![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Conflict and book
Nov. 26th, 2005 10:59 amThere is a routine on one of Bill Cosby's early albums about conflicts between the mind and body. He is talking about getting up to move around in the dark, andwhether or not to turn lights on, but I am having a similar problem with going out.
My mind wants to go out. It doesn't like being cooped up in the flat all day, especially at the moment. It wants to go and Do Something - bright lights, small city!
My body, on the other hand, is picking up the signals from my eyes that show the strings of Christmas lights outside my window (city's, not my own) bouncing up and down in the wind, and the intermittent rain. It therefore wants to stay here, where it's nice and warm.
It's going to be a long, gruelling contest, andf the outcome is not yet known. If I do go out, it won't be fuirther than Cambridge - if anyone is likely to be in a pub in the city, do please let me know...
The book thing is that I am currenmtly reading (or rereading - I forget) "Park and Ride" by Miranda Sawyer. This is a book about suburbia, it joys and its horrors, and the state of mind it creates. It is often deliciously astringent, and more often very, very funny. As so often, the funniest bits are often unintentional - she is clearly very good at getting people to talk, and partiocularly when her pen is let loose on PR people extolling the virtues of whatever they're doing, she exposes the essential ridiculousness of modern life brilliantly (for instance, the Trafford Centre PR woman justifying the vast expense on a ceiling that shows day and night because "at night the constellations will be exactly the same as the real ones, so there'll be an educational element").
And since Miranda Sawyer grew up in Wilmslow, she knows her suburbia...
My mind wants to go out. It doesn't like being cooped up in the flat all day, especially at the moment. It wants to go and Do Something - bright lights, small city!
My body, on the other hand, is picking up the signals from my eyes that show the strings of Christmas lights outside my window (city's, not my own) bouncing up and down in the wind, and the intermittent rain. It therefore wants to stay here, where it's nice and warm.
It's going to be a long, gruelling contest, andf the outcome is not yet known. If I do go out, it won't be fuirther than Cambridge - if anyone is likely to be in a pub in the city, do please let me know...
The book thing is that I am currenmtly reading (or rereading - I forget) "Park and Ride" by Miranda Sawyer. This is a book about suburbia, it joys and its horrors, and the state of mind it creates. It is often deliciously astringent, and more often very, very funny. As so often, the funniest bits are often unintentional - she is clearly very good at getting people to talk, and partiocularly when her pen is let loose on PR people extolling the virtues of whatever they're doing, she exposes the essential ridiculousness of modern life brilliantly (for instance, the Trafford Centre PR woman justifying the vast expense on a ceiling that shows day and night because "at night the constellations will be exactly the same as the real ones, so there'll be an educational element").
And since Miranda Sawyer grew up in Wilmslow, she knows her suburbia...
