Monthly Archives: March 2006

Girlie Grey, part two

Can I help you?’

Thanks but I don’t really like tea.’

It is Fitzroy, 2003 and the sales assist­ant at Tea Inter­sec­tion shrugs.

Have you con­sidered the pos­sib­il­ity that you might be in the wrong place?’ she suggests.

All the time,’ I say. It was sup­posed to be flip­pant, but she checks the panic button.

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Girlie Grey, part one

The maitre d’ is hov­er­ing over my shoulder. An ori­ginal Picasso is hov­er­ing over his.

I’m ter­ribly sorry sir,’ he says in an accent so fluid I can’t tell if it is French or His­panic, ‘but there’s a problem.’

I begin to sweat under my cravat. It is Las Vegas, Octo­ber 2005, and I am about to reap the whirlwind.

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Con­tin­ental drift

When a con­tin­ent is mil­li­met­ring its way gradu­ally across the face of the earth, occa­sion­ally sub­duct­ing or let­ting out an embar­rass­ing little slip-strike, there’s a lot of time for it to reflect, pon­der and sub­mit silly stor­ies to its blog.

After a few hun­dred mil­lions of years of this, how­ever, the con­tin­ent looks up lazily from a half-finished story about pigeons, of which it very much likes the look, to find India carving moun­tains out of its south­ern flanks.

Posted in The Last Monk, writing | Comments closed