Not very long ago, in a manuscript for a novel, I wrote (of scientists, but meant by it boors stinking of self-rectitude) Wait ’til they realise that there wasn’t a Big Bang, and that our particular part of the cosmos looks like it’s expanding outwards, while the real explanation is that everything around it is going in the other direction. Like cancer on an ageing corpse. They won’t say sorry, though, – they’ll just say, “We’re even cleverer now.”
Category: The Diary
1st June – I’m a cold Italian pizza, I could use a lemon squeezer.
And only then do the scales finally fall from their eyes, as they are forced to acknowledge the likely provenance of the strange umami flavour of the apero-snacks that had been served with their introductory two-for-one Prosecco package on arrival.
25th May – Луч солнца, побеждает холодную терпкую тьму.
I became the only man in history to be sacked from the position of hostage. It’s hard to extract the positivity from that. The joy of uncommon individuality rarely endures.
19th May – Some glad morning when this life is over, I’ll fly away.
I’d go out to a Genesis track, or Led Zep, or something equally shite so that you had no regrets about leaving the earth and all its mediocrities. Then you’d just have to hope that you died before having to listen to it all the way through.
11th May – The head of the herd was calling far far away. They met one night in the silver light, on the road to Mandalay.
The overall effect of all these moments with the new woman was to make you crave to be at home, whilst at the same time, dread the prospect of life’s quotidian transactions.
2nd May – We’d like to be unhappy, but we never do have the time.
Earlier, I endured a Proustian, bollocks-first, flight, onto a hard and sharp object. Now, suddenly, I experience a Eureka moment that is also Euphoric. I transcend the earthly to the numinous, accompanied by easy-listening, Euro-pop, played on a euphonium.
18th April – I can see it in your eyes, that you despise the same old lies, you heard the night before.
Before the internet was invented, melts like this gravitated towards teaching where they shovelled their bigoted mediocrity onto unwilling subjects like me. God knows what schools have descended to since, now that these sorts have migrated towards monetising their uselessness on YouTube.
29th March – How can you say, I go about things the wrong way?
He has a point, although, to be fair, I did mention this at the beginning, when I called Proust a ponce. I wonder if he thought I meant nonce, not ponce? Too late now. And this isn’t an argument about 1984; it’s about sun and air. And suffocation.
Mar 25th – Little things I should have said and done, I just never took the time.
‘Have you ever considered that perhaps you used up your life’s ration of good luck within its first twenty-four hours?’
16th March – It’s so very lonely, you’re six hundred light years from home.
Oh God, it is one of those chats. Massive, hole-boring, criticism that will lay a time-bomb in my foundations, all dressed up as pep-talk.
Dickie White's Diary 