The scene is St. Louis airport, gate 51. A herd of passengers is clustering near the exit to the plane for Los Angeles. Enter ILSA, SHE-WOLF OF THE DEPARTURE LOUNGE, an airline employee:
“We’re about to begin boarding, by seat rows, ladies and gentleman, so could you all please clear a space so that other passengers can get on”
She might as well have tried talking a beached whale into moving. The herd of passengers looked at her with a bemused expression and assumed she was talking to someone else.
“We’re not going to start boarding until you clear an aisle!”
Nothing. In a massive show of intransigence, no-one budged. Gandhi would have been proud at this display of passive resistance.
“Everyone take one step back!”
Zero. Perhaps she should have prefixed it with “Simon Says…”. The only people who moved were the people who weren’t blocking the desk anyway. Welcome to America, land of the free, home of the brave, and residence of the educationally sub-normal.

Los Angeles seems like half-a-dozen different places, without the coherence of London or Paris. Hollywood had all the feel of a seaside town – it just didn’t have a beach. Beverley Hills was EXPENSIVE. Malibu was reminiscent of Nice. And Downtown LA most closely resembled East Berlin, pre-unification. Guess which one of these we were staying in.

It can not be said loudly or often enough – perhaps it should be stamped in your passport at immigration. IF YOU’RE IN LA ON HOLIDAY, DO NOT STAY DOWNTOWN. From the comfort of Britain, it’s very easy to think that “downtown” is bound to be a cool and happening place. Wrong. Wrong. Wrong. It’s the business centre, so on Sundays, when we arrived, the only people who stay there are the residents. Unfortunately, there aren’t actually any of them, apart from the vagrants, and they’re not the sort of people you want to share any experiences with, being neither interesting nor cute. We have perfectly good derelicts in London and don’t need to fly 4,000 miles to see them… The best thing was a great diner, which is permanently open, to the extent that it doesn’t have locks on the doors. This 24 hour approach was a great boon to the jet-lagged, who find themselves in need of hotcakes, bacon and that great American invention, all-the-coffee-you-can-drink, at 4.30 am.

After a day of “Oh look – there’s a tramp”, we packed up and drove North in search of intelligent, or at least interesting/cute, life. We hired a car, a neat Toyota Paseo with a sun-roof, air-conditioning, and a stereo system with enough watts to dim the headlights when we turned it on. Unsurprisingly, it took some getting used to driving on the wrong side of the road and in an automatic, but the main problem was sitting on the left of the car. In Britain, you normally leave minimal room to your right, but in an American car, you’ve got a passenger seat to think about as well. I kept forgetting this, which led to Steve holding his breath as our Paseo slid gently into the next lane.

Once I’d got the hang of this, it was a piece of cake. Most of the main roads in LA are straight and long, ith two, three or more lanes, so you’ve got plenty of room for error. Steve navigated – good thing too as my usual London technique of pulling up every 200 yards to check the A to Z would not have worked here. Though the Californians would probably have coped: despite pulling some very odd manoeuveres, I barely heard a horn in two weeks. Presumably, Angelenos either don’t mind or they spray your car with automatic weapons, there’s no middle ground. Speaking of carnage, the weekend we arrived, there were 15 murders. This came in about half way through the local news just before the weather.

We found a hotel on Sunset Boulevard (despite my pleas to be allowed to stay in the ‘Winona Motel’). The recession had clearly hit the trade – x went into it and asked about their rates. “How much do you want to pay?” was the reply. Our celebrations at wangling a $15 per day reduction in the room became rather muted when we returned to the car and found we’d picked up a parking ticket, which wiped out $53 of the saving.

Americans have 10 times as many TV channels as we do, so naturally have 10 times as much crap. However, every 7-10 minutes there’s an ad break, which makes it possible to avoid seeing any actual programmes. As fascinating alternative viewing goes, the adverts take some beating, right down to the plugs for the Toxic Crusader toys, a set of “hideously deformed action figures” based on ‘The Toxic Avenger’, and advertised with the slogan “They’re gross, but they still get girls”. Alas, all my attempts to track down a Phoebe Legere bendy doll were in vain.

Another highlight was the 30-minute plug for a set of animated Bible stories, which would “help your children counteract the violence and immorality shown on network TV”, accompanied by glowing testimonies from brainwashed children (believe me, the Moonies have NOTHING on American fundamentalists). I kept hoping they might do the interesting bits of the Bible, like Revelations, but there was nothing doing.

