Things I Miss #2

I miss middle-aged, middle-management men with a type of red-blooded Tourette's Syndrome that meant every possible double entendre was bracketed with, "As the actress /bishop said to the bishop/actress." Smooth operators used verbal shorthand and merely said, "As the a said to the b." Apparently The Saint in Leslie Charteris' impeccable stories used the phrase.

Things I Miss #1

In the 1970s and 1980s one could not walk down a street without seeing the spool from a broken cassette tape spilling along the pavement and wrapping itself around lampposts and trees. I suppose most were thrown from car windows after getting jammed in cassette players. It was sometimes possible to rewind the tape into the cassette using a hexagonal pencil or a Bic biro.

A friend tells me they were also used for voodoo: one would record onto a blank cassette the person’s name and what ills one hoped would befall them; and then the cassette would be stamped on and the tape left to unravel in the wind and, it was hoped, the enemy’s life would then also begin to unravel…