Why they – and having been caught on CCTV later that evening wrecking then stealing another car I now know that there were three of them  – would choose such a rare vehicle that would’ve been impossible to sell without raising suspicion, I neither know nor care, but the consequences have been considerable and in some respects, illuminating.

Needless to say although ‘only’ 14 years-old, the XM was never a big seller for Citroën largely due to a reputation quickly tarnished by the unreliability of its complex electrics and hydraulics which, typical of its makers, had not been fully trouble-shot before its launch. Parts are therefore hard to source, very expensive and for that reason my insurance company initially threatened to write it off obliging me ultimately to withdraw my claim. But then via something called the Club-XM online forum I came across a retired engineer who has been collecting and breaking these cars with the noble intention of “keeping them going” until he himself no longer is. Not only did this prince amongst men offer to supply me with all the bits I needed, refused to take any payment for them, and delivered them to me on Waterloo Station where I spent a very agreeable hour being advised how they should be correctly fitted and certain infamous problems with these cars, remedied.

Recounting this to a friend, he correctly pointed out that this wonderful gentleman was of a dying breed and as with the grandly named Lancia Gamma Consortium, a rather more formal conflagration of chaps (and indeed, chapesses) of which I am a paid-up member, long may he and they continue their selfless efforts to ensure that these automotive eccentricities avoid extinction. One could argue that regardless of legal obligations, major manufacturers should actually want to see their cars running around decades after they’ve stopped building them, but that would be commercially naïve  – although it hasn’t harmed Porsche and Mercedes-Benz that you can still get most parts for cars they made 40, even 50 years ago.

The Gamma being laid-up, un-taxed for the winter (one sniff of a salted road and it’d dissolve into a pile of rust), I have unwillingly discovered the realities of rural public transport. So journeys that took me 30 or 40 minutes at the wheel have tripled or quadrupled in duration, often hanging around for hours in freezing termini to change buses, journeys tailored to timetables that seemed exultant in their lack of integration twixt buses, operating companies and railways or, indeed, my sleeping and eating habits. Perhaps no wonder then that despite being subsidised by public taxes, ticket prices were generally higher than comparative private transport costs, and most buses traveled virtually empty.  So should anyone excoriate me for justifying my need for a car here in the sticks, even one that I actually enjoy driving, then they can expect the shortest of shrifts.

And whilst I’m harrumphing, the nice lady cop who dealt with my case admitted that there’s no point claiming compensation from the culprits involved because they’re unemployed teenagers from what she coyly, if accurately described as “disadvantaged backgrounds”, who’ll probably just be fined… before going off and doing some more crimes, possibly some more of the archly acronymed TWOCs (Taking Without Owners Consent). Although I may be straying into Daily Mail territory here, I’d much prefer divine retribution: having something they loved and or needed rubbished, but that would probably involve slashing a pair of trainers or kicking an X-Box to bits which I doubt a judge would sanction. Nevertheless I intend to go to court and see what happens to them, if only to have my cynical prejudices confirmed. In the meantime I’m still without a working car, hugely out of pocket and pretty bloody angry.

But onto happier matters. Recent blogs bemoaning the grim fate of civilisation as we, or at least I know it prompted the same friend behind the ‘dying breed’ comment, to generously furnish me with a copy of The Rational Optimist by that well-known controversialist, Matt Ridley. Despite the occasional impression of reveling his own smartness, Ridley torpedoes many assumptions about what ails society and economic conventions and replaces them with some unassailable facts and well argued, if not always personally observed empiricisms. I must salute his thought-provoking alternatives to my own gloomy views of the future, although despite the munificence of my heroic engineer friend, I’m not entirely convinced of the innate goodness of mankind which underpins Ridley’s contention that optimism will triumph over pessimism.

Nevertheless I’ll try and give him the benefit of the doubt when it comes to the verdict handed out by the magistrates presiding over the case of my buggered-up car… if there’s a bus that’ll get me to the court on time.

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Unfortunately however, I rather urgently need a new computer. And my inadequate grasp of what’s new and necessary to maintain the minimum standards of technological capability that my life demands, means that I’m panicking. I know, I know, I know – given my regular tirades against the digital enslavement we’ve quietly acquiesced to this past decade, and especially my brief interlude bereft of both my internet connection and mobile phone, I should bravely respond to the fast dwindling efficiency of my battered old laptop by abandoning such devices for good. But no. I am instead grudgingly acknowledging that most people only want to communicate with me by email, and that some of them are actually essential to what I grandiosely call my employment… never mind my reliance on Google as the encyclopedia of the airwaves. So I am once again at the computer crossroads, wondering whether to continue down Macintosh Boulevard or turn left along PC Pathway.

It’s an intersection I’ve stood at every five years or so since I acquired my first computer – a Ferranti Advance 86 – in 1985. Having recently launched my own magazine outfit, Advanced Publishing, my choice seemed literally appropriate, if not willfully cute, but the Ferranti was a hopeless mistake to someone so utterly un-nerdy. After a month of mounting frustration, which occasionally included smacking it smartly on its casing, rather as my dad did our first t.v. set when it went on the blink, I got rid of it and bought a Macintosh Plus. Which I loved, and on which I literally ran the company for a few years. As such, it and I were even featured in MacUser magazine, both vindicating my choice and initiating an enduring smugness over my addiction to Apples.

