October 1998

From posh suburbs to the grimmest of inner cities, they have sprung up in the last fifteen years, and continue to proliferate. Charity shops are places where you occasionally find something really great, commonly something you can probably decide you like, but most of the stuff is total crap that a binman would be embarrassed to be carrying.

Yet charity shops are run as businesses, they have to pay rent and rates and all the other bills, just like anywhere else. So how do they survive selling such cack? How could they serve such a wide range of communities? What did people do with all their old tat before there were charity shops? The answer is; they didn't. There was no such tat. Charity shops are not shops. They are covert leakages of new matter into the universe, geysers spewing out freshly-minted existence.

As the universe expands, more matter is called into existence to fill it. In order not to upset the balances and systems of existing substance, new matter must come into existence in ways that are harmonious with their new surroundings. In contemporary western culture we have a dismissive attitude towards things that are old or unfashionable, and we accept their existence without paying any close attention. So what better disguise for new matter? All they have to do is crease the book or record cover, put a publishing date in the 70s, and nobody looks twice.

As Terry Pratchett observed in his book Eric, 'raw matter is continually flowing into the universe in fairly developed forms. It chooses its shape to allay suspicion, and common manifestations are paper clips, the pins out of shirt packaging, the little keys for central heating radiators, marbles, bits of crayon'.

As the rate of the expansion of the universe has increased, so the amount of matter being called into existence has similarly increased. A few pins under carpets is no longer enough. We need bigger objects, and more of them. Hence free carrier bags at supermarkets and, especially, the new abundance of charity shops.

A close inspection proves these items implausible. For example, how come I've seen seventeen different Kylie singles in charity shops? I mean, name as many as you can. Go on. How many is it? Five? Six, maybe eight at most? Where do seventeen come from then? And after I bought a copy of the (alleged) 1971 easy listening album Beatles, Bach and Bacharach Go Bossa Nova from Shelter in Leeds, how come there was another copy there less than a week later? A friend of mine had an identical spooky experience with a Bernie Winters album.

Take the album Both Sides Of Bruce that I recently found in Barnado's in Bradford. It appears to be a double album by Bruce Forsyth from 1977, released by the major label Warner Brothers. Now hang on here, let's think about this one a minute. If we are to believe this is really what it appears to be, just an old record by a smug sad twat, then we are believing that somebody walked in to a record shop and bought it in 1977. We are alleging that someone considered sane enough to be trusted with enough money to buy an album went in to the shop and chose that album over all the others in the shop.

This was 1977. Such a person said, 'no, I don't want Never Mind The Bollocks Here's The Sex Pistols, I don't want Heroes or Low by David Bowie, I don't want Marquee Moon by Television, I don't want Patti Smith's Horses, Talking Heads 77, Exodus by Bob Marley, In The City by The Jam, Germ Free Adolescence by X Ray Spex, the 26 track budget-priced Ronco Records album of soul and disco classics Black Explosion, or K-Tel's similarly magnificent Soul Motion. I DON'T WANT LUST FOR LIFE BY IGGY POP!! No, I want Both Sides Of Bruce, I believe that is the superior album, that is the one that will enrich my life to a degree that these others could not match.' Do we really think that we share the planet with such people?

The only other possible answer is that someone went into a record shop and said, 'well, I already have Never Mind The Bollocks Here's The Sex Pistols, Heroes and Low by David Bowie, etc, I ALREADY HAVE LUST FOR LIFE BY IGGY POP! They just don't speak to me. However, I think that my soul will be shaken and stirred by a record that features Brucie doing My Way live at the London Palladium.' Not likely, is it? And what would a big money-making serious record company like Warners be doing letting Brucie make an album, let alone a double album with gatefold sleeve? Who would they think would buy it? They only sensible answer is that they did no such thing. The record is not from 1977, it's brand new matter that has just sprung into existence in accordance with the as yet undiscovered laws of physics of an expanding universe.