Gay Nazi Sex Vicar in Schoolgirl Knickers Vice Disco Lawnmower Shock!
« In the thick of itRotterdam »

Comrades

  Thu 12th November 2015

The students are out en masse, inoffensively group-absorbed, all long a's and lingerie tops; do we have to faces on some of them as a man conducts them with a waving hand into tequila shots. The Left Hand Miniskirt Hold Manoeuvre as girls go flimsily up the stairs.

To some extent it's been about the drink these last two weeks. There's been a bloggy congeries, from Exile asking a question of Furtheron and then a comment of mine prompting a post of his. There was also Will Self's fascinating essay on nicotine in the Guardian a couple of weeks ago. Nicotine, he said, is like heroin and crack: you're in a permanent state of withdrawal.

Our local paper unwittingly caught my mood too. It reported on a list of the fifty local authorities with the highest level of A&E admissions which were recorded as being connected with alcohol. We came forty-first out of about six hundred.


I am mid-email in the office where I do a bit of reception work each week. The clients have all had their talking-to, and it is just me, Maria José and the white noise of the photocopier.

"Can I say...", she hesitated, "something personal?" "Yes of course," I said, unworried. I find most people boring, and their hesitant preambles rarely lead to anything. "I notice you have not had a drink tonight." I am confused. We have access to a kitchen and I can get myself a drink at any time. "What... you mean..?" And then it dawned on me.

"Because I notice, you have not had a drink today."

"Oh alcohol, you mean?"

"Yes, alcohol. You have not had a drink of alcohol?"

"Er... yes I have," I said. "Oh well perhaps that is for you every day."

"I hope you don't mind," she continued, thwarted in her well-meant positive reinforcement. "No, no, not at all," I said. I couldn't think quickly enough of a follow-up that would make her feel unembarrassed, and she gathered together her kilos of files and bade me an over-smiled good evening.


A few days later, I am with what has become a regular coterie of sots. Nathaniel walks in. "Alright Nat? How are you?"

"Shit. I've been sacked. Well, suspended, but I'm going to be sacked."

He's a barman and has been helping himself to the top shelf. "'Do you want to see the CCTV?'" said [the landlord]. No, it's OK, I know what this is about. Can we get on with it?"

We tried to gee him up, but then he told us it's the fourth time he's been caught doing this. He said that he throws up most mornings. "I'm just afraid of what's going to happen." Behind his closed eyes he was looking upwards to avoid crying in front of us. "It's one of the best jobs I've ever had. I really like working there, and I've fucked it up." He gave up his resistance and went to the toilet.

While he was upstairs I said to the others "If you're like that, why don't you get a bottle of gin or something and keep it in your jacket and swig it when you're out of the CCTV?"


It was my brother's 50th on Saturday. Trina was supposed to be driving us and the girls over to County Durham. She arrived from her house in the morning looking frazzled, saying that the rain was sluicing the roads in her flatlands, and there was a fog of spray on the M6. She didn't feel up to driving over the Pennines.

We were only going over for the day, and it would only have been for a sober pub meal. Only my sister of my family drinks, and I feel uneasy drinking in the company of uncomprehending teetotallers. "They are not our comrades," as Sergei Korovin said; but I regretted missing it, and posted his present with a letter.

We went down the pub instead, then came back here and put some house music on. I curtailed the dancing after an hour or so, suggesting we could have sex instead. Which we did.

I feel like a fucking dog, a fucking, dog. Even after we had outwardly gone to sleep, I was mentally composing a filthy card to Frances -- "I know looby, but the best fucks are the mad ones" -- who lives five minutes away. Permutations of zips and skirts and dresses and kitchen tables and cock and mouth and perineum and the reverse cowgirl and her gorgeous widened W arse from that viewpoint. I turned Trina over and fucked her again. Not right is it?

I took my youngest to the dentist in Morecambe the other day. Slashing rain and what felt like a long walk from the railway station to the surgery, during which part of the patched sole fell off from my left shoe, so that I was blotting my foot with every step.

The first question he asked my sixteen-year-old was "Do you smoke?"

4 comments

I like the permanent state of withdrawal observation. You can apply that to a lot of things.

Only 41st? It’s like you’re not trying at all.

I know how Nat feels. I’ve been laid off and sacked, too. Those paragraphs took me back. It’s a bad, bad place. A falling sensation that never stops.

