By Mat | Published:
May 5, 2007
We’ve ordered Thai food. ‘They say we can pick it up in twenty minutes,’ says the Evil Sulphura.
‘We should leave here in twenty minutes,’ I say. ‘It always takes at least half an hour, and I always end up sitting in that crowded bit at the front, waiting with all the other gullible losers who […]
By Mat | Published:
March 7, 2007
The café is crowded, which gives me a chance to slink in undetected and loiter at the back to observe Justin. He is doling out muffins, coffee and bons mots with charismatic zeal to jonesing office-workers who offer little in the way of intercourse.
Certainly, less than I did.
By Mat | Published:
October 8, 2006
Outside the window, through the girlie grey steam, the autumn weeds are waving in a distinctly springish wind. I think I could almost qualify as a perpetual motion machine, infinitely running a distracted loop between the untended garden and the untended computer, if it weren’t for the midpoint between the two, which is the television and which is being tended just fine.
I stopped doing creative things three months ago. What happened?
By Mat | Published:
July 13, 2006
“Well, the more coffee I drink the more impulsive I become and the more coffee I order,” explained Oscar, “so by late morning I tend to feel connected to the here and now, the ghost of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and a quasar at the edge of the known universe I’ve decided to call Ian.”
“I’ll get the bill,” I said.
By Mat | Published:
December 5, 2005
There is a man looking in my study window from the back yard. I suddenly can’t remember where I keep the cricket bat. He’s swarthy, and he’s tapping on the glass and saying something which I can’t hear because I’m listening to some traditional Georgian choral music on my headphones and I’ve just turned up the volume as high as I can stand to get the full majestic effect.
By Mat | Published:
August 22, 2005
“Never,†continues the supermodel, waving the little statuette expansively just beyond my reach, “has such pithy cruelty been achieved so quickly from such a position of safety,†she raves. I pause. The audience is beginning to look edgy. I reach for the statue, thinking to retrieve the situation with a short, magnanimous speech on the subject of the responsible use of wit.
The supermodel, however, can’t be stopped.
By Mat | Published:
July 18, 2005
We looked at the football players. They looked at us. One of them had a whisk. This is not a euphemism.
“What did you guys get kicked out of?” asked my new partner.
“Engleschlitchacha,” I twitched.
“Oh great,” he said. “Not just nerds. Retards, too.”
By Mat | Published:
July 14, 2005
I have a terrible, humiliating and very specific speech impediment. I find it painfully impossible to pronounce the term ‘English Literature’ in mixed company. I can say ‘Russian Literature’. I can say ‘English cricket team’. Hell, I can say ‘Feodor Mikhailovich Dostoevskij’ without blinking, but I honestly cannot say ‘English Literature’ without dislocating my mandible. It has haunted me since I was sixteen when, in a profoundly influential life event, I was psychologically traumatised by a bowl of scone dough.
There is an explanation for this, but to make it requires that we briefly revisit a party I attended a couple of weeks ago.
