Picture by Nikki A. Rae at Record Store Day 2016

On most Saturdays of my youth I would take the bus into Romford Town Centre. I’d look around WH Smith and check out the stationery, books and board games; perhaps inspect the latest fashion at Mr Byrites; pause for a while by the concrete cubist fountain at the centre of the precinct; take in the bustle of the fruit and veg market. And I’d always pop into Downtown Records.

Downtown provided the only suggestion of counter-culture in Romford’s bland and boring consumerist world. It was a timeless melting pot of punk and soul, rock and prog. It was a magnet for outsiders. It was here that I learned to stand at the racks flicking through the plastic-wrapped sleeves in quick tempo. It was here that I mastered how to decode a record’s content by means of art direction, typography, session players and song titles. It was here that I plotted my own particular path through popular music.

Of course, I never felt entirely comfortable. I was too much of an awkward geek for that. And however essential the album I handed over to the biker-jacketed assistant - ‘Hot Buttered Soul’, ‘After the Goldrush,’ ‘Crocodiles’ - he always remained aloof, impassive, indifferent.

But still I felt at the centre of the world.

A common concern in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s was warped or scratched LPs. It was like corked wine, and became even more of an issue when they started importing cheaper, thinner vinyl from Portugal. I particularly recall my disappointment when my new copy of the Shalamar ‘Friends’ album fell foul of this problem: the needle could barely stay in the grooves as it rode the topsy-turvy disc. ‘Gonna make this a night to remem…ber!’

The following Saturday I returned to the store with the offending LP still in its red and white Downtown plastic bag – just to reinforce the fact that I’d purchased it from them. (The bag had a graphic of a woman with permed hair, which even then seemed anachronistic.) I marched uneasily to the desk at the back, without pausing to check out the latest releases - heart pumping, nerves jangling. I handed over the disc to the hirsute assistant.

‘I bought this record from you last week and I’m afraid it’s warped.’

He was singularly unimpressed and stared me straight in the eye.

‘Really?’

He nonchalantly slipped the vinyl out of its sleeve to see if I was telling the truth. I felt small minded, rude, petty and ungrateful; a time waster, an irritating annoyance, an ersatz music fan. I realised the crushing truth: it’s so uncool to complain.

Of course, I left with a new record. But it took me the whole of the bus-ride home to get over the experience, and I waited a couple of weeks before I returned to Downtown.

I have never been comfortable complaining. Complaining is awkward and confrontational. It conflicts with my natural instinct to make the most of things, to look on the bright side, to be optimistic.

And yet I’m well aware that complaining is an important cog in the wheels of capitalism. It holds businesses to account, it encourages improvement, it serves the interests of other customers. Sometimes complaining is just the right thing to do.

I recently came across this quote from John Lanchester, writing in The New Yorker.

'Visitors to Britain are rarely able to grasp – sometimes after decades of residency – the vital distinction its inhabitants make between complaining and moaning. The two activities seem similar, but there is a profound philosophical and practical difference. To complain about something is to express dissatisfaction to someone whom you hold responsible for an unsatisfactory state of affairs; to moan is to express the same thing to someone other than the person responsible. The British are powerfully embarrassed by complaining, and experience an almost physical recoil from people who do it in public. They do love to moan though.'

It’s true. Despite my deeply felt aversion to complaining, I am partial to a bit of moaning: about people that eat on the tube or rustle in the theatre; about entitled posh folk who push into queues and say ‘guys’; about autotune and cursing; about the music in the restaurant being too loud and the voices on the telly being too quiet; about minted peas and over-strong artisanal ales; about masculine hugs and imprecise stapling practice.

I know I’m not alone in this.

The thing about moaning is that it comes without conflict or embarrassment. No one challenges you or answers you back. And it can be curiously cathartic.

Nonetheless I have come to appreciate that my moaning gets me nowhere. It’s pointless, self-defeating, time consuming and ultimately pretty boring. To tell the truth, my moaning gets me down.