You might laugh at my chaste lifestyle but I consider it the lesser of the two madnesses. Look at how sex ravages you. People.

Fri 13th November 2015 @ 11:55
Comment from: smallbeds [Visitor]

Wow, I just can’t keep up at that pace any more: there’s something inside me that just switches off, closes shut. Like Richard Dreyfuss said about being on lithium, how it sort of puts a floor and a ceiling on your moods, it’s like I have a permanent ceiling on my drinking.

We had to register at a new dentist’s after we moved. My use of the European number “1″ on the forms confused him and he said “can I just confirm you only drink ten units a week on average, and not seventy?”

Sat 14th November 2015 @ 14:24
Comment from: looby [Visitor]

Yes Exile, it’s a folie. Sometimes an hour or so later, it does feel like a form of possession. But I love having that drive (or is it the drive having me?)

Smallbeds: I told my doctor how much I drink once and she immediately took a liver test. I think she was slightly disappointed when it came back all clear.

Sun 15th November 2015 @ 11:14
Comment from: smallbeds [Visitor]

Well, I just hope you’ve brought enough liver for everyone in the class.

Fri 27th November 2015 @ 14:53


Form is loading...

looby, n.; pl. loobies. A lout; an awkward, stupid, clownish person


M / 59 / Bristol, "the most beautiful, interesting and distinguished city in England" -- John Betjeman [1961, source eludes me].

"Looby is a left-wing intellectual who is obsessed with a) women's clothes and b) tits." -- Joy of Bex.

WLTM literate woman, 40-65. Must have nice tits, a PhD, and an mdma factory in the shed, although the first on its own will do in the short term.


There are plenty of bastards who drink moderately. Of course, I don't consider them to be people. They are not our comrades.
Sergei Korovin, quoted in Pavel Krusanov, The Blue Book of the Alcoholic

I am here to change my life. I am here to force myself to change my life.
Chinese man I met during Freshers Week at Lancaster University, 2008

The more democratised art becomes, the more we recognise in it our own mediocrity.
James Meek

Tell me, why is it that even when we are enjoying music, for instance, or a beautiful evening, or a conversation in agreeable company, it all seems no more than a hint of some infinite felicity existing apart somewhere, rather than actual happiness – such, I mean, as we ourselves can really possess?
Turgenev, Fathers and Sons

I hate the iPod; I hate the idea that music is such a personal thing that you can just stick some earplugs in your ears and have an experience with music. Music is a social phenomenon.
Jeremy Wagner

La vie poetique has its pleasures, and readings--ideally a long way from home--are one of them. I can pretend to be George Szirtes.
George Szirtes

Using words well is a social virtue. Use 'fortuitous' once more to mean 'fortunate' and you move an English word another step towards the dustbin. If your mistake took hold, no-one who valued clarity would be able to use the word again.
John Whale

One good thing about being a Marxist is that you don't have to pretend to like work.
Terry Eagleton, What Is A Novel?, Lancaster University, 1 Feb 2010

The working man is a fucking loser.
Mick, The Golden Lion, Lancaster, 21 Mar 2011

The Comfort of Strangers

23.1.16: Big clearout of the defunct and dormant and dull
16.1.19: Further pruning

If your comment box looks like this, I'm afraid I sometimes can't be bothered with all that palarver just to leave a comment.

63 mago
Another Angry Voice
the asshat lounge
Clutter From The Gutter
Crinklybee
Eryl Shields Ink
Exile on Pain Street
Fat Man On A Keyboard
gairnet provides: press of blll defunct, but retained for its quality
George Szirtes ditto
Infomaniac [NSFW]
The Joy of Bex
Laudator Temporis Acti
Leeds's Singing Organ-Grinder
The Most Difficult Thing Ever
Quillette
Strange Flowers
Trailer Park Refugee
Wonky Words

"Just sit still and listen" - woman to teenage girl at Elliott Carter weekend, London 2006

5:4
Bristol New Music
Desiring Progress Collection of links only
NewMusicBox
The Rambler
Resonance FM
Sequenza 21
Sound and Music
Talking Musicology defunct, but retained


  XML Feeds

Content Mangement System
 

©2024 by looby. Don't steal anything or you'll have a 9st arts graduate to deal with.

Contact | Help | Blog skin by Asevo | Multiblog engine