Hi there.

These days it seems to be the usual thing for me to apologise to you for not blogging sooner.

Well, I’m sorry.

Also,  Twitter seems to do it for me these days. 140 characters, wham, bam, thank you mam. What other medium forces you to critise the health secretary in only one sentence. There seems to be a lot of this about at present. Critising the government, I mean. The one in the UK, to be exact. I don’t even want to imagine what it must be like to be an U.S. American these days. As Charlie Brooker said: “I think there is something wrong with my television. It’s showing me images and sounds from a universe I don’t recognise.” Consequently, for old social liberals of the continental sort there is not much to celebrate these days. If I ever meet Francis Fukuyama I will certainly I have a few choice words for him: ‘The End of History’ my arse. With society around us becoming coarser, more polarised and all together more unpleasant, it’s to time to switch off the news, unsubscribe from the political twitter feeds and focus on the pleasant things in life, such as 12″ remixes from the eighties.

Huh?

Indeed. I personally wouldn’t have come up with the topic myself (though admittedly I do hear a few of these), but my favourite corner of the internet, the UK’s ‘Guardian’ news paper last week asked its readers for the best 12″ remixes of the eighties. The response was impressive, with over 750 entries by old people like myself. As befitting the Guardian, the choiced ranged from the daft (early Kylie, The Goodies, Italo Disco) the so-so (T’Pau [who names their group after an old fictional alien. tsstss], Soft Cell, Peter Gabriel), the rare (Kariya, Act, Barrington Levy), the irrestible (Sister Sledge, Mantronix, Thompson Twins) to the sublime (Matt Bianco, Frankie goes to Hollywood, David Bowie, Prince, Freeez).  To make a point, let’s just remind you of this lovely example how to make an (at times hilarious) 12″.

So, instead of losing (even more) of my hair by worrying about the world turning into some populistic hell hole, I’ll rather work on my perfect, 10 hour Spotify playlist of amazing eighties 12″ tracks. Suggest some via Twitter!