70’s TV shows, detectives in Chevrolets bashing around corners chasing crooks. Starsky and Hutch, the red and white charger, wheels spinning up to a steel blue haze. The smell of burning rubber on the streets, choking, hanging round like washing on a still day. The Sweeny theme, lying on the couch pretending I was asleep and watching it through slitted eyes. The couch with blue metallic threads and baubles, so seventies, the carpet with psychedelic lines of orange and brown and yellow- who invented that? Carpet, the smell of the trapped dirt when you get down real close to it when you’re searching for a dropped pin or something tiny and small, like a part from an m88 panzer tank you’re building, it’s been carefully sliced from the tree of parts but a little to much pressure and it’s see-sawed over the edge. Frustrating as trying to free a piece of chicken stuck in your teeth, you know that tiny tiny part is wedged in there between a shag somewhere – maybe it’s a periscope for the front or something. Hands furough over the pile and a prick on the palm signals position – FOUND- that one is not for the filtering jaws of the vacuum cleaner this week.  A squeeze on the trippy cement and it’s in place , just the painting required  now, tiny tins of Humbrol paint that smell of fresh enamel, a number seven brush looking like it’s been on a hunger strike, a bare flick of hair adorning its end- a dip into the turpentine to loosen it.  The boys from Status Quo look down at me from their black and silver prison , trapped behind the one dimensionality of the poster, checking every move, my every brush stroke, my every strum on that stupid little Spanish guitar as I search to make the notes comes out the way I hear theme in my head – just like today- 35 years later, some how my fingers mostly go to the right places, the voice comes out of a place unknown to produce a tone, and Status Quo look down at me in their tight jeans and bare chested  wastecoats. The drummer’s sideburns seem to droop all the way to China.