It is in fact November the 5th, which means tonight is Bonfire night. An evening where everybody in England gathers together around a roaring fire beneath a fog-cloaked sky and celebrates the arrest, torture, hanging, drawing, quartering, and eventual burning of Catholics everywhere; via the medium of the humble baked potato.

However, recent Government edicts have made it a criminal offence to not only discriminate against, but also look at somebody else on the grounds of religion.

We here at Not What it Used to Be are taking no chances.

Tickled your fancy? Read on…

Hard to believe, I know, but this nonsense doesn’t write itself. There’s a crack team of writers, blacklisted from every other writing gig in town following an ill-advised attempt at writing the definitive Gary Glitter biography, who labour day and night to assemble the dandy delight that sits before you now.

But obviously, such frivolity and complete lack of respect for grammatical law has to start somewhere. And indeed it does. With the humble Pukka Pad. The thinking man’s writer’s weapon of choice. Hot dingle!

But horror of horrors, it would seem that not even as innocuous a slice of stationary as this is immune from the ravages of greedy businesses hiking their prices and laying the blame firmly at the door of the credit crunch/ economic crisis/ the price of oil/ impending recession/ the end of the world. Please delete as appropriate.

Tickled your fancy? Read on…

It seems that if you want success on this internet thing – and accepting that success is the one true way I’ll get my campaign to eliminate change and bring down the internet to the widest audience – then your blog has to have at least one list of some sort or another.

Well seeing as this is Not What it Used to Be it would be apt for me to come up with a list regarding something you don’t see a lot of anymore. I chose that rarest of beast (in this day and age), the humble farmer.

There was a time when you couldn’t spit in the street without hitting at least one passing farmer. Nowadays you can walk for miles and not set eyes on a single specimen of the carrot-crunching country folk.

So what might be the reason for this? Did a particularly harsh winter wipe out the entire crop of new farmers? Has a virulent strain of bluetongue confined them all to bed? Are they reacting to the credit crunch by staying at home and counting their money? One can only hypothesise on the real reason for the lack of farmer action in the news, on the television, and in the street.

So as way of a public service, mainly for those who may not know what this most timid of beasts is, I offer the 5 Ways to Spot a Farmer.

Tickled your fancy? Read on…

Another day and another bank I’ve never heard of collapses. More chinless wonders face up to the fact that it’s not just the working classes who can lose their livelihoods.

I’m expecting this to have a knock-on effect which will ultimately see me out of pocket, and leaves me wondering how all these high-paid merchant bankers (cockney rhyming slang) find it so easy to lose something that doesn’t exist in the first place. A few zeros on a computer screen shouldn’t be too hard to retrieve. Have any of them actually thought of looking in the recycle bin? I’ll wager a double-click on that little icon in the top left-hand corner of the screen will put a swift end to this economic crisis and we’ll all be back to normal.

But until those merchant bankers (cockney rhyming slang) pull their heads out of their arses and implement Jeffman’s patented financial rescue package, we have to make do with the continued talk of credit crunches, recession, housing market crashes, the cost of petrol, and the end of cheap food. But there’s another major casualty we all seem to have neglected in this time of economic uncertainty. One that doesn’t make the headlines or fill the column inches of the national newspapers. I refer, of course, to Jeffman’s drinking budget.

Tickled your fancy? Read on…

It’s a sign that Gary Glitter’s back in the country when it emerges that staff at Telford and Wrekin council in sunny Shropshire have been ordered to stop and question any adult that dares to set foot in Telford Town Park without at least one child to hold their hand.

Now, as you probably know, I’m the sort of chap that believes everything he reads in the newspapers and on the internet (if it’s in print, then it can’t be lies, can it?), so when I catch sight of a story in not only the Metro newspaper (free of charge to anybody brave enough to set foot on a West Midlands Travel bus), but also upon the esteemed BBC News website, well there can’t be any dispute in its validity.

So let us delve a little deeper into this story and extract a few tasty morsals upon which to chew.

Tickled your fancy? Read on…

Don’t be fooled. There’s officially bugger all on TV nowadays.

Beneath all the fluff, fanfare, gloss and tinsel, there’s nothing worth prising yourself away from the festering imprint your backside has left in the sofa to switch the television on for. But then, the devilry that is the remote control means you don’t even have to do that.

I fondly recall a time when you not only had to vacate your seat to turn the TV on, but to change the channel too. And we only had three of the swines to choose from. BBC1, BBC2, ITV. Try and imagine that in these enlightened times of couch spuddism.

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Recorded on a battered Sony TCM-200DV dictaphone on 27/08/08

Another depressing bus journey home. The same cast of faces that would stop a clock at fifty paces (my own included); the same air of demoralisation; the same legion of identikit kids worshipping the cult of chav.

And whilst all this goes on, the slope becomes slippier. If, like me, you believe everything you read and hear, then we’re plummeting into a recession that could spell the end for us all. So where is our rudder? Our chosen champion? The one to guide us through the coming turmoil and out the other side without so much as a hair out of place.

Whilst the nation burns, Gordon Brown fiddles. This time in Beijing, kindly informing the President of China that the 2012 Olympics will be an equally successful event. I’m afraid that if I could be bothered enough to care, I’d be failing to share his confidence. Not with this bunch of chancers in charge, anyway. The Millennium Dome and Wembley are obvious examples that spring to mind, but it would be far too easy to liken such fiascos to what might occur in the next four years. So I won’t.

Tickled your fancy? Read on…

Bugger!

Still no joy. Technology is winning the war on Jeffman at present, and he doesn’t like it one jot.

After several experiments with the archiving here, incorporating a plugin or two, there’s still no joy. The archives are redirecting back to the homepage. Nevertheless, we will fight the good fight, and venture into the territories known as PHP coding.

Tickled your fancy? Read on…

Tis the weekend again, and Jeffman’s in a holiday mood. Therefore there will posts-a-plenty this weekend (two, possibly three), so batten down one’s hatches.

In the interim, the mighty Jethro Tull make a welcome return to these shores.

Now who other than the Tull could get away with a song about the demise of the working horse in this once Great Britain? Well, there’s a few others, but it’s the Tull that continually made flirting with such nonsense an artform.

Tickled your fancy? Read on…

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.

Tickled your fancy? Read on…

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.

Tickled your fancy? Read on…

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.

Tickled your fancy? Read on…

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.

Tickled your fancy? Read on…

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.

Tickled your fancy? Read on…

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.

Tickled your fancy? Read on…

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.

Tickled your fancy? Read on…

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…

Tickled your fancy? Read on…

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.

Tickled your fancy? Read on…