No.1 on the list of places to go as far as I was concerned, had to be the Miracle Mile, thanks to the movie of the same name. We drove along, looking for the diner featured therein, and quickly found it, despite it not looking QUITE the same. The inside was very similar, and eating breakfast in there lead to a highly un-nerving sense of “deja vu”. Had a phone rung, I’d probably have wet myself. [I did bribe the waitress into letting me take a menu away – above] The nearby La Brea tar pits were also very interesting (“mammoths” definitely live up to their name!), though I felt slightly conned to discover that the familiar ones with models of struggling creatures are actually artificial, being old asphalt quarries.

Apart from these, California doesn’t have much history. While we Europeans were having crusades, wars and the Renaissance, their main inhabitants were chewing grass, pausing now and again to sweep majestically across the prairie (I’m talking about buffalo here, in case you hadn’t quite grasped the literary nettle). Now, America feels the need to import the stuff, which is why they love our Royal Family, probably more than we do. However, it all gets twisted 90 degrees, warps under pressure and mutates into something…DIFFERENT.

Take, for example, The Cat and Fiddle English Pub, on Sunset Boulevard. It’s as if it was designed by people who’d never SEEN a real British pub, but only read about them. All the trappings are there: the wall mirrors, the bar towels, the surly and aggressive service – though the last of these only lasted until we remembered the American custom of tipping the bar-staff – but it’s all overdone, artificial and unmistakably alien. The pub grub was edible, for one thing, though one does not expect to travel 4,000 miles and see “bangers and mash” (with “home-made imported sausages”) or “fish and chips” (did they realise our chips were not the same as theirs?). I still remain utterly at a loss as to what the bizarre item described as “bread and butter custard” actually was.

Disneyland is probably the closest America comes to history and even there, the castle is based on Mad King Ludwig’s Neuschwanstein in Bavaria and the other major feature is a 1/100 scale model of the Matterhorn. Like most things in the States, it’s accompanied by a ferocious hard sell: the aforementioned castle is jammed full of places like “Tinkerbell’s Toye Shoppe”. While the admission price of $30 dollars isn’t bad value, once inside, you’re assailed by endless incitements to purchase Disney goodies. Unfortunately, the only “Little Mermaid” T-shirts they had were designed for 7-year olds, so I didn’t bother.

The rides were impressive: the queues were massive (and mostly concealed, so you couldn’t see how long they were when you joined them!) but moved quickly; the longest wait was about 30 minutes. The best one was “Star Tours” (“sponsored by M&M’s”), not least because the wait was enlivened by animatronic chit-chat from R2D2, C3PO and Number 5 from “Short Circuit”. When you got to the front, you were ushered into what was basically a state-of-the-art flight simulator: a large video screen at the front had you flying into space, crashing through a comet and bombing the Death Star while the cabin, and your stomach, moved in sympathy. Utterly convincing.

Stage one of the holiday finished, we flew on to San Jose for Stage 2. The excuse for this holiday was Animecon ’91, the first seriously big convention devoted to Japanese animation. This isn’t the place to discuss the Animecon – instead see ‘Anime UK’ number 8, available from Helen McCarthy, see Three-Pin Plugs for details. And as for San Francisco, you’ll have to wait till next time.

Certain unpleasant facts of life do occasionally have to be faced. Grim realities must sometimes be confronted. That knock on the door is not likely to be Phoebe and Winona popping round with a six-pack. The chances are slim that United Artists are going to lob $75 million in your direction to allow you to direct “The Railway Children 2: The Beeching Years”. And the odds are, you won’t be able to get through life without having to work.

However, you can minimise the impact that work has on your lifestyle, and reduce it to being merely something you do between weekends. Here’s a few I’ve found useful – though some examples relate to my personal experience, with imagination most of these can be converted to suit any job.