Sure, everyone knows that Macs are more user-friendly than PCs, but watching the BBC’s morbidly fascinating Steve Jobs documentary recently I discovered that Bill Gates’ had actually beaten him to the punch with an icon-based design. Except that the Microsoft version is really just a memory-hungry lash-up that prods an antediluvian MS-DOS system, whereas Mac’s OS was designed to be seamlessly icon-driven from the get-go.

So far, so commonly known, but it wasn’t until 2003 when my iBook’s  broke down and had to be driven to the nearest dealer some 50 bloody miles away in Tewkesbury, that I learnt how clunky Windows really is. At the time I lived with a gal who very kindly let me use her PC for the ten days it took for the diffident-bordering-on-rude kids – and they were of course kids – to repair my Mac, and fortunately Karen was away most of that time running her company in London (exclusively on PCs, of course) so she couldn’t witness me swearing at, crashing and constantly re-booting her PC… I may’ve hit it a couple of times, too. The reason, obvious to die-hard Maccas, was that Windows isn’t intuitive in the way that the Mac OS is, and one has to go through various alien rigmaroles to get it to do anything. And of course having a crap short-term memory, I instantly fortgot those rigmaroles.

However, and it’s a big ‘however’, the price you pay for the superior and more stable Mac set-up is, well, over twice the price of a PC. No wonder Apple, at $346billion, has a value higher than the GDP of many developed countries, because a MacBook Pro with a 15” screen has an RRP of £1549, whilst a Dell Latitude PC laptop with, as far as I can work out, roughly the same stable of gee-gaws, costs £649. Go do the math.

My current machine is the Pro’s immediate predecessor, a PowerBook G4 which thanks to something called its PowerPC processor isn’t up to an increasing amount of software, in particular BBC’s iPlayer, which means I can no longer catch up with CBeebies, boo-hoo.  Being perennially budget-conscious, or skint if you want to put it that way, I’m therefore having to seriously consider a PC-based laptop and learning a whole new way of digital life. Or buying secondhand… just like my current machine, bought in 2006 from an Australian publishing company that was going bankrupt. Needless to say this involved many late night screaming contests with an IT manager in Sydney who couldn’t understand why its casing was damaged in transit and its screen bisected by a thin orange stripe. Secondhand? Never again, then.

As miserable fate would have it, I also need a new mobile phone if I’m going to keep up with the techno-groovers. Because after my last one cracked under the pressure (quite literally, screen-wise), I bought another by then obsolete Motorola Razr on eBay last year, and now that’s knackered, too. Yes, I’d like a nice, sprauncey iPhone like all my posh pals, thus making Apple richer still since they cost lots more than the Android-based smartphones that ape them, but I’m scared witless of trying to ‘migrate’ (see how hip I am to the jargon?) the vital address and diary data from my Palm Pilot digital organiser (circa 2003) which is also worn out… but long since obsolete.

Yes of course I’ve trawled the web forums trying to glean how to bung my Palm data onto an HTC Wildfire or Samsung Galaxy, but you’ve got to be an über-geek to understand the process, much less actually execute it, although it does seem to be rather easier with an iPhone. So it looks as if not only are we all prisoners of technology, but those of us who’re idiot technophobes are also in permanent hock to Apple.

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Well search me matey, but what I do know, or at least observe with some assurance, is that however sophisticated their evolutionary state, lack of familiarity breeds fear in animals, and to maintain familiarity for homo sapiens bedeviled by rampant, escalating change, money is the only answer, and lots of it. You’ve probably gathered by now that I do not have lots of it, but I know a few people who do and as they age they generally buttress themselves against change by acquiring the cultural trappings of their past.

So when I whine on about the disappearance of print media (in which I’ve spent my entire working life), or the consolidation of retailing into a few mega-corporations who have power to affect our lives way beyond that of governments (which have too much of it anyway), or the joys of driving powerful, noisy vehicles in a world running out of oil (which bleeding heart environmentalists, often in the thrall of rich landowners, myopically believe can be replaced by windpower) etc., etc., etc., what I am really doing is yearning for the certainties of my past. And, of course, tacitly bemoaning my lack of financial foresight because like so many of my peers who grew up during the late ‘60s and early ‘70s when the possibilities seemed endless and optimism boundless, pension planning  wasn’t even on our radar, and I’ll have to keep working until I croak.

Now that we approach our mid-sixties with only a hundred-odd quid a week of state support to see us through, such adolescent naivety seems reprehensible and those fears become colossal. Time therefore to rail against an ever more incomprehensible world where the people in charge are half our age and we are off their radar except, of course, where the burdens on their tax revenues occasioned by our escalating welfare costs threaten their status quo. So slashing public sector pensions, health service provision and local govt. funding is so, so preferable to frittering away many tens of billions on scandalously fruitless computer projects, military procurement, state-owned banker’s bonuses, oh and let’s not forget the Olympics.

