Record Reconstructor

  Dashboard! Quite out of nowhere, and for no obvious reason that I can think, the following lyrical couplet from Lost For Words   by Pink Floyd has been rattling around in my head all week. So I opened my doors to my enemies And I asked "Could the slate be wiped clean?" But they told me to please go and fuck myself I guess you just can't win While I am pretty sure this is not the reason my subconscious has decided to serve this up to me this week, I remember feeling a weird, visceral shock on hearing this song back when I listened to 1994's The Division Bell , the album it hails from, because this was the first time I'd heard (or registered) hard R rated language from a band I had been listening to since I was three years old.   The trick I've learned over the years when faced with a song fragment cycling endlessly through my brain is to just go and listen to the song.  Apparently, the psychological reason is that the brain ends up trapped in a loop it can...

Dashboard! I was eight and a half years old when the 1985 World Snooker Championship Final was played.  By that point, I already owned a tiny snooker table of my own, a little cut-down thing about 3ft by 2ft with 6 reds a couple of tiny cues.  If you're young, or from beyond the borders of the United Kingdom, you might not realise quite how insane the statistics are around this extremely niche, very British sport, and specifically the 1985 final.  Played in a theatre which seats less than 1000 people, the final was a best of 35 match, where each single frame of snooker can take anywhere between 6 minutes and an hour plus.  The final was divided into 4 hour sections, and the total thing took nearly 15 hours to complete over two days.  Eighteen and a half million people tuned in to watch it, which is a record for BBC2 which still stands 40 years later, with peak viewing taking place past midnight on a Monday night as the final drew to a close with the two competit...

Dashboard! Once upon a time, I spent a few years doing amateur theatre in my home town as a young man.  I wasn't particularly serious, or good at it;  I got talked into doing it because a girl I liked did it and she suggested I should come along;  I did, went to some table reads, some auditions.  There were essentially no men in the theatre company younger than 40 at the time, so roles which required a young male lead were mine for the asking.  I got cast in a play, said yes, then found out that the girl I liked had dropped out.  I felt compelled to carry on because I'd already said yes, despite my initial motivation disappearing off to the pub instead of hanging out in a draughty community hall with me.   If I make an effort, I've got a pretty good memory (a statement which would make Catherine roll her eyes were she to read it).  It is true, I promise - I'm admittedly scatterbrained and inattentive and I say yes with my mouth to things whil...