» Workplace Boredom

Marion
Ah, yes, dear Marion.

Marion was a tall, heavily-built German girl who occupied the cubicle next to mine. She had horn-rimmed glasses and a permanently serious look on her face, which collided badly with a comedy hairstyle- two cones of curly black hair which stuck mysteriously to the sides of her head (think Gary Larson, and then some). Not the sharpest spoon in the drawer, she kept herself to herself (apart from letting on that, rather enjoy the southern European summer here, she preferred to sit in a room with the windows closed and sweat. Nice.)

Marion would get locked into things, and would let parts of the day drift by in repetitive actions. You could walk by her desk on the way to send a fax (this was a while ago) and find her industriously polishing her glasses. You send the fax, wander off for a coffee and a smoke, and come back, and she would still be there, still polishing the same lens on her glasses. with the same vacant serious expression on her face.

Her only vice was tea. She would boil the kettle on her desk, and brew up a cup. From the other side of the partition, you could hear the tea bag drop into the bin, and then there would be an agonising wait as she put a spoonful of honey into the brew.

And then she would stir.

Metal spoon in an earthenware mug.

And get locked into stirring.

It was only a short while until the idea of timing this performance came up. The other cubicle rats were quickly irritated by the noise, but became less so as I would post the day's result. A silence would descend, everyone waiting to see how long she could last.

Metal spoon, earthenware mug, the varnish on the inside of the mug presumably getting thinner and thinner as time wore on.

Just before the office was reorganised, I was able to leap to my feet, fists in the air, screaming "RECORD!" as Marion at last woke up after a mammoth two minute, seven second stirring stint.

It wasn't to last. The office was redistributed, and Marion, after a peculiarly out-of-character screaming fight with a colleague (who she apparently tried to brain with a metal stapler) eventually moved back to the cool of her homeland.

To while away the long days at work, I sometimes like to think of her, contentedly stirring away, the ceramic on her mug worn to a paper-thin wall holding the cooling honeyed tea in...
(Thu 8th Jan 2009, 21:38, More)

» Cross Dressing

Polish bananas
Poland, early Nineties, working as an English teacher in a town that had been slower to embrace change than the rest of the country, and was, shall we say, a little less than tolerant of deviants (whilst seemingly being full of people who seemed to want something very specific to do with them...)

Anyhow, a colleague decides to have a party, and to make it a little different, also decides that it should be a “Red Party”, meaning that everyone should wear something red. A friend, who, being Lucy, will remain nameless, decided that she and her friends should outdo the rest of the party, and thus eight people should go dressed as a red light district. There seemed to be some sort of logic to it at the time, but this has been lost in the mists of time and vodka.

The day comes, and the other lads take possession of the stock of fishnet stockings, skirts and bras offered by Lucy and Rachel (who will also remain anonymous). Groover J finds himself rather at a loss, as all the truly good stuff has been nabbed. At Lucy’s suggestion (there may also have been vodka involved), it is decided that going as a rent boy will complete the red light district’s charms and services.

So, off we go. Pink shirt open to the waist (with rather a camp medallion), tight leggings, clogs (clogs?), a dinky little hat, half a dozen earrings (made from paper clips), copious make-up, and, logically, a banana stuffed down the leggings. God only knows what I looked like. The vodka excuse now sounds more and more likely.

Off we go to the party, in a taxi. On the way, we had to stop at the major station to pick up cigarettes. Lucy dressed like a Soho cocktail whore, Groover J in his finery. I swear, seeing some of the looks (and unintelligible Polish comments), we could have made an absolute killing that night, there and then, at the station, if we had been so inclined (no way, as far as either of us were concerned).

Of course, we get to the party and no sod is wearing anything red, and we look like a bunch of tits. On the up side, I did get sufficiently hammered on vodka to go around asking all the girls if they’d like to feel my banana…
(Sun 18th Mar 2007, 15:22, More)

» This book changed my life

Jack
Thanks to CaptainCuntyBollocks. It's worth reading the "friendly hint" on the question here, and not including just a list of books (I am well aware that my previous reply makes me guilty here. Maybe this can redress the balance.)

The book that really changed my life was On The Road by Jack Kerouac. The contents are insane, and stuck as a sixteen year-old in South-West London with no access to endless roads, continents to unwind in every direction and friends of different persuasions and thoughts to explore these with, the book did the obvious on my mind. I drowned myself in American literature, pausing to breathe only rarely with the odd European volume, which invariably seemed somewhat pedestrian in comparison.

