Andrew Gilhooley's Blog
What's that fool Gilhooley talking about now?
Category: Culture
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In last week’s post, I recalled one of the rituals of Sunday morning being a trip to the newsagent to pick up a copy of The Sunday Post newspaper. For the uninitiated, this is a Scottish newspaper, founded in 1914 and which, in the late 1960s, was estimated to have a readership of close to…
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Sitting down to write this post, I am sharply reminded that as a British ex-pat living in the United States, I will forever have a foot in each country, so to speak, as far as my memories go. I remember when I moved here around a quarter-century ago being impressed by the convenience afforded to…
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Estimates as to the number of Elvis Presley impersonators active in the world vary wildly, from around ten thousand all the way up to half a million. On Tyneside during the 1980s and 1990s, we had a unique Elvis tribute act of our very own in the shape of Joe Allen, aka Jarrow Elvis. Joe…
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After writing last week’s post about nostalgia, I started thinking about the fact that the things people get nostalgic for are often cultural: Television shows (the 1960s adaptation of Robinson Crusoe, Bagpuss, and The White Horses often come up in discussions by British people around my age), board games (Mouse Trap, Operation and Bloik!!), sweets…
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I’m not quite sure exactly what I am trying to say in this post. It was inspired in part by an article I read in the Monterey County Weekly (apologies in advance, it has intrusive pop-up ads, unlike the print version) about the decline of local newspapers. You see, I used to work for one…
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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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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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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…