A brief mention for two of favourite long-time bloggers here.
The first, OnionBagBlog, has long been a staple of my online reading and for years, incredibly, came out every night and I do mean EVERY NIGHT FOR YEARS. Then it disappeared for understandable reasons – I know the author and he explained why this was the case – but it has returned a couple of times in the last 2 or 3 years. The archive these days is a little trickier to access but, and I have said this to the author, I do feel the vast back catalogue deserves to be collected into an eBook at the very least.
If you’re a photography fan, then this guy is quality with a camera or an iPhone and his blog occasionally occupies the same universe as mine as we walk the same streets. I hope at some point, whether online or in book form, the archive is available again.
The man behind Onion Bag Blog is also formidable when it comes to OCDs. If there was a World Cup for OCDs, I’d advise you to put your money on the pair of us at least making the last four.
The second blog is Microgroove33. I don’t even know if Bill Hicks (not that Bill Hicks) is even still alive. He hasn’t posted for at least seven months but what I liked about this site is that it helped me to understand some of what happened to Clapham when I was a boy. My generation who grew up in the area ( I was equidistant from Clapham, Stockwell and Brixton so I consider all three, especially the first two as part of my origins) would remember the first wave of what we now understand as gentrifiers in the early 80s, but at the time we wouldn’t have had a clue what was going on as the squats and trustafarians started making way for the yuppies and houses got carved up into flats, and worse of all, Woolies on the high street made way for Superdrug in the summer of ’87, Superdrug moving from its original spot next to the Barclays. While Clapham and Brixton succumbed to gentrification as so much of south London did, every one I know who is as intimate with Stockwell as I am will tell you Stockwell is wonderfully dumpy, developers have still failed to gentrify it. They can build whatever wank they want, they can disappear the bank and the post office, and stick in a Costa and a Pret, and the area remains a dump. And I’m okay with that.
Both of these sites are well worth a read and wonderful companions to this site, just as I hope this site is to theirs.
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