• Many people, disgruntled with their life between 9 and 5, think they can escape by changing jobs. This only makes things worse; it’s usually not the JOB that’s the problem, it’s WORK itself. The longer you stay in one place, the less you need to do, and people will eventually assume you have a divine right to spend your life photocopying.
• If your boss takes lunch from 1 till 2, take your lunch from 12.15 to 1.15 – this will allow you to extend your break by half an hour or so without much problem. Early shifts and late shifts are also good, in that there are usually fewer people around to see you not doing anything.
• The secret of minimising work through illness is, perhaps surprisingly, to come into work when you’re feeling most wretched. Take the first couple of days AFTERWARDS off instead. There’s no point in staying at home when you’re sick; you won’t enjoy it, and anyway, the working day really speeds by if you’re tanked up on cough mixture. It also adds credibility when you do bunk off – people will think “It must be REALLY bad if he isn’t coming in”. One exception to this rule is if you have a hangover: it’s hard enough to manage simple things (like breathing), without having to pretend to work as well. You’ll only get a reputation as a hard drinker if you’re obviously suffering (and it’s not easy to conceal!) so stay at home, pull the blankets over your head and wait for things to get better. If you’re having your wisdom teeth removed, say, get it done on a Monday – that way you can recuperate in company time and stagger in a couple of days later looking like you’ve gone 15 rounds with Jackie Chan, and winning instant sympathy.
• Have a long-term, ongoing task that you can pick up whenever someone’s watching you. In a shop, you can stack shelves. In an office, file reports. In a computer department, clear some disk space or check for viruses. The more impressive and obvious it is, the better.
• The ideal situation is to work for a boss who doesn’t understand what you do. This allows you to pull the wool over his eyes, nose, mouth and down to his belly-button. There’s no point in doing a job fast – they’ll just find something else for you to do. So, when asked for an estimate of how long something will take, pause, look at the ceiling for a while, then give double the actual time and move it up to the next unit. If queried, say something like “Well, I COULD xways cut a few corners”, while giving a look that implies “…but I’m not taking any responsibility if I do”. My personal best is getting five days to change one line of one computer program and with schedules like that, it doesn’t take much effort to come in right on time.

• Dubious activities are best concealed in flocks. The chances are slim of anyone spotting the letter you’re writing if it’s on a desk top covered with bits of paper, and a nuke-the-alien-slimeballs game can easily be overlooked if you have more flashing screens than your average multiplex. Be careful with this, however, as it can cramp your style: it’s easy for one screen to mysteriously short-circuit on a Friday afternoon, (especially if you drench it in coffee, with added salt for extra viciousness), less plausible for a deskful to simultaneously explode.
• Your job should resemble your leisure pursuits where possible. Want to write letters? Offer to do reports, invoices, memos, etc. This also means that you’ll get to use all sorts of nice word-processers, laser printers and other devices to make your letters/CV/’zine look cool. Want to chat on the phone to friends? Do so right after a legitimate and well-publicized call, but use discretion – intimate discussion of your sex life is likely to provoke comment, unless you work for Electric Blue.
• Cover for your colleagues and they’ll cover for you. It is not good karma to answer a workmate’s phone at 4.30pm with “she’s out to lunch” even if it’s true. However, there may be traitors with a warped sense of values who actually WANT to work. Drop them in it every opportunity – it’s useful to have a scape-goat and they tend to possess bizarre notions like “fair play” which will prevent them from retaliating.
• Become indispensable. Knowledge is not only power, it’s also a comfy chair. Try and avoid teaching your arcane wisdom to anyone else or writing it down – should either case becomes unavoidable, leave out small but important points, which will sink anyone trying to replace you. If pulled up on these, affect an air of injured innocence and claim the missing info was “obvious”.
• Perhaps most importantly, ALWAYS HAVE AN ESCAPE ROUTE. The truth should be used where possible – it makes the lies, when they come, that much more plausible. Similarly, be prepared to take the rap for little things as you’ll improve your chances of being believed when you deny the big cock-ups. Everything should be explicable, escapeable or at least blamable on someone else. Panic doesn’t help, a phrase like “Well, guess that’s my lunch-hour almost over” does.

Most jobs require very little in the way of direct competence to survive -all you need to do is avoid being marked as INcompetent. Remember this, and you’ll have a good chance of, if not quite ENJOYING work, at least being able to survive it.

On the Conduct and Procedure of the Intimate and Personal Relationships of the Marriage State for the Greater Spiritual Sanctity of this Blessed Sacrament and the Glory of God
by Ruth Smythers, beloved wife of The Revered L.D. Smythers, Pastor of the Arcadian Methodist Church of the Easter Regional Conference
Published in the Year of our Lord 1894

To the sensitive young woman who has had the benefits of proper upbringing, the wedding day is, ironically, both the happiest and the most terrifying day of her life. On the positive side, there is the wedding itself, in which the bride is the central attraction in a beautiful and inspiring ceremony, symbolising her triumph in securing a male to provide for all her needs for the rest of her life. On the negative side, there is the wedding night, during which the bride must pay the piper, so to speak, by facing for the first time the terrible experience of sex.