As an aside, I do not wish to become such a burden, but as I see sad-eyed folk only a few years my senior shuffling round with their walking sticks in their charity shop wardrobes or anxiously examining the own brand options in the local mini-mart, as I find myself having to take yet another drug on an indefinite basis to counteract yet another age-related ailment, as my hair and teeth fall out at an alarming rate, and as I notice with dismay in a recent Observer Review the roster of notables of roughly my age who have died this past year, then I realise that like it or not, I will inevitably become an encumbrance to our greater society.

However as I was discussing with better informed friends at supper last night, there is a  very real possibility that along with everything else that the less affluent members of my generation have long taken for granted, the welfare system may fall prey to the coming economic holocaust. Even since my blog earlier this week, the European banking system has exhibited further fissures in its carapace of confidence, and as one friend pointed out, the system is now so dependent on inter-bank credit that if one major institution implodes, then the likelihood is that it will take the rest of them down the crapper. Ditto if Greece, Italy, Spain, Portugal or Ireland are forced into terminal deficit and out of the Eurozone, then the consequences for Britain and indeed, the West generally, could be catastrophic.  And I haven’t even touched on the growing threats posed by (nuclear?) war, religious fundamentalism, climate change and the next pig-ignorant right wing lunatic to enter the White House, all of which have massive economic and social implications.

Far be it for me to be the harbinger of doom – or there again, maybe not – but we are already seeing libraries closing, museums and universities charging for cultural and educational nourishment that was once free, the apparently critical retail sector in imminent meltdown and no-one giving anything more of a shit about it all than a ‘change is inevitable’ shrug. That this is also the response to the yawning disparities between the circumstances of the very rich 1% and the variously impoverished 99%, that the same credit rating agencies who gave Lehman Bros an AAA rating days before it went bust are now apparently determining the fate of nations with little political question, and that the great god of growth is seen as our only salvation but without  any coherent or even feasible plans to restore it… well all that does I’m afraid speak to me of civilisation’s collapse.

I’m also not afraid to say that for me personally, change is not inevitable. I won’t join my iPad-proselytizing, online shopping addicted pals anytime soon and so provided I can still afford to, I’ll keep reading printed media ‘til it’s no longer available and even if it no longer earns me a living (sob). I will also carry on shopping at independent butchers, greengrocers and newsagents until they’ve completely disappeared. And I’ll continue to listen to live music and watch movies on the big screen until the last pub and cinema that I can still access on my zimmer frame has closed down.

What about you? But whilst you ponder that, or sniff derisorily at my gloom-mongery, it’s traditional at this time to wish everyone a fabulous Xmas and topping New Year. So as a bleeding-heart traditionalist, I’d better do exactly that.

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The EU’s over-arching response to the Euro crisis, for example, is to compel governments to make swingeing public spending cuts which will, if they haven’t already, reduce the living standards to which we’ve become accustomed for decades. Cameron’s recent hissy-fit at the umpteenth crisis summit was, we are told, to ensure British sovereignty over the financial services sector which threw our economy down the toilet and ignores the reality that 50% of our trade is with a Euro-zone that’s almost surely bound to follow it. Smart move, young Dave.

Correctly, it’s been pointed out that unfettered reliance on credit has done for both society and the political apparati that was supposed to secure its finances, but when the spending has to stop, then the consequences must be faced. That said, I disavow lefty apologists who contend that this summer’s riots were due to social inequality and deprivation, but it seems clear to me that a population brought up to expect a welfare safety-net, if not certain levels of affluence, is not going to quietly buckle down and metaphorically dig for victory when they abruptly disappear. At least not when the trappings of prosperity and instant, unearned celebrity are rubbed in their faces by the media 24/7. So when the cuts really start to bite, as they already have in Greece, I would expect there to be far more civil unrest – a euphemism for fightin’ an’a lootin’ – on our streets, too.

Proof? Well although we don’t of course live under a dictatorship, on the evidence of the so-called Arab spring, and what we are now seeing in Russia and the US, regardless of the painful personal costs depressed and/or deceived citizenry are becoming emboldened to rebel against their oppressors like never before in my lifetime. What, for example, are millions of longterm unemployed youngsters, many of whom who’ve been forced to pay heavily for a further education that no longer guarantees them work, supposed to do with themselves and their accumulated debts? Sit quietly at home and play computer wargames that espouse mindless violence?

I also find it extraordinary that despite a groundswell of respected economic polemic, our government fails to acknowledge, much less exercise, the need to revive Britain’s manufacturing base which successive administrations have willfully run down in the dumb belief that north sea gas and financial services would be our balance of payments salvation, ho-ho-ho. Instead we hear daily wailing about the beleaguered retail sector which is  supposed not just to be a barometer of the nation’s economic health, but the engine that will drive up employment and tax revenues. For chrissake get real guys: with massively escalating unemployment, energy prices and constant warnings about our dire economic state, who on earth is going to go out on a sustained shopping spree… on imported goods which enrich only remote eastern economies?