The effect of American literature was not permanent. I went through all Kerouac, mainlined some Burroughs, got wired out on Hunter S. Thompson and had a nasty McInerney/Ellis habit for quite a while. In my quieter moments, I flirted with Didion, Donne, Keillor, Frantzen and many others. I got high on Dirty Realism, and took quite a while to come down. My use was chaotic, and whenever I quit, a relapse was never far behind.

I am better now. I can take it or leave it (but occasionally relapse, and enjoy the old thrill enormously).

Throughout all of this, On The Road was still there. To be honest, the book doesn't really hold up to reading once you're beyond a certain age-like The Catcher In The Rye, it's book you read when you're in your teens, and then refer to as having read, without re-reading. Some friends gave me a copy of the "scroll" for my birthday last year, the original wild, raggedy madness that Kerouac wrote on speed in a fortnight or so, which I love as a book, but haven't read.

But the book which changed my life is still there. It's a 1958 American paperback version, bought by my father in San Francisco on his wanderings across America. For some reason, the place that it was bought and its battered state (the spine has all but gone and is held in place with brittle, aged sellotape, meaning that chunks fall out whenever it is opened) give it its attraction- a change from all the predictably-bound Penguins and Picadors, a racy charm compared to the other spines on offer.

That's the one I read as a teenager, over twenty years ago. That's the one whose pages I can see, when anyone mentions the book, and the cover (a crumby coloured-in line drawing of a guy in a striped t-shirt, standing in front of background scenes of funky women, cars and a Mexican-looking building) the one that inevitably comes to mind. It is far from a first edition, just a book bought far away and brought back, which fired my mind when I picked it from the bookshelves all those years ago.

I might well rescue it if the building were burning down-it was worth 60 cents when bought, but now a hell of a lot more to me now.
(Sat 17th May 2008, 17:23, More)

» This book changed my life

Some (of many)
Life, a User's Manual
Georges Perec's masterpiece. How anyone can tie together such a bizarre amount of stories, wrap them up, and come up with a genius novel (with humour) is beyond me. Read the original (La vie, Mode d'Emploi) or the translation by David Bellos (one of my professors at university, and a self-effacing source of many gems of alternative literature) and enjoy, for once the translation is every bit as good as the original. Utter brilliance. Also leads on to a deep appreciation of Paul Auster.

Down and Out in Paris and London
Again, you can read this one again and again and again, and get something new from it. 1984 was great, but this is writing on a human scale at its best.

The Master and Margarita.
Impossible to read this and believe it was written before the Second World War- like an acid trip that never seems to end. And, yes, the Stones based Sympathy For The Devil on this, but the song (with no disrespect) never scales the heights of the book.

As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning.
Laurie Lee walks across Spain just before the civil war. The pages bleed sunlight (and poverty). One of the reasons that the country holds such a spell on anyone (to get deeper, read "South from Granada" by Gerald Brennan. Amazingly as good as Laurie Lee, if not better...) And if you've read this, read the Northern European version, A Time For Gifts by Patrick Leigh Fermour. As good, if not better.

Foucault's Pendulum.
Makes the Da Vinci Code look like a sad comic. Which it may be, but at least people read it. Go here for the real deal- Umberto Eco knew what he was doing (a good 15 years before Dan Brown).

Add to this some others that come to mind now..
On the Road, Kerouac
Cancer Ward, Solzenitsyn
The Sea, John Banville
The Risk Pool, Richard Russo
One Hundred Years of Solitude, Garcia Marquez
... and you have a good few month's reading ahead of you.

(A nod to everyone here who has recommended things I haven't heard of-I'll be busy for a while thanks to you...)
(Sat 17th May 2008, 15:32, More)

» Mistaken Identity

Fat boy
Wound up inexplicably in Gibraltar on a Saturday night. A few of us headed off after a curry to sample the local nightlife. A karaoke bar exerted its strange fascination, followed by a very grotty nightclub.

The lights got lower (or the beer was working its magical effect), and a rather pretty Scandinavian blonde (whose charms I had not been oblivious to) came up to me.

"You look just like Fatboy Slim", she says. I gurned, and managed to utter some trite denial (possibly to do with my possession of hair, lack of wealth, and presence in a distinctly crap nightclub). "You're him, aren't you?", she insists. The gurning continued.

Then she launched herself on me, mouth first, to give me a go on her dentures. Could I resist? No. Did I want to? Negative. Tasted said dentures (and very tasty they were too).

She pulled away, and, at the sight of a seven-foot Viking lumbering towards us, said "Oh, look, there's my husband", and flew into his arms.

So, if there's a Swedish girl out there who dines out on having got off with Norman Cook, I am most terribly, terribly sorry...
(Thu 31st May 2007, 21:23, More)