Good morning, sorry this blog is a bit late but I had a lie-in. It’s been a hectic week so I allowed myself the luxury of staying in bed for an extra hour or two.
It also gave me time to think about the future, and now that the transfer window has closed and Arsenal are in such a mess, I think it’s time for a new direction. So, this blog is going to pivot to video. When I was a kid we got a VCR really early, like sometime around 1977. It was a massive beast of a thing, weighing more than fully-grown African elephant and it needed eight men to lift it.
It was made by Sanyo which as I’m sure you all know is a Japanese major electronics company and formerly a member of the Fortune Global 500 whose headquarters was located in Moriguchi, Osaka prefecture, Japan. My top of the head knowledge about them is a surprise to me, funny what kinda things you retain.
Anyway, this machine was so high-tech it had a remote control. I say ‘remote’ but basically it was a switch that you could start/stop a video with but it was attached the machine with a cable. Handily, the cable was about two feet long so you’d have been just as quick using the buttons on the video player itself, but you know … gadget.
The other thing about this wonderful contraption is that it was Betamax. There were two main formats for VCRs back in the day, think of it AVI vs MP4 or MKV or MPEG but you couldn’t download a thing to play both because there was no internet and no such thing as downloading. The other, far more popular format, was VHS.
VHS became more and more popular, and when one went to the local movie rental establishment, one found that over time the selection and choice of films available dwindled considerably. In the end, you might find a copy of Fletch or Caddyshack, perhaps a Fast Times at Ridgemont High, or a lonely old First Blood with Sylvester Stallone, but that was about it. They simply stopped doing them because everyone else used VHS.
Me and my brother, the Mugsmasher himself, were the only kids who had a Betamax and all the cool kids had VHS. I know life can throw up struggles for people, but this was truly one of the most trying and difficult times that anyone could ever have experienced. You know what other kids are like, brutal, unforgiving little bastards.
“How’s your Betamax?!”, they’d laugh, pointing at us as we walked down the road.
“Get lost,” we might reply, or “At least our Dad’s not dead,” we’d say to that one lad whose dad was dead. That shut him up.
But to carry that kind of shame around with you day after day after day, so unbelievably tough. It’s hard to relive it this morning, but dammit I’m committed to this story now. The one thing we had though was Jaws. And the other thing we had was Omen II.
Both of them were recorded off the TV and we watched them relentlessly. The bit where Hooper, standing on the edge of the pier, asks the fishermen if there’s a hotel and they tell him to walk straight ahead and he says “Haha, they’re all gonna die!”, or Quint’s amazing monologue about the USS Indianapolis, and then the end with now so obviously rubbery shark but it didn’t matter back then.
Omen II where Damien, the little son of the devil twat, stands there watching while the bloke falls under the ice and can’t find a way out and still to this day that’s third on my list of ways I do not want to die, and then the bit in the hospital where the lad gets cut in half by a falling lift cable (number 7 on my list). It was only by repeatedly watching the man get sliced in two that we could find any solace, any comfort from our video nightmare.
“Why can’t we get a VHS like everyone else,” we’d ask from time to time.
“There’s nothing wrong with that one,” my mam would smile as she made curry from a tin of powder that she’d had since 1968. “Those best before dates are just a guide anyway.”
Eventually I moved out, and got a VHS player of my own. I was so happy, and then about a year later they invented DVD or something, once more the universe playing its cruel tricks on me. Since then I’ve watched Heat with Robert de Niro and Al Pacino about 5 times and I swear I can’t tell you a thing about it. It’s as if the movie goes in one eye and out the other.
I bet if I’d watched it on Betamax I’d remember it though. And doesn’t that tell so much about the world we live in today?
Actually no, no it doesn’t, but here we are, and isn’t that all that matters? To be fair, no, it’s not, lots of things matter, but this morning it’s important to remember the simple things like a man being eaten by a shark or a bloke in a lift being carved in two.
It’s all about perspective.
And so ends our pivot to video. Normal service will resume tomorrow.
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If you’d like to read something about Arsenal, here’s a piece I wrote for the Independent about Alexis Sanchez, while here’s Arsene Wenger talking about the Chilean and Thomas Lemar.
And for something to listen to, here’s our post-deadline day Arsecast, where we try and laugh as much as possible, because what else can you do?!
