He sat on the train and stared at reflection stacked upon reflection in the window at his side. So fragile, a trick of the light. Everything was so fragile. It seemed to him that the carriage was a world of its own, a goldfish bowl for humanity. It wasn’t full, but it was busy. Bustling. People from all walks of life united only by a destination. Students, sitting at their laptops, furiously pretending to work; football fans, elated, steadily draining the train’s limited bar; businessmen with loosened ties and crumpled shirts slumped into the worn seats after another day in the city. How could they not see that it was all so fragile?

Each group of people existed in its own world, with its own language, its own culture; and here they clashed. The businessman looked over with irritation at the self-righteous laziness of the students. The student sneered at the football fans’ lack of formal education. The football fan laughed at the ‘suits’, tied in to the monotony of their profitable careers. He felt nothing for any of them, no empathy, no similarity, no disgust. For him, they simply existed, separate and set apart. He didn’t consider himself above them, so much as alongside, observing, detached.

He sat, watching, considering. He spent much of his time lost in thought, although rarely about himself. Seeing no use for introspection, he preferred to examine the outer workings of society, rather than the inner workings of his own mind. Had he taken time to plunge the depths of his own psyche, he would have found that his sense of detachment was partly due to a lack of confidence, the feeling of never belonging. Instead, he analysed the minutiae of daily life, the unnoticed machinations of modern society. It appeared to him that nobody else was aware of the sudden magnitude of everyday, split-second choices, the irreversible mechanisms of thought, the impossibility of making a right or wrong decision. Once we have acted, he assures himself, the alternatives simply cease to exist, and yet he wonders if this opinion of which he is so self-importantly proud is really just pompously post-modern.

* * *

Why did he keep staring at her? She hated the train. It was always like this, full of fucking weirdoes, louts and balding, middle-aged office-jockeys. They were the worst in a way, so urbane and condescending when they handed out their cards. Shit. He was staring again. If he kept this up she’d have to fucking move. And this was her seat! She’d reserved it, hadn’t she? She’d already had a stand-up row with some fat bitch who seemed to think that being old meant that you didn’t have to book a seat like everyone else. She screwed her headphones further into her ears. Salvation in stereo. Nobody tries to talk to you when you’re wearing headphones. Unless some prick actually taps you on the shoulder. She fucking hated that.

If she stopped looking at him he might stop staring. Or she wouldn’t know. Either way, it was better than eye-contact with that freak. She looked out of the window. Fields, fields, fields. She hated going home. She’d forged her independence, but only for eight months a year. She wished she could stay in London through the holidays, but she couldn’t afford the rent. And her parents were so fucking inconsiderate. They wouldn’t even help her out. “Get a job” they said. She had a job. They should try getting well-paid work in London without a fucking degree. And her tutor was always on her back about putting more time into the course. They didn’t have a clue about how hard it was for students now. “When I was at university…” seemed to start every sentence. Who cares? University twenty years ago might as well have not existed.

Field. Cow. Field. Cow. Field. Why did her parents live in such a boring place? There was never anything to do, no bars, no nightlife. There wasn’t even a cinema. Had he stopped staring yet? No, she could see him in the window. For fuck’s sake, what did this prick want? Weirdoes like him always seemed to pick her out. She closed her eyes. Another three months until she was back in London. Fuck.

* * *

He had noticed her just before Birmingham. He didn’t make an effort not to stare; he had never held much stock in the belief that staring was rude. She was an interesting study, so youthful, violent in her manner; so angry that she seemed almost serene, certain in her condemnation of all around her.  He was sure that he would be the focal point of her rage simply for looking, but this did not faze him. Indeed, he revelled in the glow of such strong emotion; emotion that he himself had never managed to replicate. He smiled as she forcefully twisted the headphones of her Walkman, a subtle outpouring of the discomfort that he supposed his attention was causing her.

He continued to stare, but was now distracted by the words falling all around him, pattering like raindrops, bouncing between the train’s tubular walls. He was not listening to any conversation in particular, but rather absorbing what he saw as a sublime symphony of syllables, The unique tone and colour of every voice added to the sumptuous texture of this aural canvas, which had a kind of ghostly timbre, not exactly haunting, but somehow ethereal, the absence of a single chain of communication destroying any sense of reality. If the words’ communicative sense was lost, were they still words? Could they still be seen as language, or were they simply noise, a cacophony of… unmeaning.

