Chris Stanley's Bazaar

A few weeks ago, I paid three pounds for a concert ticket. Depending on what year it is, this could be an enormous extravagance or a huge bargain, but in the middle of 2020 I think we can broadly agree that it’s a waste of time. However, this was no investment. The ticket isn’t likely to be worth more than what I paid for it in years to come, but I wanted it anyway. When it arrived, professionally clamped between two slices of cardboard and sealed in a plastic wallet, my heart felt a little shaft of sunlight, which took me back to 7th May 2001. I’m going to tell you what this ticket stub means to me. In 2001, I was a student at the University of Leicester . I was in my second year, and truth to tell, it wasn’t going all that well. I was doing an English degree, something which I wasn’t sure was really for me. With no options in the first year of the course, I was inevitably stuck with Shakespeare and minute line readings of The Good Soldier , when I wanted to be explaining to pink-chee...

Where were you when history was made? Memory being what it is, it’s likely that in years to come the bare details of who you are and what you were doing when the defining moments of social history happened will be shaped and coloured into the image you would most like to claim was your own. However, I have what I suspect is a near-eidetic memory for my own life, and therefore I won’t have any choice but to admit that when England finally won a penalty shoot-out, I acted like a complete tit. I seem to have a knack for missing the moment by a hair’s breadth, but in some ways that makes my memories even more vivid, as if the mundanity of everyday life highlights the kaboom of history like the Trinity test in the Alamogordo morning. For example, when the Berlin Wall fell (or rather the Saturday evening, since it opened late on a Thursday night), we were having a family party. When the USSR collapsed in August ‘91, my elder sister and I were arguing over a game of Ludo. I thought Prince...

I don't think that writers should write a blog post about how difficult it is to write. I think it's the equivalent of second-album syndrome, where all of your songs are about what a terrible ordeal it is to be in a band touring the globe. We get it, mate: you're Nigel Tufnel, explaining the problem with the olives and the tiny, tiny bread . But writing a blog post at all has been playing on my mind, because it's over three months since the last one, and even if you're not expecting my face to imminently show up on the side of a milk carton, it might be germane of me to tell you where I'm at, not least because this gap will make a shite chapter in the unauthorised biography otherwise. I finished draft two of The Sad Club a few months ago now, and after a short break I've gone back to it to re-edit. At this point I was going to write a humorous calendar of my writing process because I've had a couple of people cock their heads in puzzlement at w...