Thu 22nd February 2024

Mel suggests getting the bus out to a pub she remembers, in a small village near Bath. We time it well as the locals are coming in after work. It's a cosy place, the bar in a low-ceilinged one room with a coal fire. Mel meets someone working on the house next door, which for decades has been occupied by a couple she knows. I feel local by proxy and start to unwind; I go to stand in front of the fire.

The same man points to my cast and asks me what I've done. I explain the broken wrist and fractured elbow, before throwing any advantage away.

"It's great," I say, "I'm on more or less full pay whilst I sit on my back side. I'm going to milk it."

There's a pause. "I'm not sure I hold with that attitude myself."

In the concentrated atmosphere, and surrounded mainly by self-employed men, it feels a bigger faux pas than it would in Bristol.

Whilst we were in Tenerife I became interested in the disputed territory you'd hit if you sailed East by South from Tenerife's southern tip.

Back home, ignoring the slight nag in my head that my girlfriend might not be interested in Pre-Modern West African History, I say "there's a suggestion that the Phoenicians might have been the first non-natives to reach Western Sahara."

She looked at me quizzically for a second, then said "where's Westminster Harbour?"

In the corner shop a woman cradling four bottles of cider clatters in with the bustling movements of the unhinged. She apologises for interrupting (but continues anyway), and starts on one of those voluble monologues that I've witnessed many times in there.

"I want to change these, change them you see, he wants a strong lager, not cider, no, he wants a strong lager, so can I change these? Some of them won't let you."

The unworried shopkeeper tells her to get four of something else, presumably a strong lager. As she show signs of leaving, she concludes "...and I'll think you'll find I'm sixty-five tomorrow!"

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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

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Lager for Rosie

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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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