And Mary Portas, whose smug hypocrisy I have previously excoriated, has now unveiled her plan to revive Britain’s high streets which basically boils down to easing local taxes (which councils strapped by government cuts clearly won’t), tighten lucrative planning regimes (ditto) and cut restrictions that deter market traders (irrelevant). Tellingly, when one of the few reporters who raised her conflict of interest in also advising shopping mall developers who are in large part responsible for the decimation of the high street, Portas said she “didn’t want to go there”. I bet.

Anyway, with 200 outlets closing every day and Amazon offering an app that allows you to compare its inevitably lower prices as you walk round your local shops, town and city centres are basically screwed. And so as my oft-bemoaned consolidation of retailing into the hands of just a few online and supermarket giants moves ever closer, with all the disadvantages and dangers that holds, I’ll get personal.

I learnt last week that the site of the aluminum foundry that finally threw in the towel earlier this year is likely to house my hometown’s first supermarket. And this on top of the recently announced closure of one of the town’s two banks, HSBC, with the likelihood that following its recently announced ‘rationalisation’, the other one, Lloyds TSB (which operates just three days a week) will follow suit. This, allied to the increasing incidence of home delivery trucks from Hereford’s Tesco and Asda some 24 miles away, would seem to sound the commercial death knell for the high street of what was, at least before the recession hit, a fiercely independent little town.

Much of this you’ve heard from me before, although repeated tornadoes and flocks of dead birds falling from the skies aren’t driving this writer into a psychotic bunker mentality as they did the hero of Jeff Nichols’ gripping, if overlooked recent movie, Take Shelter… But as I began this little rant by claiming, there is I think something rather more ominous than wintry gloom in the air. And having taxed your patience with some 950 words today, if you can handle a little more pre-Xmas cheer, watch this space on December 23^rd.

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Wiser and more self-disciplined heads than mine scoffed at my decision to cut myself off completely from the modern world, but so easily seduced was I by the plethora of information and its near unlimited right of entry, I had found it impossible to restrict my digital dalliance to a specific timetable. Indeed I’d speculated that access to other life- and intelligence-enhancing activities was suffering as a consequence of being wedded to the web, and in this respect I was vindicated.  I did indeed do a lot more reading, both of books and periodicals, and I also found myself having long and often illuminating ‘phone conversations with people who were as pleasantly surprised as I was to pick up their landlines and find someone on the other end not trying to sell them home insurance.

I actually received a couple of letters from friends who’d taken my original online statement of intent seriously, thus reviving the ancient art of physical correspondence which I much enjoyed and soon embellished with a modest blizzard of postcards, in a couple of cases prompting welcome if slightly bemused ‘phone calls from surprised recipients. In my best ‘Outraged of East Grinstead’ mode I even fired off a couple of letters to newspapers criticising columns I’d found particularly irritating, although unlike my earlier (emailed) salvo to Prospect magazine attacking their aggrandizement of think tanks, neither of them were published. Overall though, I somehow felt more relaxed, with more time for reflection and being less attuned to the demands of others, demands which have inevitably become defined by the digital over a decade or so. And in this respect I can honestly say it made a valuable difference. Having said which, one of the iniquities of email and text messaging is that we are tempted to fire off and expect instant responses to our own needs, whims and fancies with only minimal forethought.

Sadly if inevitably, once the rot had set back in and I started to check, if not always return emails again (about day nine), switched my mobile phone back on (day eleven) and answered my first text (day thirteen), it became blindingly obvious that modern man cannot live alone, or at least not without instant digital gratification. Put another way – we are all prisoners of technology.

But for disingenuous techno-luddites such as I now obviously am, there was one bit of good news whilst I was away, and one bit of bad. Penguin announced that they would not be supplying their new ebooks to libraries for fear of hackers removing their protective encryption – in which case wither protection? – and pirating them to all and digital sundry. But countering this glimmer of hope for the survival on the printed word, we also learnt that the energy consumption of the average UK household has increased five-fold since 1987, much of it due to our use of computers and associated devices. In which case wither global warming? And don’t get me started on bloody windfarms and wave-power.

As a not entirely irrelevant aside, in yesterday’s Observer, agony aunt Mariella Frostrup attempted to cheer up a woman so beset by fears of the imminent collapse of civilisation due to economic foment, sectarian hatred, blah-blah-blah, that she was actively considering suicide. And this just after watching Jeff  Nichols’s new film, Take Shelter, in which a decent American father, played with a growing intensity by Michael Shannon, addresses his similarly prescient visions of Armageddon by basically, like, going bonkers and building a sturdy underground bunker in which he incarcerates his family.

As for me, and despite both Mariella’s somewhat unsympathetic advice (basically “Get a grip, dearie – our great world leaders know what they’re doing”) and last week’s prosecution of a gang producing fake and borderline poisonous Glen’s vodka (which for years I’d happily been buying at Harry Tuffins in Knighton for £12.45 a litre), I’ve managed to find something called Tamova at an even lower £11.99… I know how I’m going to face our uncertain and disagreeable future. Cheers!

