The day well known free-thinker, scientific gadabout town and outrageous beard-wearer, Charlie Darwin, risked damnation and hellfire by publishing his renowned airport novel On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or The Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life; he could not have foreseen just how far the human race would evolve in the intervening time.

True, we may still be land-bound bipeds, no closer to flying, breathing under water, or speaking without opening our gobs than we were 149 years ago, but take a look around and you’ll see the spoils of evolution everywhere.

Tis true, I tell thee. You only have to switch on your TV set to be greeted by upstanding members of the evolutionary scale. Those fine individuals that result from generations of predecessors fighting hammer and indeed claw to eliminate weakness and brain defects from the gene pool, ensuring that not just they, but all of us, are blessed by their almost superhumanly talented legacies.

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Wahey! The house band are back.

The Move provide the musical interlude yet again. If I’m displaying a Brummie bias, then shoot me down.

Once again it’s off the their last album, Message From The Country, prior to them becoming ELO, and once again the picture quality can be a little unfortunate in places, but hey, I’m pointing you good people in the direction of some bob on music, so don’t complain.

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Pubs are closing down at a rate that will terrify men of words and forward thinking, the length and breadth of the nation. The reported figure is just shy of an alarming four a day! Yes!! Four a day!!!

There was a time when a man only had to step outside the front door and he’d find himself in the warm bosom of his local hostelry. A pint of his particular poison in the one hand; a cheroot, a pipe, or whatever his chosen method of tobacco intake was, in the other.

Not anymore. A man can walk for days before even so much as catching the faint whiff of stale beer, sweat and dried blood that is oh so familiar and like an ethereal comfort blanket to him. It is a sobering image that springs to mind when you think of a man losing his home from home, cast adrift from his community anchor and left to wander aimlessly in search of another that will reward the hard work and years of loyalty he’s put into his very own haunt.

What comes as an even harder kick to the knackers is what they do to said pub. Once time has been called on that final emptying-of-the-barrels lock-in and the heavy doors that would’ve stood firm to an assault from William Wallace and his band of loonies, have been bolted shut.

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This weekend’s Musical Interlude is once again from the mighty Move. It would seem they’re taking up residency as the Not What it Used to Be house band.

Which can’t be a bad thing. They’re brummies - one of your own - and without them we wouldn’t have the joy of Roy Wood and Wizzard’s ‘I Wish It Could Be Christmas Everyday’ to behold, every single bloody Yuletide.

This 10 carat diamond comes from the 1971 album Message From The Country,  their final album just prior to the three remaining members (Roy Wood, Jeff Lynne, Bev Bevan) becoming ELO (Electric Light Orchestra).

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You can’t even rely on bleeding technology.

Jeffman has just noticed that the bloody archives aren’t working.

The monthly links redirect back to the homepage! He will engage his trustiest of spanners and cheekiest of socket sets, in a bid to remedy this faux pas.

For a committed Luddite such as his good self, this may take a while. Plus he’ll have to remain sober long enough to remember what he’s supposed to be doing. The clever money’s on this not being the quickest of jobs.

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Hot dingle. Jeffman fears he might be getting old. The pieces are slowly but surely slotting into place. Pull out the scorecard and tick the appropriate boxes.

Greying hair. Check. Expanding waistline. Check. Aching joints. Check. They’re all there. But there’s one thing Jeffman never expected. The thing that creeps up on you like the ex-scoutmaster your mother used to tell you to keep away from and stamps the card of all right-thinking men across the land. The ones that have reached the an age when they should really know better.

I refer, of course, to a man’s tolerance to the demon hangover and the unreasonable period of time now necessary to put aside when accommodating recovery from a day and night on the sauce.

Gone are the days when Jeffman could drink the greater part of Mitchell and Butler’s stock of a Friday, then get up footloose and fancy-free of a Saturday lunchtime and be back in the pub for three, to stagger home around five Sunday morning, safe in the knowledge of a job well done.

Then be fit and fruity for work come Monday.

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We here at Not What it Used to Be are fortunate enough to be graced by the presence of the incorrigible Lord Thackery Fotheringay-Fanshawe, who has so generously agreed to give up a portion of his valuable time to speak at us all on a subject he nurtures close to his own good heart.

By Jove! Whatever happened to the working classes?

There was a time when a chap of certain breeding could lay back in his favourite chaise lounge, take in the summer air, and dwell on a fine summer’s afternoon in the safe knowledge that his income was being maintained by the lower orders doing what it was they were born to do.

A Lord, like one’s self, was kept in the manner with which he was accustomed by the legions of drones that were ready and willing to forfeit their free time in the pursuit of contributing to the upkeep of what is the divine right of all members of the higher orders, one’s self in particular.

