not rubbish! an ARCHIVE!!

yes i am not great with newspapers — full of articles I "need" to read tho never will — but as my immediate enighbour = a million times worse, i let myself off the hook

In 1995 I didnt have a job and I'd left university and decided to clear out my old music papers. But what about the great articles in them? A ha, I thought, and spent every afternoon for the best part of a week looking through and clipping and saving pieces on anyone I thought I'd want to read about later.

This was of course colossally stupid, because it's the pieces on the people you don't like yet that you scrabble back through the pile for. And lo and behold my taste revolved enormously in my first year out in the 'real world' (well DUH Tom) and my fantastic archive was never looked at from that day to this.

I'm a man after Sinker's own heart: *how* many newspapers do I still have that I'll probably never get round to checking? Before I came to my senses and threw them out earlier this year, the number was uncountable.

(of course I realise now that I knew even then that clipping was from a music-j point of view a stupid thing to do. I was clipping at the end of my university years to as to write the diary of that time I'd never kept, obviously - I knew the memory of being into each band would trigger other memories and so on.)

swank name-dropping benefit to archiving: as he has kept no clippings-folder of his own, I was able to present I.Penman a scrap- book of HIS reviews, This is Yr Life-style. His face fell heh, and he gave em back a few weeks later phew. I think exactly zero got into his collection.

In recent years I have divested myself of large chunks of my 'collection' - partly 'cos I was broke at various times, partly 'cos I needed the space, mainly 'cos I hardly ever looked at or used all this useless STUFF - mags, comics, bks, whatnot. I have found that I rarely if ever miss any of it - sometimes I set off in search of a bk only to realise it has now gone from my shelves, and that can cause a slight twinge of regret, but this happens less and less often these days, what with the interweb and all. I also firmly believe that almost NOTHING is irreplaceable - if you want it badly enough you will always be able to get it again in some form or other, somehow some way.

The most irritating 'regular' at the M+VE bkshop believed he was building a collection that could, in the event of a nuclear war, help to restore civlization. He 'specialised' in anything cheap, underpriced or conspiracy-orientated, and cld be moved to tears by Wagner (he said.)He liked Hendrix (early) and 'Black Steel' by Tricky.