Mon 3rd September 2012

I am beginning what will be a busy week with a neglectful preparation. We had a rehearsal for the D**kens thing tonight. The running order and the timing is still not sorted out, four days before the event. I'm past caring now. I sensed that others were similarly unbothered.

It's been a bit of a nervous few months with New Business Colleague, negotiating the interface between his access to people who have to shove guns off the sofa before he sits down on it, and mine to middle class Lancaster, whose language I can speak to near-native standard. Having to deal with his defensiveness and the poor way he handles his drink hasn't been easy; the way he softens when we're alone. All complicated by the mutual physical attraction between his wife and me.

It's been profitable, even if most of the profits have gone pleasurably up my nose, playing music and dancing around the room and thinking about Trina and, less glamourously, arresting the effects of my drinking. "The thing with that stuff," said a man I met on a dancefloor at the Zap Club in Brighton fifteen years ago, "is that is lets you drink like fuck."

The article in which we're trading is unfashionable. I get far more requests for something five times as more expensive, the accelerant for the Square Mile. I don't like it. It makes me feel too big. And I can't understand why anyone would use refreshments at work. Class, money, tastes--they're all interrelated, and minds far greater than mine have mapped that field.

I am off to Nottingham tomorrow to sit at Trent Bridge with the only decent boss I've ever had, who now buys ingredients for perfumes, at the cricket, prepared with boxes of pies and sandwiches. It will involve getting a bus from Preston to Birmingham at 2am and then sitting in the latter's bus station for four hours, before the cheap train connection to Nottingham. In a rather sadistic way, I am looking forward to seeing Dale Steyn and Morne Merkel, two of the most fearsome bowlers in the world, throwing down unplayable deliveries at our batsmen. I love the physical and psychological violence of cricket. You want to wear someone down.

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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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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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