At this point, dear reader, let me concede one shocking truth. Some young women actually anticipate the wedding night ordeal with curiosity and pleasure! Beware such an attitude! A selfish and sensual husband can easily take advantage of such a bride. One cardinal rule of marriage should never be forgotten: GIVE LITTLE, GIVE SELDOM AND ABOVE ALL, GIVE GRUDGINGLY. Otherwise what could have been a proper marriage could become an orgy of sexual lust.

On the other hand, the bride’s terror need not be extreme. While sex is at best revolting and at worse rather painful, it has to be endured, and has been by women since the beginning of time, and is compensated for by the monogamous home and by the children produced through it.

It is useless, in most cases, for the bride to prevail upon the groom to forego the sexual initiation. While the ideal husband would be one who would approach his bride only at her request and only for the porpose of begetting offspring, such nobility and unselfishness can not be expected from the average man.

Most men, if not denied, would demand sex almost every day. The wise bride will permit a maximum of two brief sexual experiences weekly during the first months of marriage. As time goes by, she should make every effort to reduce this frequency.

Feigned illness, sleepiness, and headaches are among the wife’s best friends in this matter. Arguments, nagging, scolding and bickering also prove very effective, if used in the late evening about an hour before the husband would normally commence his seduction.

Clever wives are ever on the alert for new and better methods of denying and discouraging the amorous overtures of the husband. A good wife should expect to have reduced sexual contacts to once a week by the end of the first year of marriage and to once a month by the end of the fifth year of marriage.

By their tenth anniversary, many wives have managed to complete their child-bearing and have achieved the ultimate goal of terminating all sexual contact with the husband. By this time, she can depend upon his love for the children and social pressures to hold the husband in the home.

Just as she should be ever alert to keep the quantity of sex as low as possible, the wise bride will pay equal attention to limiting the kind and degree of sexual contacts. Most men are by nature rather perverted, and if given half a chance would engage in quite a variety of the most revolting practices. These practices include among others performing the normal act in abnormal positions, mouthing the female body, and offerering their own vile bodies to be mouthed in turn.

Nudity, talking about sex, reading stories about sex, viewing photographs and drawing depicting or suggesting sex are other obnoxious habits the male is likely to acquire if permitted.

A wise bride will make it her goal never to allow her husband to see her unclothed body, and never allow him to display his unclothed body to her. Sex, when it cannot be prevented, should be practiced only in total darkness. Many women have found it useful to have thick cotton nightgowns for themselves and pajamas for their husbands. These should be donned in separate rooms. They need not be removed during the sex act. Thus, a minimum of flesh is exposed.

Once the bride has donned her gown and turned off all the lights, she should lie quietly upon the bed and await her groom. When he comes groping into the room she should make no sound to guide him in her direction, lest he take this as a sign of encouragement. She should let him grope in the dark. There is always the hope that he will stumble and incur some slight injury which she can use as an excuse to deny him sexual access.

When he finds her, the wife should lie as still as possible. Bodily motion on her part could be interpreted as sexual excitement by the optimistic husband.

If he attempts to kiss her on the lips, she should turn her head slightly so that the kiss falls harmlessly on her cheek instead. If he attempts to his her hand, she should make a fist. If he lifts her gown and attempts to kiss her anyplace else, she should quickly pull the gown back in place, spring from the bed and announce that nature calls her to the toilet. This will generally dampen her desire to kiss in the forbidden territory.

If the husband attempts to seduce her with lascivious talk, the wise wife will suddenly remember some trivial non-sexual question to ask him. Once he answers, she should keep the conversation going, no matter how frivolous it may seem at the time.

Eventually, the husband will learn that if he insists on having sexual contact, he must get on with it without amorous embellishments. The wise wife will allow him to pull the gown up no farther than the waist, and only permit him to open the front of his pajamas to make connection.

She will be absolutely silent, or babble about her housework, while he is huffing and puffing away. Above all, she will lie perfectly still and never under any circumstances grunt or groan while the act is in progress.

As soon as the husband has completed the act, the wise wife will start nagging him about various minor tasks she wishes him to perform on the morrow. Many men obtain a major portion of their sexual satisfaction from the peaceful exhaustion immediately after the act is over. Thus the wife must insure that there is no peace in this period for him to enjoy. Otherwise, he might be encouraged to soon try for more.

