Old School

Wow! Traffic Warden!!! Wow!! I can’t wait for the tales you will tell us - this almost makes up for having to take the hat back.
Sx

Yeah, it’s more in hope than expectation. I can imagine it being quite popular, making oneself unpopular. My sister said “I fucking hate traffic wardens,” which gives me an early taste of how I’ll be seen at dinner parties (sighs wistfully, remembering the days of dinner parties…)

Googled ’sleekit’. That’s brilliant. And we always want what we can’t have. Isn’t that always the way? If you get the traffic warden gig I hope you don’t become drunk with power.

Yes, someone at work mentioned a particularly cruel concentration camp guard who came from a very lowly and oppressed rural German family and who spent the war over-compensating on Jews.

Hope it won’t get to that stage though :)

Where to begin? I’ll start with the text message, nothing worries me more than being in a less than sober state and sending the wrong message to the wrong person/group- like a blatant message about weed to one of the group texts from a bunch of square basketball parents, luckily i’ve avoided that so far…

Wanting what we can’t have, believe that wanker Morrissey wrote a whole song about it, seems it’s how it works innit? i won’t go into a long-winded story about a stripper i used to bed who was hopelessly smitten with me(what an ego) but every time i see her it’s like, “you wouldn’t be into possibly, maybe, well like you know…”

The Living Wage- think i’ll start a punk band by that name, a useless term those pols like to toss about to placate the masses. It’s the same here in Cloudcuckooland, all the butt hurt white folks bitch about the immigrant labor that do the jobs they won’t do by saying they’re stealing their jobs and driving down wages but what they don’t realize it the Oligarchs don’t care who works those jobs (or doesn’t) they’re still not going to pay a living wage, mainly cuz the oligarchs don’t give a fuck…(though i do understand your point about the free movement of labor.)

Get the Traffic Warden gig, don headphones with house music and direct traffic in your own inimitable style. You’ll be on your way to superstardom.

I dunno. I quite like traffic wardens (but then my heart always goes out to the unloved). I’m sure you’d give that job a certain swagger Looby.

Yes, kono, it’d be a good job to listen to music and podcasts and so on. I like the idea of being outdoors all the time too. The weather down here is benign compared to Lancashire.

Sally – golly, someone who likes traffic wardens! I do like the idea of having my diplomatic and persuasive skills being put to the test every day. And I’l time being particularly unpleasant to people just as the Test Match starts so that I can watch it during my convalescence.

Geeze geezer, I nearly got blown away by Storm C; my outer dermis is desquamating as I type…

Good to read you again - s’been a while (I’m busy with a new piece of cock)! I think you’d suit being a meter maid. The stories you will tell….

Another vote here for the Traffic Warden career option, Looby- I think you would be either fantastically good or utterly hopeless at it, and either way it has a ring to it that already feels like not just the hook for a string of blog posts but for that slim bestselling volume on the shelves of Waterstones that we all know is your ultimate destiny. Somehow I just think people are fascinated by the inner and also extra-curricular lives of Traffic Wardens, and would lap yours up. If there is any justice in the world, anyway.

And congratulations on the nearly-getting married thing, I’m glad it’s worked out that you (and Cath) can stay in your amenable shared living quarters without hats being called for… I also think only you could go in the space of three posts from nearly being evicted to possibly being married to not being married and being back where you started… but present it to us in such breezily throwaway and seemingly effortless fashion that by the end we are all commenting not on any of that but on your possible new dayjob as a purveyor of parking tickets.

Sorry if that is overly sleekit of me though by the way! (Great bloody word that, and possibly only the second time I’ve come across it, the first would have to be Glasgow’s own James Kelman, since I can’t think of anyone other than you who I have read who would perhaps use it).

Hello some lass, oh fuck, another one lost. I did have a fleeting moment a couple of months ago when I thought we might end up faffing about over a jointly-made conjunction…never mind – re the job, not heard from them and it’s been three weeks now so presume my wording hasn’t worked this time. Everything somehow works out. I’m charmed, I’m under a good spell.

Awww, Jonathan, that’s lovely to hear, all of it! I do secretly wish I could knock this up into something sellable. A vanity project which avoids vanity publishing. Someone else to validate my vanity.

“Sleekit". Does no-one read Robbie Burns any more? But then, I’ve not read a word of Kelman either, and sometimes the best recommendations come from people you know.

Kelman I’m confident you would like Looby. The milieu he sets his work in would resonate with you. If you start with How Late It Was How Late, you won’t go far wrong.

Thanks Jonathan, I will!

“…and found ourselves next to a table full of moustachioed men wearing dresses. Next time I won’t bother with the drugs.”

this is why we can’t stay away! checking back in, catching up on my blogs, and i save you (and kono) for late night!