loofahfreak

Even now England is standing in front of the bathroom mirror in his vest and grey trousers brushing his teeth and smoothing worried grey fronds. Even now he is getting into bed (where Mrs. England is already snoring) in his y-fronts and undiscarded socks. He is even now dreaming of mortgages, and holidays in the Canaries and past glories and The Way We Were. Mr. England has no trouble sleeping, and he never did, not since his army days, when you took what you could. A vast suburbanite, untroubled by residual imperial guilt and sensationalist headlines: global conflicts, mass-starvation, genocide. He's never been political, a

Dear Diary, Now I am not a good person.  I have never been an innocent, since my earliest act it has been premeditated, conscious.  I'm surprised more people aren't aware of this in my interaction with them, the way that I way up the variables- whether friendship with x would be a plausible, in-character thing for me to have, given factor y.  But maybe I'm self-aggrandising.  Maybe everyone makes these premeditated choices on a daily basis to their own advantage.  Maybe their motivation, too, is plausibility – a storyline within the realms of narrative possibility, nothing unexpected or out-of-character.  I don't know.  But I doubt it.  I do

I remember this one time me and Joe made a mudslide down under the bridge where it was all slick from where the oil and the rain had splashed off as the cars went overhead.  We spent all day sliding on it, tattered and spattered, in the brown and black and rainbow muck, right up till it got dark.  Right up until the time that Joe slid too far and wound up in the murk of the water speeding down below towards the dam on the outskirts of town.  I waited maybe thirty seconds though it felt like ten minutes, and I never saw him reach the surface.  Then just when I was so sure he was dead I saw a bit of orange anorak maybe 50 maybe 100 yards downst

The mercury was the highest it had been all year, when Nietzsche drove us out to the beach in his new volkswagen which was hot enough to fry eggs on the hood. We took a walk down by the shore, and watched as the tide washed the stones to the sea sinking through sand at the waves' lowest ebb back over pebbles to scatter sea-fronds scooping and lapping and kissing the land. The seagulls were screeching overhead as he took my smaller hand in his, showed me spreadeagled starfish, interesting shells.  But I found the skimming stone, nestled in fronds of an old fishing net.  Perfectly smoothed by the smooth frothy sea, it was flat and

Joe was sitting out in god's good sunshine playing skittles with the red blood cells pumping around in my heart, and the police sirens were wailing that day, let me tell you.  And although i don't think they were wailing for me, they were wailing for us if you know what I mean, the nearest we got to fucking Strauss. I wore socks that day, it was the only day that summer I did.  And the socks warmed my feet like nothing else, you know?  I was sweating some, and the smell of old trainers was drifting up and it was a bit like when they burn the tyres that people sling over the back wall of the glassworks.  Only not so pungent, and nowhere near