TRULY SMASHED AND BLOCKED!

First wishes of the New Year come true: Wait for a day in bed and a week comes along to put you on your supine spine. I managed to work up quite a temperature towards the end of last week, without quite reaching grand-guignol self-pity and horrific spewing. Little victories must be cherished. It means my furthest wanderings have been around the heavensmouth stretch of Dalston between the Rio Cinema, which looms like a soft sainted needle, blue and beautiful, and the branch of Blockbuster video opposite, whose exterior has the design (to my mind) of the flat-rooved monoliths that line every enormo-street I saw in LA, a city that apparently has no centre, just roads leading places. The Dalston Blocky, car-park perennially flooded, might suffer in comparison with the twinkling cinema in it's environs: Unlike the dame-old Rio, giggling girlishly with age like a chanteuse who knows her good side, Blockbuster is eager but frayed; A monument to the recent past that no-one looks at; the boyband past their peak that people listen to vaguely, as their songs have a robust functionality, a use, but whom too few will miss or seek to ram into nostalgic polls in the future; Their eyes seemingly on the prize but hiding a small heart flailing for a recharge.

To my mind, Blockbuster Video haunts like recent histories, a sinking reality no-one has the measure of yet, not like penny-dreadfuls, The Falklands and cholera. Inside, infernal concussions rack the shelves: Norris, Hewitt and Gellar in the 3 for £18, Vin van Diesel in the 2 for tens, 'thinking man's action hero' not being a coveted epithet, one he quickly shirked with a series of filmic inanities, all sarky hubbub with fries. How does the colour scheme, that primary yellow and blue, seem so old? (and that meaningless tagline, now gone- 'Wow, What a Difference!') Here it covers everything like a faded gauze, except the floor which greys into black by the doorway. This week, sponsored by a bounty of unused nectar vouchers, which means free rentals, I traced every wall of that place; from the amped-up Galaxian clone on the X-box Ubermachine, buzzing and fizzing at the uniformed kids gathered around, to the embarrassed shards of some momentumless eternal sale, the choicest cuts of which the staff themselves ransacked months ago. Jurassic Park plays on the screens in there most days, a compromise between the bloodlust of the staff and concerns for the kids with their Mums, but seeming contemporous with the scene; wild and sharp as duckbills in 1993, tired and unwired now. Sometimes the sound of the televisions doesn't work. Usually it does, but the often picture hurdles awkwardly. The second screen at the back never works now, meaning that the booming sonic reports of Spielberg's T-Rex, arrive without audio-visual accompaniment, like the gunshot-like sounds heard in cities that children are told are backfiring cars.

Chain stores serve up certain piognancies. My first heartbreak was outside a McDonalds; every branch recalls this somehow, in lurid waking-dream imperfection (every one being slightly more unsatisfying than the last, every one equally horribly lit). I saw a girl from my class, aged eleven, whose countenance was worshipped by parents and teachers alike. She was held up as a hard-working example of virtuous achievement, but she'd slept with nearly every boy in the sixth-form by the time she was thirteen. 'I touched her erogenous here' one said as he crossed ther threshold of McDonalds Nuneaton, and that stuck in my skull ever since.

