Andrew Gilhooley's Blog
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Author: Andrew Gilhooley
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Here’s part two of a series of 20 albums I picked for a Facebook challenge a few years ago. The challenge was to choose 20 albums that had made an impact on me. For each album I mention, I’m including a YouTube link to a track from that album so you can get a taste…
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I’m starting off 2026 with a re-post of a series of albums I picked for a Facebook challenge a few years ago. The challenge was to choose 20 albums that had made an impact on me. The original challenge was to post an album a day for 20 days; here I am going to present…
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One of the things we are always told about scams is that everyone is susceptible to them, it’s just a matter of finding the right match between scam and person. Earlier this month I received an official-looking notice in the mail. It looked like this: I think this letter represents an example of a scam…
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Happy by Derren Brown is another book that I bought when It came out but took a long time to get around to actually reading. I read about a third of it back in 2016 before getting distracted by something else and putting it back on the shelf. It was only recently, during a particularly…
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On 25th August, 1975, I watched Tom Baker, in character as The Doctor, sitting in a cinema presenting clips from Disney films in the August Bank Holiday edition of Disney Time. At the end of the show, a hand was seen passing him a note. He read the note and announced “It’s from the Brigadier.…
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When I was a youngster in the 1970s, I remember people of my mother’s generation and older being very keen on a local band called the Dragoni Brothers. They played widely around the North East at the time, mostly at clubs and smaller venues, though they did perform at both Newcastle City Hall and the…
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Have you ever had a memory of something that absolutely no one else seems to remember? Where you ask people about it and they look at you blankly, so much so that you wonder if you dreamed it? One such memory for me is of a brand of soft drink my friends and I used…
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Yesterday I read the news that founding Kiss guitarist Ace Frehley had died aged 74. Since then, I have been reading tributes from people in the world of rock music as well as discussing it with friends on Facebook and wanted to gather a few of my thoughts here. First, the music. I remember a…
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This is quite an unusual book review in that it is thirty years since I first read William Shaw’s account of the year he spent joining religious cults in and around London. What has prompted me to write about it after all this time was reflecting on my review of Lucy Brown’s Hate Club. In…
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If you were born after about 1982, St. Joseph’s Court will have always occupied the corner of Mill Lane and Victoria Road West in your memories. Here is a photograph of how that corner looks today: When I was growing up, the view was rather different, as that corner was the site of a covered…
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As a pupil in a Catholic junior school in the 1970s, one of the things I used to look forward to was the monthly arrival of Crusader magazine. This would be sold to us by our teacher for 8p a copy, and avidly read during morning break on the day it arrived. Crusader was a…
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As anyone who knows me can attest, I have a deep and abiding affection for Doctor Who, having watched it ever since I was a wee scrap of a lad sitting in front of the TV in the living room. (My first Doctor was Jon Pertwee, accompanied by his companion Jo Grant, played by Katy…
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A little while ago, I was in my local branch of Trader Joe’s supermarket and happened to mention to the young woman scanning my groceries that at one time the store used to share the building with a branch of Blockbuster Video. She said that she had heard about it, but could not remember it…
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In her memoir Hate Club, author Lucy Brown takes us back to 2016, and a Britain in turmoil. The Brexit referendum, racial tensions, fear of Islamist terrorism, concerns over immigration, and the increasing likelihood that Donald Trump would be successful in his bid for the White House all had Britons feeling uncertain about the future.…
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Here is the fourth and final part of my list of influential singles from a 2023 Facebook challenge. The idea of the challenge was to post each day for 20 days a single that had been influential in my life. I expanded this to include singles which, when I listen to them, vividly conjure up…
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Here is the third part of my list of influential singles from a 2023 Facebook challenge. The idea of the challenge was to post each day for 20 days a single that had been influential in my life. I expanded this to include singles which, when I listen to them, vividly conjure up a particular…
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Here is the second part of my list of influential singles from a 2023 Facebook challenge. The idea of the challenge was to post each day for 20 days a single that had been influential in my life. I expanded this to include singles which, when I listen to them, vividly conjure up a particular…
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Early in 2023 I took part in a Facebook challenge to post each day for 20 days a single that had been influential in my life. I expanded this to include singles which, when I listen to them, vividly conjure up a particular time in my life. In addition, I wanted to concentrate on singles…
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Last week I published my blog post with my memories of the School Street Flats in the early 1970s. I was quite astonished by the response I received in the Hebburn Facebook groups and on the Hebburn and our Neighbours web site. So many people came forward with information and their own, usually happy, reminiscences…
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When I was young, like many children of Hebburn’s Catholic families I attended St. Aloysius’ Infant School on Argyle Street. At the time, the school must not have had its own kitchen facilities, because I can remember the food for the school lunches being delivered in big metal containers out of a van. They didn’t…
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I picked this one up thanks to a New York Times recommendation, and it’s an assured debut for Irish author Aisling Rawle. It’s a tense psychological thriller set in a near-future world. The Compound is the most popular reality show on television. In it, ten young women and ten young men live in the titular desert compound, surrounded…
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I am well aware that writing a blog is something of an exercise in vanity, and that as well as being the author of this blog I am also probably its only reader. However, I write it mostly for the pleasure of getting my thoughts out on the page and to be able to read…
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One thing I imagine people who have grown up with BBC iPlayer, DVR or even VCR would find hard to understand about growing up in the 1970s is the notion that if you missed an episode of a TV series, you had missed it. End of story. The only way you would ever be able…
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I first published this on my squashy.net blog in 2018. A year or two ago, an old friend posted the following on his Facebook page: WANTED: Participants for a book-loving social experiment. Comment if you want to participate and I’ll send you details. What do you have to do? Buy your favorite book and send…
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I originally wrote this in 2020 for Norman Dunn’s excellent Hebburn and Our Neighbours discussion board. It was subsequently posted on the Hebburn.org website which sadly no longer exists. This version has been updated with a couple of pieces of new information. Another little shopping area close to me when I was growing up was…
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I originally wrote this in 2020 for Norman Dunn’s excellent Hebburn and Our Neighbours discussion board. It was subsequently posted on the Hebburn.org website which sadly no longer exists. I have been thinking a lot about the shops that used to be on the corner of Hartleyburn Avenue and Victoria Road West when I was…
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I just finished watching the latest series of Doctor Who on BBC iPlayer. That’s right, nearly two months after the last episode aired, the one with THAT reincarnation sequence. What did I think of it? It was… well… OK I suppose. To be honest, it has been hard to care about Doctor Who for quite…
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I first published this post on April 24, 2016 on squashy.net I have to confess to having something of an obsession with the song “The Lion Sleeps Tonight”. Whenever I hear it on the radio, I find it rather mesmerizing, and always think the same thing: “What would inspire someone to write a song like…
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