grumpyf1

I wish I could go back there again...  ELO lyrics aside, One thing that has become increasingly clear as I've got older is that, broadly speaking, a lot of the music since the 80s sucks. Big time. Prior to the 80s it was pretty good, but the peak was definitely during that golden decade. Annoyingly, that neat "best decade" argument isn't quite right for me. By the late 80s, with more hip-hop, rap, rave culture and shoegazing tunes coming in, the later 80s become patchier. A steady downhill slump was in progress, that continues to this day. There's still good stuff out there - just less of it. Here's where it gets interesting, and I'd like to test a theory out with you. I was a teenager between 1980 and 1986, and that's pretty much the exact years my favourite music comes from. Ponder that for a second, and have a think about your own musical Golden Years - does that work for you too? If pushed to make a call - and it is a tricky one - I'd go with 1...

Blink and you would have missed it. It was so brief, you probably didn’t even notice. But yes, I’ve had a bit of a break. Back when I started this blog (8 th of December 2009, detail freaks!) I had no idea where I was heading with it. I liked writing. I was running a Fantasy Formula 1 competition for friends. I’d moved away from the area I grew up in just a few years before. So there it suddenly was – the gumpyf1 blog. Over time it developed into more than an outlet for F1-related ramblings, and (after coming 2 nd in a newspaper blogging competition) I wound up writing a weekly column in a Cumbrian newspaper. Over the course of seven years it increased in size from 500 words to a full page, contracted to 400 words and eventually became a 250-300 ‘podium’ thing, with the paper dictating the often-controversial topic. From writing about just about anything I liked, in April 2019 I was suddenly being asked to provide a view on topics like “Would you welcome Donald Trump to the UK?...