I moved to Watford in the year they built the Harlequin shopping Centre, 1994. It was my sixteenth birthday week. My first sight of the Harlequin was under cover of darkness, and it shone like a fort on top of the hill, full of lustrous promises of bored afternoons and tetchy, unsatisfied mini-romances with passing teenage girls. Outside, stood Blockbuster, housed, bizarrely, in a huge glass pyramid. When I saw it I believed it to be the mark of a crowning dream; it was a glamorous sentry, catching sunsets and pretending not to eye Hertfordshire shoppers as they slipped off the motorway. It quickly became apparent that it was a white elephant, an absurdity. The most stunning new architecture for miles couldn't catch a cold. The Pyramid curse. It's folly was in it's positioning. On a chaotic ring-road, with a tiny car-park that was impossible to swing into at the pace the cars would be travelling at, it soon became little more that a hollow beacon. Customers couldn't get to it. It didn't last too long as a Blockbuster, never threatening to make any money, but long enough for me to spend many Saturdays idling in it's aisles and in it's suspended mezzanine in the top of the pyramid, flicking through dated 18s and hoping to bump into Kym, who is now my wife. Being a sunny employee, she was duty-bound to say hello. Knowing that she was in my school, I'd listen to her smalltalk for signs that she might be acknowledging that she recognised me; I'd read her expression like tea-leaves, divining readouts and informations that may or may not have been sent by the user. I'd search the rows of cases for a line to feed her, look for a buzzy sentence in the plastic boxes to arrow her heart, usually finding all suggestions from the bridge to be inadequate (Blockbuster only put empty boxes on shelves) and skulk away after half an hour with a shy 'bye', to shadow-box my frustrations at the bus-stop outside. I never rented anything, wasn't even a member. This was common. For the internal dynamic there was unlike any other Blockbuster I've been to. Too few young mothers struggling with a group of eager children, too few quietly agitated Homo-Sappy-Ends in pairs looking for licking promises in the dust of an, inverted commas, comic romance; too few buffs, grim panhandling countenances slowly fading into a question over two titles they never really wanted. Mostly it was bus travellers sheltering from the rain, sad-sacs with nowhere better to go but home and teens who had sucked the Harlequin dry of fun-juice and mischief and were sombrely looking for further excitements nearby, further sockets to stick fingers into and simmer (I was, variously, all three). So the petulant and the desperate looked, stole and threw, but didn't rent. The building passed through many hands, becoming a linen emporium at one point, but no-one solved the parking problem, and the lack of success for any venture there meant the place's sullied reputation among locals grew further. The Pyramid curse.

Tom Cruise popped into the Bushey Heath branch of Blockbuster when he lived locally with Nicole Kidman. He wanted to know what he needed to join, they say. 'Two forms of ID' said the cashier, 'hilariously' according to the local press. (Didn't she know who he was?) 'Our policy is that even famous people must follow the rules' said a joyless Blockbuster statement at the time. Cruise didn't have the wit to pick up the box for Far and Away and the box for Days of Thunder. and say 'Will this do? I haven't got my passport with me.'

A vague time-travel is possible here. While around Dalston various temporalites abound, from a Carribean sixties cheer to a Victorian tracing and beyond, Blockbuster seems to render unto us the most complete time-capsule around. To me it is 1993. Unsensual, vague 1993, which houses as much pop deitrus as any other year, Death Becomes Her and another Look Whos Talking, Naff and C&C, Metallers versus ravers after school, Chakademus and pliance of oneself with dregs from the coveted booze-box in the dining room. Childs Play 3, in which a puppet replaced the dummy bullets with real ones at a military school and crushed a man in a bin lorry; a film with low horizons that weren't made for the weight of the attention after a toddler named Bulger was kidnapped and murdered by pre-pubescents. Sometimes they show trailers on the screens: forthcoming attractions, filmic events that always seem made up. One of the best birthday parties I went to was in a hired cinema. We watched a sequence of trailers for two hours. Even films that are etched into the psyche flicker in this situation: A trailer for the original Star Wars now seems so redundant as to render the film's events, which are over-familiar, somehow fresh and cryptic again.

My mother's newsagents kept videos, and I saw almost all of them. Almost every video release that came in there between 1988 and 1991. Monster Squad, K9, Drop Dead Fred. I'd spend the school holidays sitting on the shelves out the back of the shop drawing on cardboard the cover of the film I wanted to take home that night. My Robocop was a stunning graphite cowboy; My Schwarzenegger lean and interested. When I watched Robocop, I cried. My younger sister laughed at me. When I watched The Running Man, I was alone and ill. Mike came to see me after school with my homework and couldn't believe a twelve year old watched 18s.

Gaudy remembrance of these fleeting nothings. Love in less-than-important eras provides the inhabitants with humming electrical heat but a hollow discharge; A sorry attatchment to forgettables. The things that will be gone and forgotten in twenty years have a transluscent fuzz all of their own.