Gordon Smart on the weird stuff you've bought in Lockdown

20 June 2020, 10:00 | Updated: 20 June 2020, 10:01

Someone's been buying a lot of useless stuff online...
Someone's been buying a lot of useless stuff online... Picture: Getty Creative Images

Our man in solitary muses on buying useless items off the internet. Are they useless? Or just a symptom of how niche everyone's interests are these days?

Week 15 and the online shopping has reached an alarming new low.

This week, for £5.99, I bought a petrol siphon.

As soon as I clicked the button on Amazon I realised it was a depressingly tedious tidemark for a man who was interviewing Dave Grohl over a whisky this time last year.

In case you were wondering, I thought it might make life easier mixing two stroke with unleaded petrol for various bits of garden machinery, but I’ve got a reputation to uphold here. As Johnny Vaughan has warned me before, “Never let anybody know you like gardening. You are not Jo Whiley.”

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Radio X’s Martin O’Gorman, the inspiration for Johnny’s long running “Martin’s Hot Tap” feature on the 4-7 Thang, has fallen into a similar trap.

Check this out for niche… Mogs bought a Soulwax album played entirely on a rare 70s synth. It came with a book about the history of the synth itself. That might seem fairly normal, but in the same shopping spree he bought a huge box of meat from “Scotland’s Best Butcher”, which has apparently lasted the entire duration of lockdown.

Meat and synths, nothing unusual about that at all. I can’t wait to find out what the algorithms online are suggesting for his next purchase.

EMS Synthi 100 - DEEWEE Sessions Vol.01 (Soulwax)

And here’s the question, would you honestly have bought meat online before lockdown?

So let’s all look on the brightside in this Isolation Diary with a weekend of incredible weather ahead. Get online and buy something truly unnecessary and ridiculous as a reminder of this time. I might even spin this as a way to stimulate the economy.

If you can best a petrol siphon for obscurity, I'm all ears @gordonsmart on Twitter and Instagram. It takes me back to Rock and Dull on Smart On Sunday, on the big green X in 2012/13.

Ah the glory days of our now boss, Matt Deverson, sending the listener off to sleep with the correct technique you should use to clean a fish tank.

On that note, I thought I’d finish off this week's diary with a reminder of a brilliant paragraph from Charles Dickens’ novel, A Tale of Two Cities.

It was written in 1859, but it couldn’t be more true of the times we are living in…

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way.”

It is certainly the age of foolishness in my gaff.