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We wuz robbed
The rain is doing a Bristolian hammering, viz., a child bashing wooden pegs into a board.
Fourteen hours today in the works canteen. It's undemanding, but the sheer length of it dispirits me, and whenever someone walks to the counter I think "oh fucking hell, what do they want?"
Me and Mel watched the Croatia match in a pub where we had to pay ten pounds to sit on a bench. I had said that afterwards Hayley would meet us in the park. It's a ménage which has had its uneasy moments when I've legoed them together in the past. But they're my only friends in Bristol.
Before Hayley was to arrive, I suggested I scooter off to Marks and Sparks to get us some rubbish to eat. At the entrance to M&S I was told by an employee that I wasn't allowed to wheel my scooter round the store. She suggested I park it behind some gigantic blown photograph of a cake. As my idiocy has no limits, I parked it as she suggested, just at the same time that a white young couple came in and parked their bikes in the same place.
I went quickly round, gathering crisps, olives and cider, returning to find my scooter had gone. I looked at the space where Bert should have been, disbelieving, as if the visual illusion would vanish at any moment. I walked back to the park, resenting the slowness of a pedestrianism I had escaped for a month, wobbling my sadness inside with the stupid imperative to not make an outward meal of it.
I got back to Mel's bench and told her. She was full of the practical suggestions that no-one wants when being upset would be better met by sympathy rather than solutions. I rang Hayley and told her. She turned up with a clashing liveliness which gave me the unconcern which I wanted. And sex too, pulling her shawl over her tits, but repeatedly, consciously. I drank quickly, getting on a high of suppressed upset. Mel retreated to her phone.
Hayley went to have a piss behind a tree. "Why don't you get with Hayley?" Mel said. Here we go again, my next task of the day. "Oh no that would never work," I said, truthfully, worrying whether I'd made her sound like the rock of ages and reinforced Hayley's more glamorous status in Mel's eyes. I want them both.
I was sad about losing Bert. No-one will take as much care of him as I did. But tomorrow I'm on the 7am coach to London, to collect a replacement scooter from someone in Camden. He is anxious that I am not late, as his mother "hates being held up" for her dinner date. He's told me this three times now. You can hear the cat-gut of the apron strings straining at his throat.
I'm bringing Bert's replacement back on the train. Then, in an Indian run by someone me and Mel met when we were working in Parks and Carks, we're meeting my brother's clan. They're down here for the National League play-off final, Hartlepool v Torquay, moved to Bristol City's ground because of the Euros. It doesn't serve alcohol.
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looby, n.; pl. loobies. A lout; an awkward, stupid, clownish person
M / 60 / 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
Eryl Shields Ink
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
The Most Difficult Thing Ever
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
The Rambler
Resonance FM
Sequenza 21
Sound and Music
Talking Musicology defunct, but retained