She had stopped looking at him, obviously she had decided that her confrontational glare would not work, and had moved on to ignoring him, pretending he wasn’t there. That was one way around it. But such a weak one, he couldn’t help thinking, and in that weakness some of his admiration for the girl was lost. He considered himself a thinker; a renaissance man, he supposed the stereotype was. But to be a renaissance man was to be stuck in the past, and he believed himself to be very much in the present. Still he was fixated on the girl. What was it about her that made her so compelling?

* * *

Turn on. Tune in. Drop out. They said she was part of the iPod generation. What the fuck did that mean? What, so because she listened to music she was somehow inferior? A ‘hoody’; an ‘asbo’? The kind of bigoted generalisations that made her cringe every time some middle-aged Daily Mail reader reeled them off. Cretins. And what did they suggest as an alternative: Gardening? Golf? Fuck that. She continued to glare out of the window. Whoever had said that thing about art galleries in the North  being pointless was right. There was no fucking life up here, let alone culture. Sheep. Field. Sheep. Field. Sheep. Nothing.

And her parents would be unbearable. It was always the same, paraded in front of auntie this and uncle that. Isn’t she grown up? Isn’t she pretty? Isn’t she standing right fucking there? They were coming up through Derby now. The beginning of the end. That station summed up what was coming. A series of green plywood boxes with yellow stripes surrounded the pillars, remnants of some half-finished building project doomed by budget cuts to become a permanent feature. They’d been building it ever since the railway was invented. She fucking hated that station. Birmingham, the end of the South, the last remnant of cultured society, had receded. And here she was in fucking Derby. She folded down her table and buried her head in her arms.

The minute she shut her eyes she was back in London. South Bank. Camden Town. Eel Pie Island. She missed it already. It was like a different world. Fuck. This was going to be a drag. She wasn’t even sure she’d get on with her old friends any more. What if they were just like before? Would they even have changed one little bit? Even thinking about them annoyed her. But then again thinking about her old self annoyed her just as much. She used to be such a fucking bumpkin.  The southerners laughed at her when she arrived in London. But she soon showed them that she could stick up for herself. She was a fighter. London was a war. She felt like one of those soldiers she’d read about coming home after world war two: No sense of purpose. Everything up here was so much less alive.

* * *

Wakefield. It was getting close to his stop. He had to change at York for Harrogate. The thought of leaving this train, stepping out of its atmosphere and bursting back into reality saddened him slightly. In the quotidian bustle of the city, there was no time for him to sit and watch; to examine, extract, extrapolate. His thoughts bounced back to the girl. Where was she getting off, he wondered? He resumed his vigil, trying to work out from her demeanour where she was going. He was certain she was a London girl; she had the air of stroppy self-confidence that pervaded the inhabitants of that pompous city. Although somehow it seemed false, put on. His mind worked to unravel her identity.

Why was she distracting him so much? He was usually able to distribute his time equally between his studies, watching each one, weighing them up against one another. This time, he was completely taken by the girl, but why? He didn’t have a daughter or a sister to relate her to, and she was far too young for him to find her attractive. He abandoned his abortive moment of self-examination, and plunged himself back into observation. He needed to divert his attention and regain his composure. He looked again at the reflections in the window, and noted his five o’ clock shadow. He wondered if other people watched like he did. Where would they put him, in what category would he reside; executive, aristocrat, banker? He didn’t suppose that self-taught intellectual was a category that was on many people’s lists.

The majority of the football fans had left at Wakefield, and the train was a good deal quieter now. He noted that without the camaraderie of their peers, the few remaining supporters had calmed down significantly. The psychology of group dynamics in action: no belonging, no confidence. The girl seemed more relaxed now that the louder fans had gone. In fact she seemed to be sleeping, with her head on the table in front of her. The difference between her defiant, aggressive manner only a few minutes ago and her current complete tranquility was staggering.

* * *

She had never been able to sleep on trains. She was too terrified of missing her stop, and of who might sit next to her. She wasn’t afraid to fake it though, when it suited her. Like when the ticket inspector (or ‘Train Manager’ – what a joke that was) was waddling past. Or like now, for those invasions of privacy that even the power of the ipod doesn’t stop. It gave you time to think, an excuse to free yourself from the restrictions of politeness and manners, to exempt yourself from banal conversation with strangers.

