One of the salient experiences of university life was exposure to academics. There was a kind of sadistic glee in some of those first-year lecturers and tutors, somewhat akin to people who enjoy corrupting children; they were going to apply ‘reason’ and ‘education’ to our conditioning and laugh their evil laughs as our bourgeois values fell away from us. As far as they were concerned, God and the Easter Bunny were much the same thing. Continue reading
This photo is the lake of this moment. It elongates and pulls the sinews of my heart across it, so wide I don’t know if they’ll hold and next thing, inexplicably, there’s tears…
I remember on Sex and the City how Carrie Bradshaw was a big reader of the love-letters of ‘great’ men; I was inspired by this notion at the time. I looked up some of the letters, Beethoven’s specifically and was, well, disappointed. Not that I am a ‘great’ man (no one other than me seems to think so, anyway,) but I have always felt that this letter was one of my better efforts.
It’s strange to think that all my writing, all that work, can boil down to one single effort, much like a sprinter’s entire training life can be boiled down to that sub-ten seconds he’s tearing along that hundred meter track. But I guess that’s the thing; ordinary lives find their extraordinary moments for that finite stretch of seconds, or words, or moments.
So here’s mine. The girl is long gone; I’m certainly the better for it. But I remember being transfixed by a sorrow so great it could only be described as grief, and here are the thousand-odd words I wrote in the hope of transfiguring it into something more than a squalid agony.
Theme Park at its Darkest 