Bothered

Friday, September 22, 2006

Wednesday, September 13, 2006

Jason Schwartzman as Louis XVI - lovely. From what I've heard this has been getting very mixed reviews, but I'm really looking forward to it.



In a way I’ve been feeling pretty regal myself lately – probably because I’ve been hanging with the fucking peasants. Boredom has done terrible things to my temper. Can’t be arsed with anyone.

The window is broken. “These frames are from Australia love.”
“I don’t care where they’re fucking from mate, I just need it to be fixed.”

“Free Evening News?”
”No, I DON”T WANT IT.”
Hate the way that it’s suddenly not OK to take that shitty rag.

Think I’ve got the message across that I’d prefer that the people sitting around me to speak to me, rather than email me if they have a question about something.

From: Sandra
Subject: Did you get that email
Date: 13 September 2006 14:58:59 BDT
To: Bothered

I just sent?

Conversation is sophisticated and the phone is not just there so I can trip over the wire. Clodding along on their keyboards with their headphones in. Yawn.


Little Miss Sunshine
was brilliant. Just the right levels of indie deprecation and family comedy cuteness. The whole beauty pageant finale began as a scary insight into the paed elements of infantile perfectionism and ended in a genuinely warming display of family affection.

Monday, September 11, 2006

I bought a beef and chutney sandwich in Cheadle on Saturday. The shop was of note because it seemed out of time, delightfully old school next to all the Greggs and Hampsons, or those expensive delis that haven't quite got over themselves yet. Cooked sausages were congealing deliciously in their own fat next to a big tray of dripping and some ancient meat slicers. The women serving looked like they'd been there slicing all along, easily in their eighties, moving slowly deliberately around the equipment. A middle aged woman caked in powder came in for dripping and warned me not to leave my wallet open on the counter.

‘Be careful. You never know who’s about… someone had my purse right out of my bag the other day.’

Everyone in the shop nodded and muttered.

‘Oh dear, around here was it?’

‘Oh yes. They say it’s all these Europeans who’ve come in’

Good olde England. Later I found myself telling a French man about it in Big Hands but I think my take on it was lost in translation in my shitfaced state and I came across as some kind of Daily Mail toting idiot. Still, at least neither that nor the fact I was talking about chutney in the first place stopped him from kissing me.

Wednesday, September 06, 2006

You do not need to leave your room. Remain sitting at your table and listen. Do not even listen, simply wait, be quiet, still and solitary. The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked, it can do no other, it will writhe in ecstasy at your feet. (Franz Kafka)

While I was waiting around in my room in typical style a couple of weeks ago, I read an unusual and rather endearing book called Death and The Penguin. It features a Ukrainian who writes obituaries for a living, about VIPs from the local post-communist society who haven't actually died yet. The penguin, adopted from cash-strapped Kiev Zoo, is a depressive with a congenital heart defect and attends a lot of funerals.

A sense of foreboding grows between Kurkov's prosaic and deadpan lines while the myopic anti-hero sits around dejectedly with his pet, alternately writing and drinking cherry brandy. Seemingly only passionate when waxing elegiacal about the increasingly pervasive presence of death, and the futilities of life, the fantastical plot unwinds slightly out-of-focus around his lonely, functional existence.

In the end Viktor is forced by events to address his own fate and actually take some decisive, individual action to save his penguin, and then himself, from the perils of their immediate circumstances. And of not really living.

Well I've neither the cash nor the inclination for vodka and heavy gambling that Viktor has, and the flight I've booked isn't bound for the antarctic, but it's a relief to finally abandon the uncertain limbo of my own making I've been living in these past few months.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The man from the Ibizan Angels called me yesterday, exactly a moon later. Why do I feel like I know him from somewhere? I swear that guy is some kind of portent. Sometimes the little coincidences of life floor me, they really do. Well, tomorrow night is the harvest moon, and a lunar eclipse to boot. It's clear, so we'll head back to the meadows...

Sunday, September 03, 2006