One heartening factor for which the wife can be grateful is the fact that the husband’s home, school, church and social environment have been working together all through his life to instill in him a deep sense of guilt in regard to his sexual feelings, so that he comes to the marriage couch apolgetically and filled with shame, already half cowed and subdued. The wise wife seizes upon this advantage and relentlessly pursues her goal first to limit, later to annihilate completely her husband’s desire for sexual expression.

Andrej Karczewski, London – Okay, I’m a cunt and I know it, a bottom-of-the-barrel, low-life scum not fit even to lick the soles of Miss Kinski’s leather high heel shoes.

If you’re writing to the editor, a little bit of self-abasement never does your chances any harm. Alternatively, you could perhaps try to confuse the hell out of me:

John Worley, Northampton – Dear Mr.McLennan, (I feel like a corpse – hence the stiff formality). As I’ve been dutifully feasting my eyes, gloating my soul upon your accursed publication for the past five issues, I thought it was high time – not intended as a drug reference, please note – I wrote and made a few incisive comments about said zine-thingy; but as I’m not feeling particularly inspirational today, I’m just gonna ask for a bloody T-shirt.

Ah yes, the T-shirts. Or even the bloody T-shirts, using the word as an entirely accurate adjective. Civilization has not collapsed following their release into an unsuspecting world:

Steve Rag, Eastleigh – My own T-shirt has been officially declared garden-worthy. I wore it while I was cutting the grass last weekend, and not one single bird, grasshopper, slug, etc, etc, complained. The fish in the pond actually looked quite impressed. As for wearing it out on the streets…I’m not that adventurous.

Wise man, judging from this cautionary tale:

Glyn Williams, Mickleover – Derby is clearly not ready even for the ‘polite’ TC T-shirts! Upon wearing it for the first time in the city centre I was approached by an elderly chap who said that his wife found “The picture on your attire most distressing”. I told him that it was another Benetton promotion. Feel free to use this recommendation on any future sales drive. Talking of your T-shirts (but this time the ‘impolite’ version) I actually saw the movie ‘Heathers’ last weekend for the first time. The line about the inappropriate use of the chainsaw seemed contrived (perhaps the lousy actress blessed with the line didn’t help) and the whole film was very disappointing. Just remind me again: what is the attraction of Winona Ryder?

Ouch. How does it go? “For those that understand, no explanation is necessary. For those that don’t, no explanation is possible”. Perhaps the best justification is the simple one: she’s not Julia Roberts. While still on the ‘lust’ front, but someone else’s for a change:

Helen McCarthy, London – “Nice review of ‘Hamlet’; I’ve been saying for ages that Ol’ Blue Eyes is underrated as an actor, but sceptics put that down to mere lust…I had a long phone conversation with a friend about how much I was looking forward to Mel Gibson’s Hamlet; he sounded a bit bemused, said “I wouldn’t have thought it was a natural role for him” and listened for ten minutes while I raved about the ice-blue, opal-blue eyes, the remarkable quality of stilawess, the physical presence, and so on – then he said “Oh, the Australian – I thought you meant Mel who’s on with Griff Rhys Jones!”…It sounds as though your reviewer of ‘Violence Jack’ missed the bit where the monster eats the corpse of it’s transvestite, hermaphrodite lover after Jack has finished preparing it for the sushi chef, and the bit where the gang of cute kids gets chopped – purely for being cute as far as I can tell. After 28 years in the manga/anime business, it’s nice to see that Go Nagai [the creator of ‘Violence Jack’] still enjoys doing what he’s best at”.

And here are a couple of other people enjoying their work for one reason or another, starting with some info on the sort of book I wished we’d studied at school, instead of ‘Cider with Rosie’.

Todd Grimson, Oregon, USA – “I saw the mention of Trash City in the Joe Bob Briggs newsletter and I’d like to see a few issues, especially any that deal with Nastassja Kinski. I’m a writer…The novel I’m working on now, entitled ‘Brand New Cherry Flavour’ uses Nastassja Kinski as a sort of patron goddess -the heroine strongly resembles her and works in Hollywood, where people remark upon it… It runs on movie logic; anything can happen that would work onscreen. Zombie-bikers who once went to UCLA. Magic everywhere, spells using urine or piercing your tongue. Psychic tattoos (you wake up in the morning and they’re just there). An evil dwarf. Several litres of blood. Body parts nailed to a wall. Untold scenes of nudity necessary to the plot”.

