Wed 11th August 2010

There was a loud knocking at my door at 8.30am. That's strange. The postman doesn't come that early. "Hello, I'm Mr Edwards."

Oh shit. Unless I know another Mr Edwards, you're a bailiff.

I asked him in, midway through me making some sauteed potatoes for breakfast.

"The thing is," he said, "it's past that stage now. It's been passed over to me and they're coming to seize your goods this morning."

I tried to project a sense of calm which I didn't feel. St Augustine's Confessions and The Oxford Book of English Prose were on the table and I felt like saying "Look, it's OK, I'm civilised."

"But it's alright, I can pay it now," I said, anxiety in my voice rising as my sangfroid weakened. "With a card, or cash?" he asked; me dreading it would have to be cash, imagining the humiliating task of ringing Seriouscrush up to see if she could bail me out. "Card," I said. "OK, well I'll have to ring them up then."

At this stage the potatoes were getting a bit excitable in the frying pan so I invited him through. He took my card and started writing things down. It became more relaxed, and he told about the scallops his Northern Irish mother used to make for breakfast, anecdotes from the debt collection game, and about making last minute efforts to stop the removal men taking furniture away from a single mother of four who hadn't paid her TV license. "But I deal with everyone. I've had barristers, professional footballers, police officers."

By the end he was shaking my hand, saying, "In the nicest possible way, I hope never to see you again. Terrible weather isn't it?"

It occurred to me afterwards that had I left for university fifteen minutes earlier, I could have spent the day parping about with poststructuralist aesthetic theory, before coming back to find I had nothing to sit down on.

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

M / 61 / 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

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In which Mr Edwards fails to take my furniture away

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

Rummage in my drawers

The Comfort of Strangers

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

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