Feedback Friday :: Conversation Piece

bulk :: 13st 7
exercise :: none
back pain :: crippling
chair purchase attempts :: 4
chair companies called :: 2
chair purchases :: 0
% of chimps working at chair companies in question :: 100
no. of passionate kisses :: 0
no. of desultory kisses :: 0
decent days of writing done :: 3
marks out of ten for the week :: 5

So. These are the photographs I wanted to show you last week, when I posted that vicious little rant that some of you found a tad off-putting. Interestingly, Ben mentioned something the other night about the slightly unpleasant tone I tend to exhibit. I tried to resist it for a while - because ideally I’d like to have the warmth and amiability and purity of intent that seems to come so naturally to, say, Bill Bryson - but Ben was absolutely right. I am rather negative, and bitter, and certainly cynical, and generally disrespectful, and judgemental. I’m quite the misanthrope really. But I still love it. You know. Everything. I still love everything.

Anyway, here’s something positive for us all to rejoice in, hold hands and dance around. To recap briefly, I discovered this public art in South Shields just a few days before leaving the North East, after missing it regularly for three or four months. It really moved me. It made me feel warm and amiable and pure. And I loved the fact that they hadn’t been vandalised. You can bet your arse they would have been in London. Eh? Bloody Londoners.

Enjoy.















































Good, huh?

I’m currently leeching internet from a company downstairs (ssshhhh), and they’re about to turn it off till Monday morning, so please ensure that when I check back in then, I have a massive ragbag of comments waiting for me. Come on, it’s easy. Join the conversation! What did you think of the sculptures? Do you like Bill Bryson? Isn’t he nice? Don’t you think TS Eliot looks like Aleister Crowley? Makes you think. What are you up to this weekend? I’m not up to much myself. Writing. I’m trying to write something. Ben and Imogen are both away doing musical things. Imogen’s in the States for a couple of weeks and Ben’s spending the weekend in Dublin. Bloody musicians eh? Life of Riley. Life of O’Riley in Ben’s case. And you? What are you doing? What are you wearing? Do you think I’m needy? Oh, just speak to me, for God’s sake, you motherfuckers!

Oops.

Sorry.

Feedback Friday :: Naked Prejudice

bulk :: 13st 5
exploratory rides :: 2
other exercise :: zero
tobacco intake :: elevated
insolvency threat level :: elevated
pages of The Da Vinci Code remaining :: 276
new friends made :: 7
new friends lost :: 1

Before I get back into the thrills, spills and humiliations of life in London, I thought I’d like to properly say goodbye to the North East.

On the whole, as I'm sure made clear, I didn’t enjoy my time up there. Although my sample jar – sociologically speaking – was clearly only partially full, I found it a suffocatingly small-minded place. I mean, actually like no other place I’ve ever been – quite striking in its negative incapability, with vast tides of the population seeming to exist in a state of almost intentional closed-mindedness, in a way that you just don’t see down here, not to that extent. In London, I think, people exist. Even if it’s often a rather confused, haphazard or accidental existence, forced by numbers. Up there they just drift through their soulless concrete cake-boxes like colossal graceless whales sucking up Gregg’s pasties and Bacardi Breezers, trading nods which sit firmly on the fence between suspicion and simple-minded friendliness; the men with their stone cold, lifeless eyes, their giant elastic guts thumping through their football strips like they’re perpetually starting a fight, jutting thighward like enormous chin-pillows of flab; the women with their tiny pinched mouths and surly ashtray children, Brian tattooed fecklessly to each and every neck; and everywhere, harsh empty faces slipping apathetically down hollow skulls, like dirty wet rags in a raw, unforgiving wind. You know?

But aside from all that, I wanted to say something positive about the area. To end on an upstroke.

The first thing I’ll really miss about the North East is the glorious coastline, which is raw and feisty and at points breathtakingly beautiful.

Actually, that’s it.

But something happened in the last week – on my penultimate ride to South Shields, I found something I’d hitherto missed, something which made me return with my camera for the last ride, two days before I came back to London.

It was this...

Oh.

I just spent over an hour preparing the photographs I took. Around twenty of them, there are. And there isn't enough internet connection here to upload them. Not at the moment. Ah, well. All the more for next week.

Fresh start next week, you know.

Aaah, London.

In the meantime, have an exciting weekend, won't you, and happy 9/11!