Category
Friends
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03.30.03Nos VemosSo we had a leaving dinner for Meester Yan the other night.It was a great evening. I haven't smiled so much in months. The best thing was that while leaving dos can be sad and dismal affairs (because you know you'll probably never see the individual concerned again, even if they're just going to a new job down the road) this one wasn't depressing in the slightest. It was a celebration - of old friends, of adventures to come, of long-overdue reunions and of just surviving the week. There'd been a corporate shindig on Wednesday, but on Friday, it was just ...
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03.17.03Found, after eight years in hidingActing as a bookmark between the pages of Cat's Eye by Margaret Atwood, this thumbnail sketch of a man in a bar in Bolivia. The paper is a Cacho* score sheet, distributed in bars and sponsored by the major singani brand, San Pedro. People always used to tell me that "se puede huele las uvas en el singani San Pedro" but frankly, I'd be amazed if you could smell anything after a couple of glasses of that stuff. Let's just say it's an acquired taste. Much much more palatable when you turn it into Chuflay (which involves mixing it with ...
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02.27.03If you’re going to use it, spell it rightIt's Liaise. Not Liase, no matter what Mr Gates' spellchecker may tell you.Useless fact for word buffs: "Liaison" is a seventeenth century cookery term and "liaise" was invented by the army in the 1920s. [words-work]I have a friend who was once the editor of a major London listings and culture magazine. He once told me that as a matter of course, he binned every CV for an editorial position which spelled that word wrong. You might be able to use it in context, he argued, but if you rely on your computer to tell you when you've made a mistake, ...
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02.24.03UN Petition for Peace?Have you received an email purporting to be a UN petition for peace, and urging you to add your name to it and then send it on to all your friends, and then every 500 or so, forward it to the UN? Yes? Well, before you send it on, please stop and think.You might be interested to know that one of my good friends is listed on the petition with her maiden name - and she's never signed this petition.When she received a copy of this petition the other day, she was surprised to see her name on it, because ...
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02.05.03Dinner: First Flat FoodDate: 26.03.01 Guest: None (yet) Menu: Chicken, pasta, caesar salad, wine, strawberries, cream Chef: Dave Conversation: The world's worst flavour combinations (raisin and caper, or oyster sorbet?) Pesto Tagliatelle with Lime and Garlic Chicken Tell flatmates you'll cook them dinner. Instantly regret decision due to the overwhelming performance anxiety of "The First Meal" situation. Rack brain. Go to supermarket and buy: 1 lime 1 bulb of garlic 3 chicken breasts 1 packet of fresh tagliatelle 1 tub of double cream 1 jar of pesto chilli powder (or paprika) olive oil parsley (optional) Arrive home, consume beer, smoke cigarette. Then, start dinner. Chop chicken into bite-sized pieces and place in bowl. ...
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01.01.03On CrushesHow did that song go after that anyway? Something about how I could grind coffee every time we touch? I could never figure it out.In 1985, I went to the Just Seventeen magazine open day at the editorial offices on Carnaby Street, with my best friend Jane. We were eleven at the time - though as anyone who's familiar with teen girl publications (that's for, not about) will confirm, the average age of readers is generally about five years lower than you pretend it is. So Just Seventeen (known as J17 these days) should really be called Just Twelve, while ...
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01.01.03In MexicoWe arrived in the late morning, after a cold night in SeaTac airport, sleeping under bright lights to the accompaniment of automatic doors swishing open and shut, letting in gasps of snowy, frozen air. Ten hours later, we were in another world, stepping off an Alaska Airlines plane into a wall of moist, hot, heavy air. Mexico. We headed for the Hotel Vialta, picked at random from the Lonely Planet book. We were students at the same college in Western Canada - friends, but not close. We knew each other well enough to plan an expedition together South of the border, ...
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01.01.03The Writing On The WallI've pretty much never been one to be influenced by nefarious friends. On the whole, I've been fairly good at making decisions for myself, not bowing to peer pressure, even if it made me unpopular. I like to think that I've been consistently true to my conscience. That is, since I was about twelve. Before then, I was as malleable as blu-tack that's been sitting on top of a radiator for days. Picture the scene. It's the mid eighties in Thatcher's Britain. It's the first month of the first year of secondary school, I'm eleven, and I've got a bad pageboy ...
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01.01.03On Visual MemoryAt one point, a few years ago, my friends used to poke gentle fun at me for always drawing maps using the objects on the table: "So imagine that this salt cellar is me, and that ashtray is the corner of the road...hand on, can you pass that fork? Ok, that fork is the zebra crossing, and the mug, I mean the bus was going along here like this..." My listening friends would start to chip in usefully: "What's this pepper pot?" "How about my lasagne?" "Can this glass be a bus stop?" and so on. Smart arses. But I can't help it: ...
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01.01.03The Wedding Guest (1)Four years ago, on a sunny Saturday in September, I went to my best friend J's wedding in Dorchester. Josie was marrying R, the love of her life, after a long engagement. They were (still are) clearly nuts about each other. I was three days off starting my MA in Manchester, and had taken a few days holiday in Dorset - mores specifically, Portland and Weymouth - just reading and mooching around on my own, staying in cosy B+Bs with enormous over-stuffed double beds and never getting up for breakfast. It was heaven. I got a room at a posh hotel in ...
recent posts
- Another city, another event, another night alone in another hotel.
- Is this the emergence of the Twittering classes?
- Noises off
- Music for Rail Journeys
- Being a list of songs relating to the switching on of the LHC
- A moment’s pause
- In search of a simple sandwich
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Looking for the Anti-Valentines?