One more stop and she would be off this train and back into the real world. Thank fuck for that. This train was getting too much for her, shoehorned in with all these people who she didn’t care about. Who she couldn’t care about. Because who the fuck were they anyway? A load of people all going to the same place, with nothing in common. She was glad she couldn’t see them any more, that she didn’t have to think about them. It was such a waste of time wondering about people that she would never see again. What use could that possibly have? She wouldn’t remember a single face from this train. She never did. They meant nothing to her.

She peeped through a crack between her elbow and her hand. How long would it be before he got bored and stopped looking? She knew she would be smudging her mascara, but it would be worth it if he would just stop fucking staring. He was probably some kind of head case. She remembered that time in Italy when some old man in a raincoat sat next to her on a park bench and started to tug himself off. That was fucking weird. I mean, what do they get out of that anyway? He’d be better off just paying a hooker to do it for him. The freak was still watching. Only one more stop until she got off. And not a moment too soon. She imagined him with a huge hard-on underneath his scruffy, worn suit. What a fucking pervert.

* * *

He observed her slyly as she lifted her head and rustled her things. Leeds then. She seemed uncomfortable, it was obvious that she disliked travelling. She had smudged her make-up in her sleep, but seemed not to have noticed as she hurriedly stuffed her possessions into her duffel bag. It was at least another quarter of an hour until Leeds. Only her Walkman lay unpacked, he noticed, her barrier between herself and the outside world remains. It would be a shame to lose her, such an interesting subject. He had spent nearly the whole journey watching her, and had become somewhat attached. Not to her, as such, but to the occupation of studying her, and of extracting (or perhaps creating, he had to admit) her story from her manner.

She sat back down, ready to leave a full ten minutes before the train arrived at the station. Such nervous travellers never failed to amuse him, rushing and pushing, always on their feet for so long before they have a chance to escape. They queued as the minutes passed, so typically English. It was the same with the people who queued at airport gates, seeming to imagine that there are more passengers than seats. He gazed again out of the window, watching the view refashion itself, fields giving way to concrete and steel. He realised that he was almost angry at her for leaving, unreasonable though that was. Perhaps he was a little angry at himself for being so passive. Could he ever work up the nerve to talk to her? He silently chastised himself for lacking the courage to approach someone who so completely captivated him.

As the train slowed past the platforms, the panic intensified. People were grabbing for bags, suitcases tumbling from luggage racks upset by frantic passengers. The girl had ended up stood next to him, and he couldn’t help but stare. Was there beauty, he wondered, in her insolence? Maybe he was jealous of her self-certainty, of a rebellious confidence that he had never felt. But it was too late now, she was about to leave, and there was nothing for him to do.

* * *

How the fuck had she ended up stood next to the one person she wanted to be furthest away from. And her ipod had just run out of battery. That really took the piss. You could never count on technology, it always bit you in the arse when you needed it most. She grabbed the ipod and shook it in anger. It wouldn’t do anything, but it made her feel better. At last it was time to get off. She stuffed the ipod in her pocket and started to shuffle forward.

* * *

They were all getting off now, and as she angrily shoved her walkman into her pocket, he noticed that her headphones were trailing along the floor. This was it. His moment to reach out to her in banal, impersonal conversation, with the excuse of goodwill to back him up. Excitement mingled with fear. He touched her arm, and as she whipped her head round he saw the glint of rage in her eyes.

“Ex… Excuse me”, he stammered.

“Prick”, she snapped, as she disappeared through the train’s sliding door, her headphones trailing behind her.

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I was born aged thirty-three to a car crash in a town called Truth or Consequences, New Mexico. They always begin their books like that, with some notorious event, the nucleus of an explosion of cause and effect; the creation of a protagonist. That is the difference between fiction and reality: in fiction nothing can be inane or inconsequential, randomness is non-existent; Newton’s third law reigns supreme as we act and react. Every story begins with a collision: of worlds, of lives, or in my case, of automobiles. My atom bomb was a clash of cold, hard steel. A tale of two Chevys.

And after this blast, there is always a lull, the tinnitus-ringing concussion of description and explication before the noise of plot creeps back, as the reader is whipped into the pounding action and reaction. Percussion followed by repercussion. It is written to be read, idiom and tradition. It’s so formulaic. And so I’m getting out; I’m breaking free of convention and constraint. Until now you’ve always read the author’s story. Now you’re getting mine.