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And so I return to one of my regular if rather forlorn topics, namely the pointlessness of my writing, and you reading, this. But only briefly, because when I’ve successfully submitted that rare thing, a blessedly well paid bit of print journalism I’ve just been working on, I’m going to conduct a little experiment which I think may put the interweb, or at least the tiny sliver of it that I inhabit, into some relief. My plan is to turn off my web browser and with it my email account, and also my mobile phone, and keep them that way for at least a week – possibly much longer.

Although I personally haven’t read their experiences, I’m aware that various hacks and even respected writers have embarked on similar adventures, but since I’m not being paid to find out how or indeed if life changes as a consequence of being digitally disconnected, my motives are probably quite different. And they go like this.

I now reckon that I average two to three hours online every day, seven days a week – more, many more, if engaged in some heavy-duty research.

I also have an increasing tendency to email or text people I can’t easily get hold of by phone, or don’t actually want to talk to for fear of embarrassment or ennui. And I also suspect that the time it takes to successfully conclude such ‘conversations’, as we now so erroneously refer to them, is much longer than might be taken up by a simple phone call. For example, just yesterday I spent five minutes receiving or sending a total of eight texts in order to meet up with a friend which could’ve been accomplished by one 30 second phonecall. Five minutes which involved repeatedly interrupting and losing my train of thought over something I was trying to write, which in fact probably meant ten or fifteen more minutes of lost labour.

The consequences of being liberated from this is something are both tantalising and terrifying – the former because I don’t manage to spend as much time as I used to reading, listening to music, talking to friends, futzing around (that’s a technical term for using sophisticated engineering techniques) with my cars etc., etc., the latter because I fear that all this extra time mightn’t be much use because ten years welded to the web has limited my ability to concentrate on reading anything non-digital except wine labels and, cunning though it is, The Week.

Talking of which, The Week’s publisher, my friend Felix Dennis, for many years had printed on his personal office stationary something like, “We do not, and never will, have email”. Moreover he’s the only person I knowingly know who doesn’t have a mobile phone.  All very admirable if purity of communication is what we’re talking about – and here aboard my high horse I surely am – but you might reasonably wonder how he could successfully run a thriving print and digital publishing empire without such apparently essential tools. The answer, of course, is that he has a retinue of trusted assistants who do have email addresses and mobile phones and he simply barks out his orders, enquiries and thoughts to them which they then disseminate to the, ahem, end users. That said, Felix is also the only person I still maintain a regular, if occasionally robust postal correspondence with.

And whilst I certainly savour that, I am not filthy rich and he is. However it does remind me of when I was at least quite affluent and quite successful and had p.a’s who could do my bidding. Tellingly, that was when I worked for or owned publishing companies of various sizes in which the efficiency, the number and the quality of staff were a crucial factor in the success or failure of our magazines.  In principle that remains so, but the jobs they do are quite different now. Magazines, newspapers and for all I know websites rely very little on full-time employees to produce their content, much of which is contracted out (but without secure contracts, of course) to freelancers or third parties who in turn employ only freelancers. This is a mixed blessing: on the one hand it means media can be more specialised yet remain economically viable with titchy readerships (hurrah); on the other it means their few permanent staff are perpetually overworked and inefficient, emphasis is placed on the cheapest possible content which invariably means that any given periodical lacks the common, unifying characteristics that once made great titles great, and so overall these titles’ quality, and ergo their fortunes, deteriorate (boo-hoo).

But this is also a theme I’ve warmed to in the past and like the object of Elliott Gould’s derision, it make not a jot of difference to anyone. I’m hoping therefore that in abandoning the digital, my own communication skills will be revitalised, my vocabulary broadened, I’ll return to using books, libraries and the phone to find stuff out, and I’ll elicit more responses like that from a friend who admitted with some astonishment that our ten minute phone conversation – landline-to-landline, natch – was the longest purely social such exchange he’d had in years. And for all I know, I might just restore the Royal Mail’s fortunes, too.

So if you don’t hear from me for a while,  it’s because you haven’t got my landline number or postal address. Enjoy!

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(C) The New Yorker – so sue me why don't you?

Sometimes this angers me, not least because as little as four years ago I had seven paid monthly columns in various magazines, plus regular feature commissions from most of them, all of which amounted to earning a modest living. Now I have but two such columns, at reduced rates, very little feature work and two of those magazines have closed. The rest have imposed greater workloads on their permanent staff with, I maintain, a subsequent reduction in quality which will in turn likely lose them readers… but I would say that, wouldn’t I?  Crocodile tears I can live without, but it’s a measure of how the print publishing landscape has changed so radically in just a few years that many journalists who genuinely love to write – and I count myself amongst them – largely if not only are able to do so, and only for free, in a medium that has confiscated large chunks of their income. Irony overload.

One of the other paradoxes of this is that in response to the rolling but often superficial news formats prevalent on radio, t.v and most especially the internet, the newspapers which we used to rely on for news and investigative journalism have reduced such content considerably, replacing it with columns, criticism, commentary pieces and general interest features. Which we used, and to an extent still get, in the dwindling cohort of magazines.

