I’m irate, peeved, irate, peeved

It’s rare to get a phone message from Grange Girl, especially one this excitable. ‘They just announced a massive music festival on 6 Music! In Lewes! We’ve got to go! Runrig! July!’

By the time I reached her house, she’d gone all deflated. ‘Turned out to be Lewis with an ‘i’, did it?’ I said sympathetically.

She sniffed. ‘Who’d have thunk the Outer Hebrides would have a more rocking scene than us?’

‘Nonsense’, I said. ‘There’s tons of gigs every week here. Meadowlands Festival this weekend. Starfish thing in the summer. Rock in the Bog in July. Arthur Brown lives here. The guitar festival, er, used to be on every year.’

Her head slumped into her hands. ‘Runrig have never played here though.’ She was clearly in a slough of despond. ‘And 6 Music’s going to be axed.’

‘Is it? Damn those Tory-Dems and their swingeing cuts.’

‘It was decided months ago, when Labour were in charge.’

I often arrive a bit late to the news.

‘Well, we must protest’, I protested. ‘I listened to it once and it was good. That nice George Lamb was on.’

‘You’re too late. The consultation closed on 25th May.’

I often arrive a bit late to the direct action.

‘Oh. Shall I make some tea then?’

We mused in silence for a while, sipping our drinks.

‘There’s a Save 6 Music Facebook group’, Grangey said, suddenly.

I started, spilling tea on my Hush Puppies. ‘How would you know that, Grangey?’

Grange Girl’s techno-peasantry is the stuff of legend. She listens to music on reel-to-reel tape, and absolutely will not countenance a mobile phone. In fact, she’s still a bit suspicious of her land-line. ‘Letters were good enough for Napoleon and John Peel.’

She looked defensive. ‘They mentioned it on the wireless. Obviously I can’t join, not having the interweb, but you could.’

I nodded vigorously, filing the idea away in the large drawer at the back of my brain labelled ‘Things I probably won’t get round to.’

‘Shall we go to a gig tonight?’ I suggested, perusing the handy Viva gig guide taped to Grangey’s fridge. ‘There’s bands at the Snowdrop, Royal Oak and the Pelham. We should go to all three, demonstrate our support for music in all its myriad forms.’

‘Except jazz.’

‘Goes without saying.’

‘Nah, let’s just listen to the early Peel sessions with The Fall and have another cup of tea.’

This seemed rather a reckless imbibe of caffeine after six o’clock but she read my mind and said, ‘Camomile, obviously.’

She popped the kettle on the gas hob, fired up the reel-to-reel, and we were transported, by the power of music, to 1981. To a time before mobiles, CDs and Facebook, and before 6 Music was going to be axed (or indeed, existed). Mark E Smith sang, ‘You don’t have to be weird to be wired’, and Grange Girl and I clinked our mugs together and toasted to happier times.





Beth Miller, 26th May 2010. Published in VivaLewes.com. Many thanks to Annabel for introducing me to the term 'techno-peasant'.

I know a change is gonna come, oh yes it will

For a town with a reputation for resisting development, there’s actually quite a lot of change going on in Lewes. I don’t mean the big attention-grabbing changes, like the railway land improvements or the knocking down of twitten walls, but those little everyday things which inspire nostalgia for a dreamy distant past, when the Harveys was warmer and old ladies cycled to communion, cricket bats under their arms.

Or in fact, the not so distant past. ‘It’s SO annoying’, said Aging Lad, describing how he had to park many metres from his destination. ‘I remember when you could drive down the Cliffe and park right outside the shops.’ Well yes, Lad, I wanted to say. Even you, with your addled brain should be able to recall last year. But all the others started chipping in with their own freshly minted nostalgia. ‘It’s such a shame having to buy school uniform on-line’, said Absent-Minded Mum, ‘do you remember that shop that used to sell it?’ Everyone looked thoughtful. ‘For goodness sake, people’, I cried, ‘Wards! It only closed a few months ago.’

‘I never bought uniform there, anyway’, said DJ Mama. ‘Not when you could get cheap knock-offs from, oh, what was that place called…?’ How quickly they forget. ‘I think you’re talking about Woolworths’, I said, thin-lipped. This, of course, precipitated the inevitable discussion about how much everyone missed the pick-and-mix and how they’d bought their first seven-inch single at Woolies, so I went away to bang my head against a wall for a brief yet reviving period. When I returned, they’d moved onto the next stage of the debate: how there’s no longer anywhere to buy plastic toys. ‘There used to be another toy shop, you know’, Pells Boy was saying, to incredulity all round. ‘No, really. Where Oakleys is now.’

I left them to it and walked down to Waitrose (‘remember when it was Safeway?’). I bumped into Cycle Girl and had a little moan to her about reminiscence-mongers, but she started doing it too. ‘It’s restaurants for me. I really miss Thackerays; and though I had a nice meal in Shanaz last night, I did hanker after that plastic foliage they used to have that dangled in your dhansak.’

She then moved on to bemoaning the demise of the guitar festival. I legged it before she could tell me about Richard Thompson’s last great set.

Then, in the chilled aisle of Waitrose, it happened to me. I asked an assistant where the little Innocent smoothie cartons had gone – smoothies being as essential to the well-running of a middle-class Lewes family as unleaded is to their Renault Espace. She informed me they were no longing stocking them. I swayed slightly in front of the cabinet, and found myself saying, ‘But I remember when you used to have them, just here, in four different flavours.’ It made me long for a nice sit-down and a cuppa in Artisan, but of course, it’s not there anymore.

Beth Miller, 3rd March 2010. Published in VivaLewes.com and in Viva Lewes magazine, April 2010.