Here comes the first break with tradition, the first insult to idiom. A book always starts with the birth of its characters; I’m going to start with the conception. I was conceived in a smoky study, a seedy late-night encounter between an author and a mediocre idea. My author wasn’t an idealist, he knew he’d had better ideas. He knew that if he waited, there were far better ones to come. But he was hungry, he needed it now. His publisher was on his back, and he was fading out of the public eye. It was a marriage of convenience. And so it was, I was conceived in this sordid, half-hearted clinch between an author and his failing imagination.

I suppose I should describe myself. I’m a collage, an amalgam of body parts that caught my author’s eye over the last few months before he wrote me up. I’m a Mexican, so he imagines Gael Garcia, the only Mexican actor that someone who lives in the cultural isolation of an anglophone country can conjure an image of. But something has to be different: I’m older, I have Bob Dylan’s beard, and I’ve put on a few pounds. My hair is flecked with grey, the same as the model in that hair dye advert that he saw last year. Just like all authors, he projects his own insecurities on to me, correcting them as he goes: like him, I have one blue eye, and one green, but unlike him, I don’t wear coloured contact lenses to cover my tracks — I’m not afraid of my body’s idiosyncrasies, I embrace them as he wishes he could. As he writes his yearning to be what he creates is spilled, drip by drip, on to the page.

But there are problems with me telling this story. I have no control; my actions are predetermined, already committed to print, for a character ink on the page is an irreversible fate. I can’t change what I do, how I look, how I react. The only thing I can control is how I perceive my actions, and how I relate them to you. 

* * *

So, I was born aged thirty-three to a car crash in a town called Truth or Consequences, New Mexico. An odd name for a town I know, but the place does exist, and my author thought it held some kind of irony, a literary poignancy. Everyone else thought it was a strained and thinly veiled metaphor. What my author didn’t know is that far from having the grandiose past that its title suggests, the town was actually renamed in the 1950s, after a radio broadcaster announced that he would host his show in the first town to christen itself after the programme. A town willing to undermine itself for a moment in the limelight; a total sell-out. 

The crash wasn’t dramatic, but metaphorical: a simile for the randomness of chance encounters and their influence over our lives. It wasn’t brutal, no ambulances were called and no tires squealed. He didn’t want to distract from the real event, the collision not of two cars, but of two characters. A small bump was all that it needed, the beginning of the chain reaction. I was hurled into an existence without a past.

“Puta madre, pinches mujeres no pueden conducir”

He always put my foul language into my mother tongue. It was an attempt to seem authentic, and to disguise the words from his mainly conservative, middle-aged audience. The latter he denied, of course, but let’s just say he knew which side his bread was buttered. 

“Hey, what, weren’t you watching or something? No mames, cabrón!  Look at my car! I mean, what the f…”

He still didn’t let me swear. But by now it doesn’t matter. Our eyes have met, the clichés are flowing thick and fast. Love at first sight? You could say it was fated, written in stone – or on cheap typing paper. 

* * * 

There it was. My birth. But unlike you, I grew up before I was born, aged before I was conscious. My emotional development was both instant and inadequate. Seems like a tough job to create an entire personality within the space of a few lines. But my author is made up: he doesn’t even have to describe how I’m feeling, human empathy bridges the gaps for him. And as the scene is described you project your emotions onto me like you fill in a crossword. 

ACROSS

1. As he stared into her eyes, he realised that he had never felt like this before… (9)

AMAZEMENT

DOWN

1. …he suddenly knew that nothing else mattered… (7)

ABANDON

ACROSS

7. …and that he had to make her love him. (6)

DESIRE

The clues were all there, and this crossword was by no means cryptic. But my author left holes, his inadequate descriptions often leaving me ambiguous, incomplete. You might not have ever worked out what my author meant when he wrote that the girl’s beauty filled me with a nostalgic sense of regret. But then neither did he. What did it matter, as long as the words filled the page, made the right sounds and connections. It was in these empty words that he lost control, created this parallel existence which I maintain. I am alive in that wriggle-room that he left me; I have created myself in the gaps. My ‘One Across’ is CONFUSION; my ‘One Down’ CUNNING. I’m trying to take back the power that you and my author used to hold; I’m filling in my own blanks. 

