Back to the Nineties

This last week the BC household took a trip back to the nineties - the 1890s! I'm all for a bit of retro, but spending seven days without power while electricians rip up your carpets and floors, forcing you to boil water on the stove and read by candle light isn't anyone's idea of fun. We'd been having problems with the lecky for a few months. Lights would dim and flash back on. The TV would blink in the middle of those all-important Celebrity Big Brother episodes. The internet would switch off abruptly. And then it all came to a head last Saturday. We walked in and groped around for the switch, but the bloody thing wouldn't turn on! We went to the electric box and, dangerously, the trip hadn't, erm, tripped. Out came the engineer who told us we had two problems. First, our antiquated wiring system was probably arcing somewhere, causing the lights etc. to cut out. Second, the feed into our house was similarly ancient ... and was a serious fire hazard!!! His advice (British Gas engineers no longer have the power to turn a supply off, all they can do is "advise" the customer) was to get the service providers to replace their cabling and then get the place rewired.

Seven days later, here I sit with piles of dusty books and furniture still draped with covers. The plaster around the switches and sockets is more or less dry (disappointingly it's a grim-grey colour rather than the pleasingly warm pink of "traditional" plaster). An endless day of dusting, hoovering and tidying stretch awaits. Sisyphus has nothing on the labour confronting me.

Still, one shouldn't be downhearted. How about a silly, bouncy, kitschy track from our nineties to get the day off to a bounce. Anyone remember this?

Yes pop pickers, that is Deuce with their cheese-friendly 1995 hit, Call It Love. I sometimes wonder what happened to lead singer Kelly O'Keefe - she had proper star power. 

With all the cleaning, blogging will be sporadic for the next several days. I also need time to catch up on the news and what's been tickling the belly of leftyblogland this last week. I see last week's demo in London against Israel's murderous rampage in Gaza went well, while, simultaneously, the conference on workers' political representation twiddled its thumbs (some belated reflections on this next week). There's been more doom and economic gloom, the dreadful reign of George W. Bush is in its final days, Tina got evicted and Mutya walked from CBB, and The Scum is inexplicably leading with a Mars story that's been doing the rounds in popular science journals for years. It's not as though there's nothing going on in the world!