This post is a website first for me. Not once in three years have I published something on this site written by someone else. However, Chris Tucker wrote me such a super response to my post entitled “It’s my party and I’ll cry if I want to” that I wanted to share it with you all. The comments are associated with the original blog post but if you had read the article before, there is every chance that you wouldn’t notice them - and that would be a shame.
I thoroughly enjoyed reading Chris’ feedback; I am sure that he spent as much time on his response as I did writing the original post and I really appreciate the effort to engage.
My view is that Chris should start his own blog – I’d be a regular visitor.
Enjoy!
And Chris - thank you.
Dear Adrian,
As skewed as your Weebly stats may have been, you can be sure to have at least one dutiful and grateful reader. That's me, by the way. I feel compelled to petition that you keep the website alive, and I'm going to tell you why.
I was born in the late 1980s and, outside of my Dire Straits, Fleetwood Mac and Pink Floyd album collections, my view of the 1970s is generally marked by bell-bottom flairs, casual racism, the first Rocky movie, political upheaval, and the colour orange. At university, I learned that academics often present the decade as one being dragged, its platform shoes kicking and its ringed fingers clawing at chest hair, into cultural modernity. The recent Yewtree scandals have only added to the perception of the decade as a fraught and sordid one, a ten-year-long Abigail's Party, except with more cat suits and sexual harassment.
However, your blog does a great job of bringing some jovial normality to the era. Rather than the sweeping, narrative-driven 1970s given to us in The Professionals re-runs and Panorama specials, your blog gives us a view of the period that is celebrated without prejudice or tight-collared revisionism. A few days ago I caught an early 90s Whitesnake track on the radio and felt the same pang of childhood nostalgia that you likely to derive from corduroys and Mark III Cortinas. I immediately thought of your blog and its relationship to the years of your life that are long passed but never forgotten.
It can be said that your blog has become a lens into my own future, a type of modern memoire that seeks to give order to the disorder of memory. The 1990s, in my case, are not long passed, and Oasis and Blur records have not quite receded into the cultural memory like the ELO and Yes albums that gather dust in back alley record shops in the bohemian parts of town. However, that day will come, and I'll probably be the one blogging about it - reflections on Toploader and Grange Hill sitting alongside reviews of people carriers and TV shows about Ant and Dec.
If you've achieved everything you wanted to achieve then you've most certainly done it well, but I for one can say I'm glad to know when a bizarre ornament you own is featured in a BBC documentary.
Maybe you're Adrian Baldwin the author, and the man of the same name is a less prolific imposter.
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I thoroughly enjoyed reading Chris’ feedback; I am sure that he spent as much time on his response as I did writing the original post and I really appreciate the effort to engage.
My view is that Chris should start his own blog – I’d be a regular visitor.
Enjoy!
And Chris - thank you.
Dear Adrian,
As skewed as your Weebly stats may have been, you can be sure to have at least one dutiful and grateful reader. That's me, by the way. I feel compelled to petition that you keep the website alive, and I'm going to tell you why.
I was born in the late 1980s and, outside of my Dire Straits, Fleetwood Mac and Pink Floyd album collections, my view of the 1970s is generally marked by bell-bottom flairs, casual racism, the first Rocky movie, political upheaval, and the colour orange. At university, I learned that academics often present the decade as one being dragged, its platform shoes kicking and its ringed fingers clawing at chest hair, into cultural modernity. The recent Yewtree scandals have only added to the perception of the decade as a fraught and sordid one, a ten-year-long Abigail's Party, except with more cat suits and sexual harassment.
However, your blog does a great job of bringing some jovial normality to the era. Rather than the sweeping, narrative-driven 1970s given to us in The Professionals re-runs and Panorama specials, your blog gives us a view of the period that is celebrated without prejudice or tight-collared revisionism. A few days ago I caught an early 90s Whitesnake track on the radio and felt the same pang of childhood nostalgia that you likely to derive from corduroys and Mark III Cortinas. I immediately thought of your blog and its relationship to the years of your life that are long passed but never forgotten.
It can be said that your blog has become a lens into my own future, a type of modern memoire that seeks to give order to the disorder of memory. The 1990s, in my case, are not long passed, and Oasis and Blur records have not quite receded into the cultural memory like the ELO and Yes albums that gather dust in back alley record shops in the bohemian parts of town. However, that day will come, and I'll probably be the one blogging about it - reflections on Toploader and Grange Hill sitting alongside reviews of people carriers and TV shows about Ant and Dec.
If you've achieved everything you wanted to achieve then you've most certainly done it well, but I for one can say I'm glad to know when a bizarre ornament you own is featured in a BBC documentary.
Maybe you're Adrian Baldwin the author, and the man of the same name is a less prolific imposter.
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