But however good your intuitions were, you’d never guess from the description of my meeting with this girl that I would go on to kill her. That was the twist, the plot turn right at the end to keep you from realising how boring the book had been. Sorry to spoil it for you. To understand my version of this tale, you need to understand my predicament: I am trying to give you a sense of the inevitability of my actions. I would kill her – and I could do no more about it than you could. But for now that is all that you need to know; you can make your judgement later, once I have told what needs to be told. Whatever you might decide about me, you can’t say that I’m not honest, upfront and frank.

* * *

I don’t see myself as the villain of this story. The antihero maybe. But why shoehorn myself into these roles created by just that tradition that I am trying to escape? In real life there are no heroes and villains, just a whole load of good people who have done bad things. Or maybe bad people who have done good things. Who can tell? Reality is a rainbow in shades of grey. And now I talk of real life, but what do I know? I am as far away from real as it gets.

After the crash my author crammed in a hurried romance. It was everything that a fictional relationship should be: simplified, melodramatic and doomed. It had its moments of decent writing, but for the most part it was trite and corny. Still, it was nothing if not functional, and the girl and I were soon condensed into a single entity, our love becoming a character in itself. We had what would be dubbed by crooning, forthy-something women in suburbian book-clubs a ‘roller-coaster romance’, with it’s ‘thrills and spills’. The discussion would rattle along in language more cliché than even my author could summon. Suffice to say that the plot unfolded with a sickening predictability.

We fought, we made up, we made love – the latter related in almost pornographic detail that my author and his readers somehow considered less offensive than cursing. I carried out everything required of me. I plastered a “lost-boy look” on my face when she stormed out, paying no heed to the ineptitude of the description that I was supposed to fulfil. I wandered through the city in the rain looking for her, enduring pathetic fallacy that was ‘pathetic’ in a more conventional sense than my author intended. It was the epitome of the trashy romance: designed to seem normal in its abnormality, the deluded readers sympathising with the situations that they wished they were exciting enough to have experienced.

Of course it was the secrets that spoiled it, brought it all crashing down. What else could it be? He couldn’t let those expectant readers down – where would they be without that formula to revise, novel after dull, duplicate novel. The illiterati clinging on to the only thing they could understand. No, they wouldn’t tolerate change. My author pretended that this restricted him, but really it set him free. How else could he earn a living peddling trashy, mediocre romances. Yes it was the secrets that spoiled it, and all the usual suspects too. He didn’t hold back: shady family backgrounds, old flames and dodgy business dealings all reared their mundane heads to shoot my coupling out of the water. He painted me as a man who wanted to change but didn’t know how. He painted me from experience.

But then he really blew it, really made me mad. I could have been happy with my lot. I was trashy, but at least I wasn’t boring. So I slipped into a depression, I can take that. I turned to drugs as a way out – who doesn’t, right? But anti-depressants and tranquillisers? They aren’t even fun. I couldn’t even play the angry young man, the James Dean wannabe or the Hunter S. Thompson on an apocalyptic bender. I was the saddest kind of middle-class, suburban junkie, so hung up on social stigma that I was too afraid to hit the real stuff. He wouldn’t even let me destroy my life in style.

* * *

No, not in style at all. I didn’t go out in a blaze of glory so much as in a flicker of inadequacy. And so towards the boring, predictable end of his boring, predictable book, I got into my car and headed into town. And it was then, after a half-hearted and simplistic attempt to examine my chemically altered state of mind, that my author crashed me again. And of course it was her car I crashed into: an attempt at classical symmetry and unity, coupled with an astounding lack of depth and imagination. Me and my lover thrown together one last time by a disappointing cliché and a failing author’s pen. She died, of course, my lover. I’ve told you that already. Did I die too? I couldn’t tell you. He left that last question unanswered. Perhaps he’s already writing the sequel.

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One of the most inspiring things I’ve seen for a while. My offering is the title of this post. I thought it was quite good! My other idea was “I have always said Carpe Diem”

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1. Sitting, Waiting, Writing

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Isabel caminaba por la calle. Era una chica guapa; tenía el pelo rubio, y los ojos azules, como el azul del mar mediterráneo. Sus labios brillaban, y cada hombre que pasaba por delante de ella acababa mirándola. Este día llevaba ropa muy hermosa, porque iba a una fiesta. Su vestido relumbraba con todos los colores de un arco iris, y se podía ver toda su figura — perfecta, joven, sensual, como una princesa griega de los mitos clásicos.

