(no subject)

It's now 10am - I've been at work since half eight. Before that I was on the train, and before that at home, most of the time feeling very miserable, and suffering from insomnia (took two hours to get to sleep, due to heat, and thinking about work).

I don't believe I've spoken a word to another human being for 16 hours. And as for speaking to a non-accountant human being, probably about three days.

No wonder I feel depressed...

(no subject)

Some days you get the feeling life is trying to tell you something...

Got home from work, and went out to a rehearsal. After an hour, director decided he didn't actually need me.

Went to one pub, where some other theatricals sometimes gather of a Thursday. No sign of them.

Go to another pub, where my next-door neighbour often is of a Thursday. NJo sign of her.

Go to the Chinese for some comfort food. wait at the counter for about three minutes, no-one comes to serve me, and walk out again.

Stop to look at the takeaway menu for the Chinese restaurant. After a while, nitice someone knocking on the window. Hoping to see someone I know, I look up ... into the pissed-up eyes of some red-faced blonde, who is sitting giggling at me with her equally drunken comrades.

A definite "what's the fucking point?" moment...

(no subject)

Today's random LJ quote is a caption from a picture:


"Here is a picture of my mom and Billy Bob right after they got married."


Now if that isn't Alabama in a nutshell...

reading matter

Two books:

First, have just finished "Waking Dream" by Rhiannon Lassiter. I have to be rather careful what I say here, since it is more than likely that the authoress has a presence on here somewhere. The stuff of hiannon's I had read before had left me a little bit "ho-hum" - which is not to say that I don't admire her trememdously for actually getting things written and published, or that I don't recognise that even the most dreadful bilge (which these weren't) isn't a thousand times better than an unwritten work of genius.
"Waking Dream", however, I thought was absolutely splendid. Believable characters (the lack of which is the greatest of my many failings as a writer), and some genuinely interesting and rewarding ideas. And any book written for teenagers that can introduce them to most of the great poets of the past 500 years can't be too bad...

Following that, have just started "Mrs Slocombe's Pussy" by Stuart Jeffries, a book on television which I picked up ages ago on the cheap, probably from the old Heffer's paperback shop on Hills Road in cambridge. It is proving an interesting, and occasionally very funny, meditation on the role of television in our lives. There follow two quotes from the little I've read, one illuminating, one somewhat less so:

i) [on why he watches television] "I don't want to feel anxious - that overwhelmiong spirit of our age, our age of apparent choices and apparent satisfactions"

ii) [on a John Updike quote] "For him, the vagina looked frilly, and when I read that I thought immediately of the serrated edge of a Robinson's custard tart"