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Look at me
Did my second supervised session on reception at Really Late the other day. I like it and I hope my CRB result doesn't disbar me. There's a Confidentiality Agreement, even the boundaries of which I am leaving unapproached, but I admired the goodwill of couples making an effort, and felt sympathetic towards their awkwardness as I tried to make small talk about the weather and watered the geranium with a show of insouciance.
"You'll get a lot of tears here looby; you've got to be ready for that," said my supervisor. She told me how to deal with seeing clients in the supermarket or post office afterwards, how to show them out of a misleadingly marked door lest they be seen by someone leaving the offices of Really Late, how never to say the organisation's name when answering the phone.
Got the girls off to bed and made it to the offy with minutes to go. Looking for some out of date Hobgoblin which he sells off cheap, I notice a man from my bookgroup buying a bottle of wine and some Polish lager. I ask the shopkeeper "Is it all downstairs?" "Yes, sorry, there's only me here at the moment. I can't get it." "No bother, that's alright."
"Are you after something special?" says Bookman. "Yes, he's got some Lithuanian white cider at 99p a gallon. Some say it's got antifreeze in it but I think that's a slur on the Lithuanian people."
At that moment I am arrested by the appearance in the shop of a beautiful late teenage girl with stylised plastic flowers in her long brown hair and a colourful Hawaiian skirt made out of strips of plastic. "Is this your daughter?" I ask Bookman. "No," she says. "I'm his daughter's best friend. Sorry to appear in such an outfit." Look at me.
"Oh no," I say. "Not at all. You're introducing a welcome element of Hawaiian sunshine into the usual Lancaster gloom."
"Buying drink then," she continues. A comment, or a question? "Yes, well," I say, "this is where all the respectable middle class dads get caught out -- ten to ten in the offy." "What's your name, middle class dad?" "Cliff." She guns her index fingers towards me. "Busted."
Modern girls, aren't they lovely?
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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
Rummage in my drawers
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 Defunct
Exile on Pain Street
Fat Man On A Keyboard
gairnet provides: press of blll
George Szirtes ditto
Infomaniac [NSFW]
Laudator Temporis Acti
Leeds's Singing Organ-Grinder
On The Rocks
The Most Difficult Thing Ever nothing since April
Quillette
Strange Flowers
Wonky Words
"Just sit still and listen" - woman to teenage girl at Elliott Carter weekend, London 2006
5:4Bristol New Music
Desiring Progress Collection of links only
NewMusicBox
Purposeful Listening (né The Rambler)
Resonance FM
Sequenza 21
Sound and Music
Talking Musicology defunct, but retained