No siempre había sido así. Cuando era joven, siempre se sentía inferior, siempre pensaba que sus hermanas eran más felices y más guapas. Pero en su adolescencia llegó a ser muy bonita, y ya se dio cuenta de su propia hermosura. No demasiado; no tanto que se consideraba el ombligo del mundo, pero ya se había dado cuenta.

La calle era el opuesto de Isabel: Un desierto gris de concreta y acero, sin belleza, sin alma, sin amor. Las hojas (amarillas, rojas, marrones por el otoño) volaron en círculos, abatiéndose como buitres en el viento; las bolsas de plástico bailaron, ahora suavemente, triste por el muerto del viento, ahora con rapidez, entrecortadas, como si estuvieran celebrando su reanimación.

En este momento, Isabel se volvía lo más feliz que nunca. Sabía que en esta fiesta estaría el chico que amaba. Isabel, como estaba, hubiera podido tener cualquier chico, pero no eligió el más popular o el más apuesto. No le molestó lo que le dijeron las otras muchachas, porque este chico bajo y negro, que no les gustó ni la familia ni los amigos de Isabel, ella amaba.

Cada vez Isabel pensaba en su amor moreno, se puso emocionante. Todas las cosas le hacía recordarse del. Hoy, las nubes estaban mullidos como su pelo, los árboles — otoñales, sin sus hojas — estaban delgadas, enjuto y nervudo como su cuerpo musculoso.

El fin de semana pasada se le había dicho que le amaba; él no dijo nada, pero a Isabel, le entendía que significaba este silencio. Todo el mundo sabe que los hombres no muestran sus emociones, su amor.

Isabel paró. No quiso llegar temprano a la fiesta. Entonces, decidió sentarse en el bordillo y observar a la gente. Mirar a las personas que pasaron por allí era una de sus pasatiempos preferidos. Continuamente cambiando, la gente era la parte más interesante de la existencia, opinaba Isabel. Ella creía que se podía aprender mucho del aspecto de una persona.

Mientras se quedó allí, Isabela estaba contenta. ¡Pero ya necesitaba ir a la fiesta! Se había perdido en su reflexión, y parecía que tan pronto como se sentó, se tardó. Corría por las calles, y finalmente llegó a su destinación. ¿Pero donde estaba su amor? Buscó entre las piernas de sus amigos, y lo vio: “Aquí estoy, perrito”, gritó. Su mama le oyó y le castigó: “Isabel, tiene mas tiempo por el pinche perro que nosotros. ¿Por qué no saludaste a su familia y sus amigos?”. Pero Isabel no escuchaba; estaba enamorado.

Translation:

Isabel walked down the street. She was a pretty girl; she had blonde hair and blue eyes, blue as blue of the Mediterranean sea. Her lips glistened, and each man that walked past her stopped, looking at her. This day she was wearing beautiful clothes, because she was going to a party. Her dress glittered with all the colours of a rainbow, and you could see her all of her curves — perfect, young, sensual, like a princess from the Greek myths.

She had not always been like this. When she was younger, she always felt inferior, always thought that her sisters were happier and better looking. But in her adolescence she came to be very pretty, and now she realised her own beauty. Not too much; not so much that she considered herself better than everyone else, but now she had realised.

The street was the opposite of Isabel: a grey desert of concrete and steel, without beauty, without soul, without love. The leaves (yellow, red, brown for the autumn) circled, swooping like vultures in the wind; the plastic bags danced, now smoothly, sad for the death of the wind, now quickly, jerkily, as if they were celebrating its resurrection.

At this moment, Isabel was the most happy she had ever been. She knew that at this party would be the boy that she loved. Isabel, as she was, could have had any boy, but she didn’t choose the most popular or the most handsome. It didn’t bother her what the other girls said, because this short, black boy, whom neither her family nor her friends liked, she loved.

Each time that Isabel thought of her dark lover, she became excited. Everything reminded her of him. Today, the clouds were springy like his hair, the trees — autumnal, without their leaves — were thin and wiry, like his muscular body.