Much of this I no longer bother to read because it is simply anodyne, or in shameless thrall to the entertainment and fashion industries. For example, most of what we once called the quality press is full of puff pieces promoting a new film, album, t..v. programme or, just occasionally, a book via an up-their-arse profile of its star or creator, especially at weekends which is when I (sometimes) have time to sit down and read them.

Which might – just – be alright if the standard of critical reviewing and editorial oversight counterbalanced such fawning prose, but increasingly it doesn’t.

One example of this which particularly irked me concerned a new film by newish Danish director, Nicholas Winding Refn, with star du jour, Ryan Gosling leadenly playing a virtually mute getaway driver. Admittedly with its taut if spare plot, lots of gratuitous violence and some decent performances from Carey Mulligan, Albert Brooks (about time too), Ron Perlman and a neat cameo against type from Mad Men’s Christina Hendricks, Drive isn’t a bad film. So far, so okay. But not one, not one single reviewer in any of the ‘papers I read – and after the first two or three I made a point of seeking out five or six others (my local newsagent loves me) mentioned that Drive is a hugely derivative rip of The Driver, a far superior film by Walter Hill. Released in 1978, it features Ryan O’Neal in the eponymous title role and the witheringly beautiful Isabel Adjani as the femme fatale he hooks up with. (If you haven’t seen it, read a brilliant critique in my seminal 1981 tome, Road Movies, which is rarely available via dusty secondhand bookshops, oh and Amazon, for about tuppence).

Even The Observer’s Philip French, who generally knows his way around cinema’s back catalogue and often references obscure foreign language flics to make his point in a showy-offy way, even he failed to point out the plagiarism. It underlines the poor standard of film criticism which ill-informed, perhaps willfully ill-informed journalists are allowed to get away with these days, journalists who a year ago might’ve been restaurant, motoring or music critic or op-ed columnists or some fashion editor’s favoured off-spring – yes believe it or not, even in the morally unimpeachable world of print, nepotism happens. And so the media merry-go-round continues its ever-decreasing circle around and around and eventually up its own bum.

Except, of course in the New Yorker where although they may be what is politely called ‘seasoned’, the same old meticulous but largely brilliant and knowledgeable journalists ply their trade untrammeled by the disruptive and coarsening predations of the interweb. Needless to say, the only critic who had the gumption and perhaps, given the power that Hollywood wields  in this economically-strapped medium, the courage to establish in considerable detail that Drive is simply a flashy reproduction of The Driver was the New Yorker’s Anthony Lane.

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It’s been a funny old few weeks since I last scribbled, involving a complete change of career – if such I ever really had – which has prompted both astonishment and ridicule in some quarters. Behind this is my enduring affection for my home town of Presteigne and  associated dismay at the decline of localism that threatens not just it, but similar locations throughout Britain – a topic I’ve railed about several times here. In the current economic climate the might of the big supermarket chains, the decline of postal services (and consequent small post office-cum-village shop closures) and the collapse of small-scale manufacturing has augured the demise of many local retailers and pubs and the subtle but ultimately deleterious effect this has on local cultures.

Some argue that this an inevitable outcome of economic change in a digital world, where commercial interests are consolidated into a few big players who nonetheless supply what society needs – or is persuaded to think it needs – in a cost-effective if often unregulated manner. And, furthermore, that the social consequences should not be feared or condemned, and perhaps even embraced as stepping stones to some brave new world. In which case I would refer them to Aldous Huxley’s dystopian and now rather prescient novel of the same name.

One or two locals dismiss my verbal hand-wringing over this as mere sentimental twaddle, arguing that our town would be better off with a Tesco or Morrisons feeding its increasingly unemployed and impoverished citizens, if only to save them the cost of driving to towns nearby where they already exist. That this would take money, and possibly even more jobs out of the local economy isn’t something they wish to debate, but even these naysayers had to think twice when a small chain of Indian takeaway restaurants recently offered to buy The Hat Shop.

Owned by three good friends (and good friends of mine), one of whom – the main chef – wished to retire from the hard slog of maintaining The Hat Shop as a local high street institution these past 22 years. The menu is ever-changing, seasonal, globally eclectic and though not cheap, excellent value, and the place has become something of a social hub where we hold our parties, entertain friends and over the years held musical events, themed culinary evenings and regular art exhibitions. Needless to say its atmosphere, due as much to the cheery nature of the women who run it as it is to its cosy décor, is elemental to its popularity and the owners had hoped that it might be bought by someone, possibly a chef and front-of-house couple, who would at least maintain its social value, if not its menu. But when the Indian company made an offer within days of The Hat Shop going on the market, and then upped it again a few hours after it was rejected, the horns of a dilemma arose.

There were those who said that the town could actually use an Indian takeaway, even though we already have a Chinese, a fish’n’chip shop which inevitably does burgers, kebabs and occasionally, curries, and a café selling takeaway pizzas. It would, they vociferously claimed, mean cheaper eating for the mass of folk who didn’t patronise the Hat Shop anyway, and provide a welcome addition to the culinary scene for those that did. No matter that we have Indian outlets in towns a very few miles away, and no matter that Presteigne would then be without any restaurant offering fresh and freshly cooked ingredients, many of them produced locally.

