Landing! England! (see) There were three of us, and they put us on a bus and drove it under the cliffs. Used a payphone, with funny little octagonal coins: if the money looked less interesting, Stirling would fall further than it has; there must be a cusion provided by the thousands of pounds tourists must keep in change - just as I have done my ( Read more... )

I have decided to walk to University, to coincide with 2009's general 'implausible walking' theme. It is a mere 154 kilometres as the GoogleEarth ruler flies, or four days in the countryside with a rucksack full of books and a piano - what could be more lovely ( Read more... )

Orlando Bloom as James Joyce with Who? as Nora Barnacle? That's what I thought as I woke up this morning. Hove has a Mortimer Street and a Mortimer Mews. I don't think Orlando could do an Irish accent very well; he certainly couldn't write a novel: Prove me wrong Orlando! I remember reading somewhere he lost his virginity at fourteen. Like Casanova ( Read more... )

That's right kids, they're on offer, and there was a sale of undesirable meat on a Dark Age fortification, offal on offer on Offa's Dyke. A man on In Our Time said today 'people tend to think clocks produce time, that if there were no more clocks, time would just stop.' I think he needs to credit the nation with a little more sense, although I do ( Read more... )

I feel like saying something about scales and balances but fear that to breathe or even look at them will tilt them adversely. Still, armed with a few memorable couplets, a suitcase full (full) of books, geography from the film of 'Maurice', new trousers and, what, five hours sleep, I go forth to the fifth-oldest continuous intstitution in Europe ( ( Read more... )

Today the utter folly of the entire English project was exposed by my failure to finish 'Jazz'; still, I listened to a lot of Acker Bilk and enjoyed not having to deliver letters. Time Passes.

'Hey you over there, looking at your toes,
Don't look at the world like it's about to bite you on the nose:
It's far more likely to go for the throat...'

I've got luminous paint on my coat, but it was worth it, damnit. This morning a man called Dan asked me what my degree was in:

I grow old, I grow old,
I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers

One of those days when you realise running downhill with a trolley full of post is damn fun. People were terrified.

I am sending my second personal statement today; it ends: 'it is far from a calendical curiousity that the beginning of the academic year is as far as possible from "the cruellest month".' So a year wasted, one presumes; I have no bones left and it isn't through something fun like venereal disease but erosion caused by bags over Union-regulation ( Read more... )

Just listened to James Comerasani talking about Ashphet Keyani of the Pakistani Army. Isn't poetry wonderful?