Gay Nazi Sex Vicar in Schoolgirl Knickers Vice Disco Lawnmower Shock!
« Rural ridesA long-winded proposal »

For administrative purposes, Italy

  Mon 7th September 2020

I'm in the Old Post Office. The capital "O" gives it away: it's been deracinated from the state and turned into a pub. I was caught in the vestibule to have the rules explained to me, now runaway regulations loosed from science, stoked gleefully by young people relishing a scrap of authority and control at work. I was told not to stand up, and to follow the arrows.

I miss mine and Mel's pub, where no-one gives a shit who you sit with or stand up with or talk with, its weed-perfumed garden, little dots of powder on the toilet roll holders, signs saying that anyone found doing drugs will be barred - always a good sign -- and where on a Sunday afternoon we'd be snogging and stroking and undoing.


I got back to Bristol last night from Rovinj, in Istria, in Croatia. I told Cath I was going to Bergamo in Italy as Italy's unquarantined. She surprised me by telling me about her holiday in Bergamo two years ago, so I had to look up "attractions in Bergamo" to get my story straight for when I got back. I couldn't be doing with a fortnight of her anxiety about isolation, a dance on the landing every time I want to go to the loo, and worse, having to handle her, acting as counsellor and defendant, as tolerance and condemnation wrangled for precedence in her head.

I got through security OK -- they never search near your cock -- had a £6.50 pint of cider in the bar, and then went to the loo, leaving all my stuff on the table. Got back and couldn't find my phone. I'd taken the "smart" phone I never use which had my boarding pass on it. A helpful Welsh couple at the next table rang it repeatedly as I tipped my bag out onto the table, all my cheap underwear looking ragged in a pile on the table.

I missed my flight, and sat annoyed with myself for being downhearted. I went to a car hire place, where I asked to borrow their work phone to ring my eldest, Fiona. I keep important numbers written down in my diary. They were on a different flight, the day after, from Liverpool and were staying in an airbnb there.

It was five o'clock. I could still get to Liverpool. Fiona, with a lack of at least audible exasperation, bought me a sixty-eight quid ticket for their flight. I got the bus to Temple Meads. A train in five minutes. I got halfway through asking the conductor if I could go to Crewe with him as I showed him my erroneously-issued rail pass, when he cut me short and ushered me into first class.


I didn't know how it'd work, an ersatz family of me, my eldest and the middle one, and Fiona's ex Imogen, but lacking mum and the youngest. We went swimming, the equality of near-nudity, in a warm sea which was as popular with the locals as it is with jellyfish, throbbing gelatinous blobs looking like domes of smoked cheese gone mouldy, as big as your head, and hundreds of their smaller harmless children.

On the last day we went for a meal out in a slippery cobbled square. Wary cats looked up hopefully at our table. I was tense about Fiona throwing her food out to them, as though it were disrespectful to the staff. I said "Imogen, I have loved having you on this holiday. I hope it's not the last time you come with us." She welled up, as did Jenny, who tearily stared at me as I put my arm around Imogen. "No, really." I laughed with the hilarity that expressing affection can provoke.


At the airport I still had a wee bit of speed. The alarm went off as I walked through the sensor arch. They ushered me to one side, and said "your belt", which was a bit confusing as my belt was in the tray, and swabbed both my waistband and my bag. I stood, trying to calm a tremor, for some elongated seconds, before the test came back negative and I was waved through. A pint of the local beer, post-security, was three pounds. I ordered two, and felt myself deliquesce into the beautiful liminal space of an airport.

4 comments

Comment from: Scarlet [Visitor]

Oh Looby, you are a sneaky bugger, telling Cath you went to Italy!
I feel like I should send a spare M&S Voucher so you can get some underwear.
Sx

Mon 7th September 2020 @ 12:39 Reply to this comment
Comment from: looby [Visitor]

Please do Scarlet. I don’t want to look like a redundant model for Ethel Austin if it ever gets to the underwear stage with Mel.

Mon 7th September 2020 @ 13:47 Reply to this comment
Comment from: kono [Visitor]

Life and how to live it… even when we fuck it up, lol! i’ve got a fiver someone walked by and nicked the phone, and that last line, there are certain times and places where airports seem so calm and relaxed even though everyone is rushing about…

Thu 10th September 2020 @ 21:14 Reply to this comment
Comment from: looby [Visitor]

Yeah, I just felt so safe after I’d gone through security, but everyone I’ve told this to said, “yeah but there are opportunistic thieves everywhere.” Well, they’re welcome to my old stupid phone.

If I were rich I’d send a lot more time in airports. Not flying, just sitting in that timeless, placeless state.

Thu 10th September 2020 @ 22:14 Reply to this comment


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

Complete website engine
 

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

Contact | Help | b2evolution skin by Asevo | Open-Source CMS