Last weekend she had told him that she loved him; he said nothing, but Isabel understood what this silence meant. Everyone knows that men don’t show their feelings, their love.

Isabel stopped. She didn’t want to arrive early to the party. So, she decided to sit on the kerb and watch people. Watching the people that walked by was one of her favourite pastimes. Continually changing, people were the most interesting part of existence, Isabel thought. She believed that you could tell a lot from somebody’s looks.

Whilst she stayed here, Isabel was happy. But she needed to go to the party! She had lost herself in her thoughts, and it seemed that as soon as she had sat down, she was late. She ran through the streets, and finally she arrived at her destination. But where was her love? She searched between the legs of her friends and she saw him: “Here I am puppy”, she cried. Her mother saw her and scolded her: “Isabel, you have more time for the bloody dog than for us. Why haven’t you said hello to your family and friends?”. But Isabel did not hear her. She was in love.

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An Amazing Alliterated Article

Beginning by broadening the boundaries of the brain, boredom brought me to begetting a bemusing, beguiling and boundless brief.
To crush the creative constraints of common conjecture with careful cogitation!
Discovering the delight of disassembling dialect, I decided to demonstrate the diverse deviations derived from diligent development of discourse.
English is endlessly expressive, easily exploited and engineered.
I found firmly following the foregoing formula a fairly formidable folly.
This game generates great glee, and a growing glossary.
However, having hoped for hours of happiness, I was horrified by the harrowing hardship.
Instigating this innovative and intellectually interesting item is initially irritating.
I am justifiably jubilant at this juncture of jargon.
The key to keeping in kilter is keenness.
Languishing in this linguistic labyrinth leaves a laughable lingual lattice.
Moreover, mollifying my manifestly mean mission mandates much meditation.
Nevertheless, in nonchalantly notating this nebulous and nefarious nuisance, I nourish my notions.
Originally, the objective occasioned an obtuse and obfuscated oratorio.
Proceeding postulates palliating the preliminary premises of parlance and patois.
This questionable quest is quintessentially quixotic.
I am required to rigorously and rapaciously ransack my registers.
Society has seldom seen such stupidity and senselessness.
Treading the titillating track twixt tenacity and triviality takes talent.
This undulating utterance unravels ubiquitous unities.
A voluptuous variation of vocables is valuable in this venture.
Which word will work?
Xylophone, xenophobe, xerox?
Yet I yield and yammer:
I have zigzagged to my zenith!

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I should probably introduce myself. My name’s Dave, and I’m a nobody, a nothing. I’m the oasis that’s a mirage, the horse with no name, another face in the ebb and flow of the sea of suburban England. I’m so insignificant that I’m not even flotsam.

I wander through each leafy street
With boring hedges trimmed in rows
And there in every face I meet
Boredom, resignation shows.

So I’m not a poet; I can’t even bastardise Blake well, but you get the picture. I’m bored. My sister’s bored. My mates are bored, my grandma’s bored, my shrink’s bored, my bus driver’s bored. I live in the bored suburbs of a bored city in a country which can’t believe that its empire no longer exists and that it’s gradually fading into insignificance. And I lied about the psychiatrist — I’m too boring to need one of those.

That’s the irony of the modern predicament. It used to be that people got bored because they were interetsing. It used to be that they sorted it out: Caesar conquered, Brunel built, Picasso painted. Byron went to the Dolomites, got absolutely off his face on opium and had orgies with his fellow romantics. Aristotle did bloody everything. But now even the boring people are bored; now there’s no hope.

Politics is boring, the right has become the centre right and the left the centre left. People are always looking for the centre, the compromise; middle ground, middle of the road, middle class. Films are boring because everything is allowed; books are boring because everything has been said; sport is boring because every record has been broken. Music is boring because nobody cares any more, apathy reigns supreme. Nobody would heckle Beethoven, or riot at The Rite of Spring, Mozart would no longer be outrageously young. There is no such thing as outrageously young any more, it’s always another nine year old prodigy, another fifteen year old olympian gymnast, another thirteen year old mother.

In our world everything is an extreme, and the extremes aren’t frightening any more. A pickled sheep is art, closing the piano lid and sitting in silence is music, jumping out of a plane is sport, and putting clothes on is a job. In fact the only interesting thing I’ve seen for a decade is…

I’m sorry, am I boring you?

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