GROOVY OLD BLOG (GOB)

GOB

Groovy Old Blog, you might call it, and here’s where you can read about more recent sightings of Groovy Old Men and related matters:

Shorts, tattooed legs, down-the-gym chests, nice tans, lined Golden-Virgina faces, cap sleeved t-shirts, number one headcuts. These two geezers in my local tobacconists look prime examples of a kind of Groovy Old Men not in the book. My guess is they’re former mods – aged twenty in 1965, so early sixties now. It’s a good look. But spoilt by their braying over a red-top headline about teenage stabbing.

“In our fuckin day we knew how to fuckin fight,” one protests. “Now it’s all knives.” The other agrees, aggressively: “Yeah, in our day we knew what a punch up fuckin was.” They’re building a head of steam. “Bloody stabbing – they want to have a good fight, like we did!” The trouble is, they keep agreeing with each other, so there’s nowhere for it to go. And the agreement seems to be getting louder. I get out of the shop before a hoody comes in and the ex-mods vent their agreement on him.

But not before clocking a headline which says that some thin faced Stone has run off with an eighteen year old girl. Now I’m home from the shops I can’t even remember which, without a Google. Here we are. It is Ronnie Wood, hard-drinking bad-painting former Small Face has run off with Russian 18 year old cocktail waitress. You couldn't make it up. (Well maybe you could) It gets worse. The Faces are to reform, according to the NME. And poor old Ronnie failed to sell his self-portrait (with Rod also pictured) on Ebay. “In my day we knew how to flog a self portrait wiv Rod Stewart!" “Yeah we fuckin did…” "And we never had ebay”. "Nah we never!"