sister, my parents, my dead sister’s daughter, and also a lawyer, just to keep us honest. Tracy had a safety deposit box in the floodlit, camera-rich basement and after a lot of key jangling, and huffing and puffing from an embarrassed bank employee, we found ourselves alone with that smudged steel tray, that shallow box of her most important bits.

An older post that still rings true:

A lot of the music made in the U.K. in the late 1970s and early 1980s is more important to me today, looking back, than the friends I had then – David Treacher and Neil Saint and Martin Robinson and Zoe Thomas. I remember their names, and a good few stories (I sport more than a couple of scars from those days), but the names just don’t have much of an emotional pull now. The friendships petered out not long after I arrived in Canada; the music has stayed with me.

With the launch of the new website we’re having a second look at some of the most popular posts of recent months. This bit, on the possible hazards of buying a new home without a realtor’s help, attracted a lot of attention.

Joe Talbot, lead singer of the very special English punk band, Idles, is a complicated character. I say that based on a dedicated run-in the last few months with their two albums and then a fleeting encounter in Toronto. And by encounter I mean that I saw them play an incendiary set at Lee’s Palace to kick off the impressive new record, Joy As An Act Of Resistance, all the noise that night causing bits of plaster to fall from the ceiling like a celebratory confetti.

Back in August, day five of our holiday on Martha’s Vineyard, and the sense of guilt at having crossed the border still making me grumpy. I was trying to think of it as an island off the coast of America, rather than part of the country proper. A hideout populated only by decent people dismayed and embarrassed by their appalling leader. Like Puerto Rico, sorta, only with a fully functioning power grid and ten dollar tubs of yoghurt.

Another older post. A true story. A waking nightmare.

Across from what used to be the Kingston Shopping Centre and is now a bus terminal, is a house on Helen St, tucked in behind a shut-down gas station and the bunkerish remains of an old veterinary clinic.