I have resolved to moan a little less and complain a little more. Henceforth my negativity will be channelled towards positive ends.

And yet I read that a number of retailers have recently removed the option to complain by email from their website, or have stopped responding to email complaints altogether (7 March, The Times). And customers who want to register an issue are increasingly encouraged to have a conversation with an automated chatbot.

Perhaps I’ll only properly appreciate the right to complain when they’ve finally taken it away from me. Ain’t that always the way.

'Raindrops keep falling on my head.
But that doesn't mean my eyes will soon be turning red.
Crying's not for me.
'Cause I'm never gonna stop the rain by complaining.
Because I'm free.
Nothing's worrying me.’

BJ Thomas (B Bacharach / H David)

No. 279

Some time in the late ‘70s my parents decided to invest in a freezer. As they were catering for five kids, they selected a large chest-style model. It was so big that it wouldn’t fit in the kitchen, and our new arrival was installed with some ceremony in the wooden shed in the back garden. There it co-habited with an unruly assortment of paint pots, old curtains and rusty lawnmowers.

Mum bought a book dedicated to cooking for the freezer and embarked on an industrial programme manufacturing spaghetti bolognaise and shepherd’s pie for long-term Tupperware storage. (The shadow of nuclear war still hung over us back then and we needed to prepare for every eventuality.) Dad drove down to Bejam in Romford Town Centre and collected a frozen half-pig, thereby securing a near endless supply of pork chops for family suppers.

One evening the Carrolls sat watching telly, having just polished off that week’s third plate of pork chops, oven chips and garden peas. Contented, Dad placed his tray to one side and announced:

‘With our new freezer we may not eat cheaper, but we do eat better.’

The freezer in the garden shed provided many years of solid service. Indeed it was still performing admirably when I left home for Turnpike Lane in the late ‘80s. I confess I rather liked the fact that the family freezer lived in the shed, and I would have been upset if, in some unlikely fit of rationality and conformity, my parents had upgraded it or transferred it to the house.

In the early hours of one cold, snowy winter’s morning my good friend Thommo, also my flatmate at that time, was struggling to get home. He’d had a few beers in town and fallen asleep on the wrong train heading in the wrong direction. He spotted a train destined for Romford and thought at least it was a place he’d visited before. He jumped on board and, having reached the station, trudged through the thick snow to my parents’ home on Heath Park Road.

When Thommo arrived he saw no lights on, no sign of life, and being a considerate soul, he was uncomfortable waking the whole household. And so he made his way to the back garden, let himself into the shed and organised some makeshift bedding on top of the chest freezer.

Early the next day Mum spotted the evidence of an intruder. There were tracks in the snow and the shed was open. She got Dad out of bed, somewhat grumpy, and pushed him out of the back door to deal with the situation.

‘Oi, you, get out of there!’ Dad cried in a booming voice with a gruff note of intimidation.

A timid Thommo, hung-over and frozen to the bone, poked his head out of the shed door and explained the situation. He was welcomed into the warmth, fed and packed off to work.

This modest incident became a staple of Carroll family folklore. My Mum, a devout Catholic, subsequently made a small wooden sign and hung it above the freezer in the garden shed:

‘Here, on one cold winter’s night, slept Thommo. It might have been Christ.’

We spend a good deal of time nowadays ironing out the rough edges in our lives, smoothing over the contours. We are increasingly obsessed with tidying things up, organising them away, decluttering and streamlining. We want frictionless experiences, seamless journeys, logical order, rational consistency.

But friction creates experiences, and journeys begin at the seams. Life happens in the folds and creases, in the spaces between. Life happens around the freezer in the garden shed.

I have over the years grown comfortable with difference and discrepancy. I no longer demand that everything should conform and make sense. And I feel no compunction to tidy my world into neat compartments that spark joy. I think I may be happier that way. As my Dad might have said:

‘You don’t live cheaper, but you do live better.’

No. 220

Complaining v Moaning: An Uncomfortable Experience at Downtown Records

The Freezer in the Garden Shed: An Untidy Life Can Spark Joy Too