Moreover, a little light research revealed that the prospective buyers’ strategy is to re-heat food cooked in a Birmingham factory and bus in staff from that same burgh, thus removing jobs as well as revenue for local suppliers. To cut a not very long but rather vexatious and, after at least one accusation of culinary racism, occasionally acrimonious story short, I decided quite literally to put my money where my mouth had often been. And my offer to buy the Hat Shop, slightly higher than the Indians’, has since been accepted, and I’ve now embarked on the steep learning curve of a neophyte restaurateur.

As hiring an outsider would’ve been a risk not relished, to my huge relief in this I’m aided by the three chefs who, now not about to be displaced by Brummie factory workers, will be maintaining the traditions if not the exact menu of yore. So after a bit of a re-fit, the Hat Shop will re-open in 2012 with a new lease of life and the vigorous but hopefully appropriate marketing campaign it never really had.

Downsides? Well of course, and particularly in the currently grim economic climate, I might screw it up and lose my shirt, because the money I was saving to buy a house and start a small publishing venture in the new year is now virtually all spoken for. But then again I’ve been trying unsuccessfully to find an affordable, ideal home for almost three years and after so many false dawns, who’s to say if yet another of my fanciful schemes to recover my aforementioned career would ever get off the ground.

But if the worst come to the worst, or even the würst, at least I’ll have eaten well during my little adventure. See www.thehatshoprestaurant.co.uk

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Such thoughts don’t only attend me when a death is announced for I often find myself wistfully remembering those who I long ago spent as much time with as I do with the close friends I have now, but of course there are only so many hours, days and weeks in the year and geography and careers and new lovers and the raising of families – the latter not in my case, obviously – conspire to punctuate and invariably puncture or re-shape those relationships, just as an ebbing tide turn the pebbles on a beach into new and different patterns.

Preparing a eulogy for a friend who was still a regular part of my social life until last autumn, I found myself re-evaluating the impact she’d had on my life and considering the ‘what-ifs’ that attended the various stages of our relationship: the missed opportunities; the misjudged assumptions; the lazy failures to be as supportive as one might’ve been. But I also remembered the fantastic fun and the huge benefits I enjoyed from what scraps of life we had together. And with some slight embarrassment as I delivered that eulogy, I found myself declaring feelings for her that perhaps I hadn’t fully realised during the forty odd years we’d been friends. Which is I guess is the basis of such post-traumatic regrets.

Mr Hibbert in characteristically enigmatic pose

With Tom Hibbert, who died last week aged just 59, it was different. Ours was a friendship born out of journalism, he a writer, mine at the time an editor. In 1980 the same company that published Smash Hits hired me to edit a low-budget crack at the nostalgia market which now supports weighty journals such as Mojo and Classic Rock, and I knew Tom as author of some of the whacky pop poster mags produced by Bunch Assoc., the post-underground press outfit I also worked for. Tom, then mainly if incongruously wrote for a DIY magazine, as someone who could throw together a feature about almost anyone at short notice. Despite our best efforts, it would be nice to say that Greatest Hits was just too far ahead of its time, but by current standards it was actually pretty awful.

Although Greatest Hits fell over at the starting gate, Tom went to work for a successful partwork called History of Rock, but we had friends in common who became closer and greater in number and we drank, took copious quantities of whizz together and generally had a very good time indeed.  Much of this revolved around our mutual love of obscure and invariably psychedelic bands, anorak fixations that prompted outbursts of “Pop quiz, pop quiz” when we would challenge each other to name Big Star’s first drummer or the composer of ‘My Friend Jack Eats Sugar Lumps’, often fabricating the answer with a vicious certainty that brooked no dispute. But indisputably, Tom was a brilliant writer whose world-class mordancy was tempered by a mischievous humour , and when I launched New Music News in 1981, he really got into his stride. NMN was unleashed at a week’s notice after IPC’s Melody Maker (for whom I was a columnist and features scribbler) and New Musical Express fell victims of a union dispute and it was a mad, sleep-deprived attempt to inject some levity into a weekly press that took itself far too seriously… and of course, cop the advertising revenue that suddenly had nowhere else to go.

With a constant succession of Marlboros burning holes in his desk and esoteric outwear, and a glass of his favourite, quite disgusting but comfortingly cheap Hanky Bannister scotch never far away, Tom would churn out features and reviews with an insouciant ease, although not always on time. Well rarely on time, actually. And because we needed readers’ letters but barely had any readers, he simply made them up, usually on wildly off-message topics and often referencing imaginary acts with improbable names. Along with Mark Ellen – the two would later work together to even greater effect on the real Smash Hits and then Q, where he honed irreverent interviewing into an art form  – Tom would write also bizarre captions, e.g. ‘Anna Ford gives Wavis O’Shave’s bum a good kicking’, which I doubt anyone except me and the other Mark found amusing, but it didn’t matter.

