One of the best things about living in Brighton (apart from the sea, the pubs, the overpriced everything, the Londoners and so on) is FIP. A French radio station which for years we've been mysteriously able to pick up on normal radios on exactly 91 FM. It plays everything from Billie Holiday to Wu Tang, and being French, they very sensibly play all the tunes with the swearwords left in. So refreshing. No ads, and almost no talking (and what talking there is is in French. Parfait). About one tune in four is actually French, and a similar amount are jazz, especially when you really need it on a Sunday afternoon. It's the sound of Brighton, they even come over and DJ in pubs and people sit round drinking red wine congratulating themselves on their taste. More than they usually do, that is.
But now it's gone. 91 FM is a wasteland of static, and I fear that maybe one of the urban myths about it was true; that some kind soul was boosting the signal in his loft, and he's just been busted. We can still listen to it
online, but it's not the same as having it on a transistor radio in the park.
RIP FIP. Mod out to buy half of Maplins and put this injustice right.
From a time when small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri were real small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri, the cover art of Ron Turner. More unlikely spaceships and angry Venusians than you could possibly need of a day. Gratuitous breasts, 1950s chrome-finned optimism, giant hands crushing the Empire State Building, it's all there. Magnificent. And isn't Vargo Statten is a superb name for a scifi writer?
I went to Yorkshire for the first time on the weekend. It weren't bad. Not as good as Sussex, or indeed Lancashire, but not bad. Nice hills and stuff. But I was mostly taken by the massive cooling towers right by the motorway going through Sheffield (above), about as dramatic a view as I've ever seen. They'd never allow that down south...
