2003-10-23 - 10:48 a.m.

Working at a classified ads paper has made me realise one thing, apart from the fact that there are thousands of well built, uncut white males looking for no strings fun, couples welcome. Very accommodating of them, don�t you think. The other thing is that there is a market for any old tat, the oddest things having disproportionate value due to nostalgia value, which is when people forget how quite shit things actually were at the time. There seems to be currently a golden age for early eighties electronica, the halcyon days when BigTrak bestrode the earth like, er, a crudely programmed plastic tank with no batteries included. It was a time of optimism, when even fundamental skills were delegated to small bleeping machines. Take Speak and Spell, for instance. Carefree parents would entrust the transference of basic literacy to this orange box, with nary a need for social interaction, or school. They had seen the future, and it required no effort on their part. The drawback,of course, was that the gizmo spoke in a metallic monotone that made Stephen Hawking sound like Laurence Olivier. Not very useful unless you wanted to go on to front an experimental industrial synth band, many of whom simply cut out the middle man and programmed Speak and Spell to deliver their lyrics in any case. Now they go for �50 a pop. Imagine what an uncut white male looking for no strings fun with a Speak and Spell might be worth.