Steve Moss, Liverpool – “I’m working in a new shop selling all kinds of cruelty-free/environmentally sound/political campaigning/etc stuff…Short of roadying for The Ramones, it’s the ideal job – no bosses, no uniforms, flexible hours and a say in every decision that’s made…If any cute babes come into the shop while I’m on the till, I ask them in my most innocent-sounding voice if they’ve signed our petitions, and then as soon as they go out of the door, go over and make a note of their names and addresses…It can’t fail!”

Tsk, tsk – such an appalling lack of political correctness.

Jason Parker, Bromsgrove – “Remember when I told you about my foray into ‘dingy shop land’ to get my Japanese magazine? Well, I asked the shop woman if she had any comics :-
“Comics?”
“Er, manga!” replied I.
“Ah, you want Banga’s”, said she, as she then proceeded to lead me to a shelf and gave me a box of those “paper-snap-things-that-bang-when-thrown-to-the-floor”! After much patience, I bought a 120 page manga – £3 – and when I went to pay for it, asked her what the title was. After some scrutinising, she replied “Golf?” with a disconcerting lack of confidence…The content was remarkably similar to the Magic Cop/Encounters of a Strange Kind style of Taoist kung-fu magic. God only knows where “Golf” came into it…”

Finally, Andy Waller, enjoying life to the full at college – “By the way, if you print that at all, you’re dead.”

Probably the casual threat of the year so far. Hah! A brave writer like me doesn’t bow to threats like that. At least not when I am entirely aware of the lucrative possibilities offered by blackmail and will hopefully be able to wring a few pints out of Mr.Waller on the strength of his preceding comment. Unless someone wants to make me a better offer? Bids to the editorial address, please…

TC10 was available from Fantasy Inn, Top 10 and Psychotronic Videos in London, Trick or Treat (Alun Fairburn’s mail order weird stuff company), and Videodrom and Michael Dericks in Germany. It was not available from Forbidden Planet, as they took phenomenally long to stump up the money for TC9. I’ve since heard they went near-bust in October, which explains some of the delay, but otherwise, well…

WHY IT TOOK FORBIDDEN PLANET 141 DAYS TO PAY FOR TC9.

1. “Your invoice has been passed to the Accounts department”
2. “You’ve just missed this Friday’s cheque run”
3. “We do our cheque run on a Thursday and you’ve just missed it”
4. “I’m afraid the person dealing with it doesn’t work here any more”
5. “If you don’t hear from me, the money’ll be in the post”
   [I didn’t, it wasn’t]
6. “I’ll just find the invoice and call you back”
7. At 3:30 – “Call back at 4 o’clock”
8. At 4:00 – “He’s gone home for the day”

Narrow escape of the past quarter. Went to the King’s Head theatre to see an adaption of Hardy’s ‘Far from the Madding Crowd’. However, a cock-up in Time Out meant it should have been the previous Saturday, and I came within inches of having to sit through an evening of feminist comedy. Fortunately it was “wimmen only”, as I found out when I tried to buy a ticket. I’ve never been so grateful for reverse sexism, as it would probably have been as enjoyable as root canal work without anaesthetic.

Apologies to Dean Heathcote and Tony Lee for failing to credit them last issue for the ‘Violent Anime’ and ‘Aliens III’ pieces respectively. Thanks this issue got to Spencer Hickman, Dan Pydynkowski, Stefan Kwiatkowski, Anthony Cawood, Steven Cremin, Alun Fairburn, Lino (who’s got to buy a copy now!), Andy Waller, Peter J. Evans, Tom Edge, Tim & Karen, Rick Baker, Dean Heathcote, Brian Bower, Jason Parker, Steve Moss, Kevin Haney, Trevor Brown and Ken Miller who gets the TC Cool Dude award this issue, for co-organising the show at the Scala (one of the best days I’ve had in a long time), fixing me a chat with Jorg & Mannfred, lending me his cassette recorder and generally being a nifty guy.

This issue is brought to you under severe pressures of time, thanks to the approach of Christmas, leading to a maelstrom of holidays, Xmas parties and other, just as vital, activities. Any errors you may see are a) my fault and b) not surprising in the slightest.

Finally, subscribers should check the envelope (yep, the one you just threw away) – due to a hard-disk error, I lost the subs list and had to recreate it from a backup and two issues worth of letters! Any complaints, let me know…