The VHS tape is really dead this time. I had already written its obituary back in 2005 when the local branch of Blockbuster stopped stocking them in their second-hand bins.
Despite my reading the rites the tape clung on though, appearing in vast quantities in charity shops. Occasionally, beneath the tottering piles and boxes and boxes of series of Friends and Star Trek: Voyager, I would find a gem; a never before heard of, never to be seen on DVD, piece of low-class dross with chrome effect lettering on the cover. I found some terrifically dreadful films like that. Slowly over the years the tapes came down in price. Eventually they became so cheap that not buying them would have been rude. Ten tapes for £1 was the cheapest I paid, though there was one shop I knew of which gave the things away in the end. They had a big box of tapes from which you could just help yourself - if you could find anything worth watching - which I rarely did.
But, slowly though, shop by shop, over the last couple of years, the hand written...
We No Longer Accept Donations of Video's
...notices would inevitably appear on the shops' doors. (Complete with misplaced apostrophe.)
Last week the last bastion, the last redoubt, of VHS in Lochaber fell. The final misspelled notice went up on the door of the Disability Action shop in Caol. There are no longer any charity shops in this area that sell VHSs.
So, unless a miracle happens, the last Rutger Hauer SF film I have never heard of that I will buy on VHS is Split Second (1992), a particularly dreadful piece of cinematic poo which I will now be forced to treasure for all the wrong reasons.
---------------- .o0o. ---------------
The kids got their school reports today:
'Holly reads with great expression and has a good understanding of what she is reading. She needs to learn to read a bit slower when reading out allowed.'
There really is no point is there?
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