But by the gads! They suddenly stopped working.

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In the absence of any video or live footage for the sublime ‘Cherry Blossom Clinic Revisited’ this week’s The Move moment is the perennial psych-pop classic ‘Flowers in the Rain’ from their 1968 self-titled debut album. Belter.

Incidentally, The Move come from Jeffman’s hometown of Birmingham, and if you take a swift peek at their original singer, Carl Wayne, sat their on his little stool, you’ll see he has the look about him of a bloke that’s just come off the track at Longbridge.

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In these heady days of lenient sentencing and punishments unfitting of the crime, isn’t it reassuring to know that there’s one judge out there keeping his feet firmly on the ground?

In doing so he flies in the face of popular criticism levelled at the modern judiciary by issuing sensible sentences that cock a proverbial snook at the barking mad stereotype Judges presently enjoy.

I refer, of course, to the eminent Judge Lord Matthews, who this week dealt with a mad Glaswegian who’d strangled his wife to death after she refused to give him any beer money, by banning him from going to the pub.

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If, like me, you experience on a daily basis the displeasure that is public transport then you’ll already know where Jeffman’s coming from.

There are those less charitable than my good self that might say the problem with public transport is that they let the public use it…

Well. There was a time, in some long-forgotten and rose-tinted past, when buses were exciting. Yes, you read that right, exciting.

Now before you dismiss this as the half-cut ramblings of some toothless, retarded deviant with an unhealthy bus fetish, who bolstered by a Methuselah of rum has decided it’s time to make his very own public confession of a sordid  past of bus-based self abuse, allow me a moment to explain.

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I think Jeffman lied when he said he’d be back on Monday, but then Jeffman, like a politician, has a long history of – how shall we say? – frugality with the truth. Just ask his good mother!

So what has spurred Jeffman into this unscheduled appearance?

Nothing really. Just a desire to get some random idiocy out of his system, and the fact that I can barely believe that giving Maggie Thatcher a state funeral has become an issue.

It has provoked our deputy leader, Harriet Harman, into releasing a statement upon this fine Saturday, saying that there has been no discussions whatsoever over granting the ex-Prime Minister that holiest of holes, the state funeral; should the hag do us all a favour and pop her evil, corruption-ridden clogs, anytime soon.

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Jeffman must apologise for the laxness in the land of not what it used to be this week. We will be back on Monday with Public Transport.

In the mean time take a gander at the Faces. A Nod Is As Good As A Wink…

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There was a time when you knew where you stood with the common or garden village idiot. He (for they were invariably always male) would sit on his wall at the edge of the village watching the world go by in blissful ignorance, only stopping every once in a while to fall off.

But nowadays, it would seem, the tranquil pace of village life and the occasional loaf of gratis stale bread are not enough. For the villages are missing their idiots en masse.

So what evil has lured the idiot away from the safety of his wall and thatched-roof cottage upon the village perimeter? Well it would seem that like moths to a living room lamp on an unbearably hot day, the village idiot is being drawn to the deceitfully bright lights of television.

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Once again the musical interlude is brought to you by those doyens of decadence, the Rolling Stones.

Jeffman apologises for the quality of the video but it’s a rare treat and needs to be seen by as many people as possible, if only for the fact that you may never see a more stoned bunch of individuals, nor a creepier promo vid, in your entire life.

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In what seems like a lifetime ago I promised mobile phones and technology for the second part of this article on how the art of conversation is not what it used to be… So, with no further ado it’s mobile phones and technology I deliver.

Once again fear stalks these halls; what seems sadly endemic in this modern society. But more of that later.

At the risk of sounding like quite the little Luddite, I accuse the proliferation of modern technology and unnecessary gadgetry for the breakdown in conversation, even more so than the lack of common ground between young and old. And how ironic that the most dangerous assassin out there could well be the very thing you’re reading this on. The internet.

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The Move, indeed. Those psychedelic mods from Jeffman’s hometown of Birmingham. One of the most popular bands of the 60s not to find success in America.

Indeed, it was said of The Move, and I quote: “Without doubt, it was The Beatles, the Stones and The Move in that order in England.”, all-be-it by their own manager.

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Jefferson Airplane make a welcome return to these shores this weekend with the first track off their 1968 Crown Of Creation album.

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And so this prolonged car crash that is Gordon Brown and his treacherous band of thieves ploughs relentlessly onward as he makes not just one, but two policy U-turns in the space of a few days.

First off - in what’s up there with the quickest of embarrassing public U-turns to have been perpetuated by useless governments - there’s the decision to scrap one of the key elements of the plans to tackle what seems to have become a small-scale epidemic of knife crime.

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