Buying the New Yorker 1996 - page 77 & 81

I'm sure I laughed my way through 1996. So we're cool on this one.

I also have a dog and a cat. I'm sure these dinky little compilations are quite jolly. I'll bet they made excellent Christmas stocking stuffers, which is why there are enough left-overs in January for the New Yorker marketing juggernaut to be advertising them now.

I have an idea - sell the old day-by-day calendars to the nostalgia market - I already admitted that I laughed my way through 1996. Why shouldn't I want to do it again? I'm doing this, after all.

+++++++Update++++++

The other day, someone pointed out that I seemed to be getting tired of the "Buying the New Yorker." I think I'm just a little tired of 1996 - when I was making my comment above I started looking around for what happened then so I could indulge in a bit of nostalgic list-making.

1996 was an astonishingly dull year.

One of the highlights of 1996 for me was a confluence of events that allows me to say this sentence in complete truthfulness:

After I cleared customs at Heathrow, the first thing I heard was the brand new Beatles single playing on a cleaning lady's transistor radio.

So one of the best moments of the year was one where I could momentarily infer that I was in a different year altogether. It still seems a strange and wonderful little detail. I love the little details.

A few years later, also coming into Heathrow, we got into a minicab just as the radio was announcing that the next song would be the brand new single from S Club 7. My wife looked at me and almost fell out of the cab laughing.