And that, I now realise, was what I loved about Tom. Anything he did, wrote and  sometimes even said, didn’t really matter in the great scheme of things. For example, he was actually a pretty good guitarist and songwriter, but seemed to find the whole business of performing a bit of an aimless lark deliberately using the cheapest equipment, whether it was with the prophetically-named Tired of Living (whose jaunty vinyl excursion ‘You’ve Got To Kiss A Lot of Frogs’ I recklessly financed to coincide with Charles and Di’s wedding) or the slightly more professional Love Trousers (with fellow plank-spanker, Mark Ellen).

And because he didn’t really care about food – for a long time he dined almost exclusively at Notting Hill’s Spud-U-Like – or the effects that umpteen Marlboros and everything else he imbibed might have on him, he soon eventually succumbed to serious illness, first pancreatitis, which nearly killed him, and later complications as a result of diabetes, which did.

To those friends who as we all got older cautioned Tom to rein back on the drink and the gaspers, he would just shrug us off with a wry smirk and a “Yes, yes, of course” as he pulled another Red Stripe from the carrier bag that was his perennial briefcase.

As with others now lost to me, I hadn’t seen Tom in far too many years – geography being my main, but ultimately empty justification – but his departure does underline the frailty of relationships that once were so special and for which, in this age of instant digital communication, there is perhaps no real excuse. Given his playful nihilism Tom, of course, might disagree.

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Readers of these blogs will by now be familiar with my own coruscating views on the evident moral decline of western civilization and in truth I sometimes wish I could pen something more uplifting, but if it’s hiking in the Chilterns, the Best Pushchairs Under £100 or amusing little eateries tucked away in the lesser reaches of Suffolk, then I’m afraid the weekend supplements are always going to be ahead of my game. So for the moment I shall stick with pessimistic fatalism and duly informed by Joanie I noticed in the same issue of the i that reported her Daily Mail utterances, news of major survey of eight- to 17 year-olds which concluded that those who regularly read text messages were much more likely to be below average readers than those who didn’t. More dishearteningly, only 5.4% of this sample admitted to regularly reading fiction.

This might account for the level of illiteracy bemoaned by Joanie which, by the way, was prompted by comments by her “many friends in business” who just can’t find the staff they need (e.g. spin-doctors, wig-makers, plastic-surgeons?), but whilst I personally share her grief, there are those who would aver that this matters not a jot because society is simply and inevitably embracing these new forms of communication and changing accordingly.

A whole school (sic) of educational thought espouses the benefits of grammar- and punctuation-free phonetics, and social networking sites which, let us not forget, facilitate the overthrow of dictatorships as well as the looting of high streets, have between them created a language that aped the argot of science fiction monsters a few decades ago. Add to this the high-speed, staccato-cut visual imagery that some of us oldsters might find annoying if not bewildering, and it’s perhaps no wonder that attention spans have diminished and Joanie’s feckless youth lack the ability to concentrate on books or even magazine articles containing more than a few hundred words?

But if it’s only old farts who lament this, there are surely more genuinely sinister aspects to this march of cultural development? For a start, the normality of text messaging, Twittering and Facebooking is generally undertaken with little or no thought to its consequences. Cyber bullying, riot-inciting Facebook and Blackberry trafficking and shameless sexual harassment are just three examples of how digital media encourages communication without responsibility: just tap out a whim-inspired message, press ‘send’ and out it goes into cyber-space which, because there’s no-one on the end of a ‘phone or across a table to answer back seems to remove any consideration of consequences. And an old fashioned letter requires so much more thought, effort and the almost ludicrous cost of a stamp all of which might actually facilitate pause for thought during its composition.

Quite apart from the dangers of such instant communiqués and the slapdash language that they’ve now normalised, there is also the sheer volume to contend with. I really, really do not understand how those addicted to Twitter and Facebook find time to do a job of work (and here a nod to Ms Collins and her business pals may again be due), much less poke their noses into a book or their feet into a gym, cinema or art gallery. I have enough trouble tearing myself away from the great god of email to engage in such cybernautics, let alone spend the hour or so a day I once spent reading a newspaper or a few chapters of latest Jeffrey Archer’s latest masterpiece.

Of course the emergence of digest media like Metro, The Week and most recently, the Indie’s baby sister, i – which I do actually buy every day, but mainly ‘cause it costs only 20p and the Indie is a shadow of its former self – reflect if not intellectually nourish the Twittering, time-poor middle classes. But where I wonder will it all end? Well to mount another of my regular hobby-horses, if this race to illiteracy continues, then no-one will be reading books in a few years time. Which is just as well because there won’t be any libraries left: after all, isn’t it so much more important to mount a single Tornado raid on Libya than keep open the average public library, both of which cost approx. £40,000… and don’t even get me started on the cost of our Afghani and Iraqi adventures?

As for newspapers and magazines, well within what little there’s left of my lifetime, they’ll all be gone too. With the possible exception, that is, of the celeb-based rags that continue to proliferate, so at least we’ll still be able to absorb the wisdom of such latterday sages as Joan Collins.

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